Flock 2014 Strasbourg proposal

Flock 2014 Strasbourg proposal

Staff

• Haïkel Guémar
• TODO: please insert your name if you want to join the organizing committee

Organization Volunteers

People who are helping us in collecting informations and contacting people for our proposal

• Alexandre Moine
• TODO: put your name here

Strasbourg

Strasbourg is the capitale of Alsace region in eastern France and the seat of the European Parliament. Due to historical reasons and the nearby border with Germany, many people speak German or Alsatian (a Low Alemannic German dialect) too.

The historic center Grande Île (Grand Island) has been classified by the Unesco as "World Heritage Site" in 1988. It is an island on the Ill river with many medieval buildings.

Transportation

• Strasbourg-Entzheim international airport (10 min from downtown)

It offers direct flight from most major city in Europe and connecting flights from major cities in the world.

Airport	Price for return tickets	Duration
RDU	1200€	12 to 14h
BOS	1200€	12 to 14h
JFK	1400€	15 h
PRG	200€	5h
CDG	N/A

Cheaper from CDG is to take the train, around 90€ per travel if taken at last moment, 50€ if taken in advance

• Baden Baden airport is the nearest German airport, and this is where the lowcost companies land.
• It is well connected to the European rail network and France with high-speed rail network (TGV)
• shuttle train allows travellers to be in Strasbourg downtown within 15 minutes and there are 4 trains per hour.
• car rental, taxis are also available though the shuttle train is easier.
• Strasbourg has an efficient and dense public transportation

Proposed Venue

• Université of Strasbourg in the Atrium building
• Our proposal is to co-locate Flock with GUADEC (see Guadec 2014 bid details) or at least have an overlap (one/two days).

GUADEC will be hosted from 24 (thursday) to 31 July (thursday)

• • core days (conferences): from 24 to 27 July (sunday)
  • hackfest: from 28 to 31 July
• GUADEC is planning to pay a part-time person for handling logistics few months before the event. We plan financing that contractor so he could also handle Flock logistics.

Social Event

• One common social event with GUADEC

Pros & Cons

Pros

• co-located with GUADEC 2014

Fedora Desktop is a GNOME based distros, and many of our contributors working on GNOME can't make it in Flock/FUDCon, like at Flock 2013 due to conflicting dates. That is a perfect chance to involve them in our discussions, all the more, since we are discussing currently the future of Fedora which includes the GNOME community. GUADEC Strasbourg organizers are ok with our proposal and are collaborating with us. That's the strong point of this bid and an unique occasion to get GNOME contributors on board.

• Strasbourg is a beautiful medieval city, an european capitale. It's a city with many german-speakers and well connected to Europe ( not far away from Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, etc ).
• Strasbourg university was one of the first to deploy a french experimental ipv6 radio network in 2002, serve as internet hub for the region. They also hosted one of the first active LUG of France, and pioneered switch to Openoffice back in 2005.
• The city also have a growing startup community with coworking space la plage digital, and a hackerspace
• French & German communities are the most active european local community and Strasbourg is at the border of both countries. It's both French and German speaking.
• We'd like to invite some Debian Developers working on Fedora projects like fedmsg (Nicolas Dandrimont, Simon Chopin), Firehose (Stefano Zacchiroli, Sylvestre Ledru) so they can participate to hackatons at Flock. They agreed to participate at Flock if their schedule allows it. We're also considering other opening to our larger community.

This is a great occasion to collaborate with other distros. Suse HQ are not far away ( 5h, 100€ to 200€ from Nuremberg from train/plane ), and Mageia core contributors are in France, England or Germany.

• We are discussing with different potential partners for sponsoring Flock:
  • Irill a french public research institute dedicated to Free Software directed by Roberto Di Cosmo . It employs many Debian Developers including one former DPL. They offered us to set up video recording of our conference with professional equipment. Some videos recorded by Irill are online for show.
  • Inria the french computer science research institute which has been sponsoring many FLOSS events and projets. We are actually discussing with Stéphane Ribas, their community manager if Inria could possibly sponsor Flock.
  • Several medium to big sized cloud companies (enovance, numergy, cloudwatt) have sponsored some events in the past.

Basically, the motto of our proposal is "Strengthening our bounds with our upstream and fellow distros communities"

Cons

• co-locating with GUADEC ?

TODO

Please check the Flock Bid Process

Tasks	Status	Owner
Contacting Alexandre (GUADEC) for venue	in-progress	hguemar
Contacting Irill for media partnership	in-progress	hguemar
Contacting Inria for sponsoring	in-progress	hguemar
Contacting other potential sponsors	TBD
Estimated cost of flights from BOS, RDU, JFK, PRG	in-progress	misc
Lodging rates & distance	TBD
Social Event proposals	TBD