Re: Debian Science Extremadura work session?

[Frederic Lehobey <Frederic.Lehobey@free.fr>]

Hi,

On Fri, Jan 13, 2006 at 04:24:44PM +0100, Frederic Lehobey wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 08, 2005 at 09:26:39AM -0600, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> 
> > Now, to make this a tad more actionable: Would someone want to make revival
> > of this an item for the suggested Estremedura workshops and get some people
> > in the same room for two or three days to push this further?  Anybody care to
> > run with that idea and organise it?
> 
> After this suggestion and Steffen Moeller answer¹ I have created in
> December the wiki page http://wiki.debian.org/DebianScienceMeetings
> (without advertising it unfortunately).  Since then several meetings
> are getting themselves organised.  See
> http://wiki.debian.org/WorkSessionsExtremadura .  There seems to be
> only two possible dates left (March 22-26 and December 13-17) but the
> most important questions are:
> 
> 1/ Who would be interested in?  I see possibly at least Dirk
> Eddelbuettel, Steffen Moeller and I.
> 
> 2/ What for?
> Technical work.  Meeting of the people on this list who would take
> advantage of such a gathering in order to strengthen the support of
> scientific applications in Debian.  I am thinking of people around R,
> Octave but maybe also people around ROOT, Maxima or Axiom and the like
> software.
> 
> I think it could be a good opportunity to get people from the Ubuntu
> and Debian science team to settle efficient ways to cooperate and have
> their works easily integrated into both distributions (hence the
> crossposting to ubuntu-science).  So packaging and QA could be
> practised a lot in such a meeting.
> 
> And nonetheless meet one each other.  Real life discussions are always
> much more efficient than email exchanges (hence the success of
> regional meetings and events like Debconf).
> 
> So, who would be interested in such a meeting?  At which (remaining)
> dates?  I have put my own name as an example in the table in
> http://wiki.debian.org/DebianScienceMeetings .  Who else?  Please add
> your names and availability.

So far, at the time of writing, only 3 three people have expressed
their interest (plus Andreas Tille for December :
http://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2006/01/msg00073.html) and, as
far as I know, none of them (excepted Andreas) are Debian developers.

What should we do?  (I believe the time is now much too short
especially for the sponsors to have actually a gathering in March
22-26.)

Should we focus on other meeting dates (December is now planned for a
QA session: http://wiki.debian.org/WorkSessionsExtremadura)?  Are
there enough people interested to produce something useful?  Should we
even meet at all?  ;-)  Do you believe such work sessions are not the
most productive way to improve science support in Debian?  Or are you
simply not available?

Andreas' message
(http://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2006/01/msg00101.html)
suggests some slots could be double-booked.  Should we ask other work
sessions if it would be feasible?  (I think for example of the
DebianEdu people for possible synergies
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Extremadura2006).

> Moreover, this page is not dedicated to Extremadura only.  It can be
> used to plan any possible meetings of people interested in science
> applications during other upcoming free software events like:
> 
>  * who will be at Fosdem 2006?

I will.  :-)  So it is an opportunity to eventually meet with other
attendants interested in science support in Debian (I will mostly hang
around Debian room).

>  * who will be at Debconf 6?
> 
>  * and so on...
> 
> Obviously with such a message I am volunteering to help organise such
> a meeting in Extremadura would it be considered interesting by the
> Extremadura sponsors.

Still true would it be useful to Debian.

Best regards,
Frederic Lehobey

> 1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2005/12/msg00032.html