Hi, unfortunatly I forgot to send this mail directly after FOSDEM, and now I probably forgot something to tell you. Hopefully Anto or Cesar can jump in and hopefully my summary is right in the first place. A meeting between Anto and the other DebConf volunteers didnt take place at FOSDEM, as we planned to have it on Sunday and then Anto got sick on Sunday and had to stay in his hotel. So it was only me who talked to Anto on Friday evening and Saturday. The bad news (I like to start with the bad things) is that the working localteam at the moment indeed is quite small, mostly Cesar and Anto. (And both are quite busy atm.) The good news is, that in July there will be 15 people from the Extremadura administration working full time on DebConf. As I understood it, from July 1st and not July 15th. (I'm fully confident they are aware what is coming to them. A big, worldwide conference with ~400 (or more) guests. They might not know all the details and will certainly assume some wrongly, so we need to make sure we communicate our needs well. But I dont see a general problem here, the Extremaduran adminstration yearly also co-organizes the Free Software World Conference (which seems to have been renamed to OpenSourceWC..) with >5000 attendees and they also sponsored >15 Debian development meetings in 2006-2008 and spend _lots_ of money on that. (A 6 figure Euro amount each year, probably.) So I'm certain they will not fuck it up, if we dont (let them) ;) ) Another good news was, that a third dormitory was found and rented. (Anto should probably add more detail here.) So what does that mean? IMHO not soo much, unlike debconf7+8, there will be more preparations done by non-localteam people, like CallForPapers, Website content and other stuff. Which is basically like debconf5+6 were done. (But unlike DebConf6 we will have a bunch of reliable local people during the conf!) And I think it would be good to try to recruit some people from other parts of Spain (who intend to go to DebConf ;) to take away some load from Cesar and Anto. (For example, the contact & the contracts with the venues will be in spanish, so I think it would best if the person(s) doing the bookkeeping/finances speak spanish (and do the bookkeeping in english of course). Another thing is organising the meals, and there is more. So I would still suggest to setup a localteam mailinglist and IRC channel, also so that we are able to point localteam volunteers there. #debconf9-localteam? probably better #debconf9-voluntarios (es_HL warning ;) to reflect that its a spanish language channel, else we could also just use #debconf-team.. And don't forget to attend the dc9 meeting on monday, 2009-02-23 at 20 UTC, agenda: http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf9/Meetings regards, Holger P.S.: As I never came around to blog this: there is a _very_ nice train connection from Madrid to Caceres, definitly faster and more comfortable and scenic than the bus ride some people will remember from those developer meetings. IIRC it was something like a bit below 30 Euros one way and 2 or 3h.
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