What happened so far?
We have been running our Call for Participation for the FSFE summit until May 29 with an overwhelming quality and quantity of submissions. Thanks to all of you who took part or helped to spread the word. It seems like this is the right time for a FSFE summit.
Since the end of our call, in the first week of June, we have installed our summit committee (see below) and have been really excited in reading through the amount of submissions. On the other hand, however, we were also having really a hard time of having to choose and reject so many talks that we would like to hear. Believe me, I made my very best to get as many speaker-slots as possible from the overall QtCon organisation for our FSFE summit. Unfortunately, we still need to reject proposals. And by the way: If you did submit a talk, you will get a confirmation or rejection this week or the next one.
Last week we had an organisators meetup with everyone involved from KDAB, VLC, Qt, KDE and FSFE to bring together and divide all needs and demands of our particular communities under one roof. At this point, my big gratitudes to all of us involved and in particular to Jesper K. Pedersen and Frances Tait from KDAB to offer such a collaborative and respectful environment for all our communities.
Update on the summit’s logo
In the meantime, our engaging designer Elio Qoshi – in consultance with Open Source Design – came up with a new version of our logo for the FSFE summit. The new version is more balanced and looks more like a modern style. This is highly appreciated, thank you very much Elio.
The Summit Committee
In our Call for Participation, among calling for talks, sessions and workshops, we have been including a call for volunteers to join our “program committee”. The idea behind: we do not only like to run a conference for our community – but also by our community! Obviously, such a demand involves multiple aspects. One of them is to give our community a chance to decide on the program.
To still keep capable of making decisions, we limited the amount of committee members to ten. Sorry for those that have been rejected but our choices have been based on a formula between professional experience (to reflect quality of talks) and/or FSFE contributions (to reflect the affiliation to our community) and/or country of origin (to reflect our European community). Additionally, part of the committee is composed by FSFE staff. This is our president Matthias Kirschner, our executive director Jonas Öberg, our enthusiastic intern Cellini Bedi and myself, head of summit organisation.
Finally, the summit committee is composed by additional six volunteers, two of them being our Fellowship representatives Mirko Boehm and Nicolas Dietrich. Together we form a team of ten people from five European countries. Thanks to all of you for taking your time and helping to shape the first FSFE summit.
After a successful start and given our mutual interest in extending this staff – community experience, we decided to keep the summit committee running during the whole time of organising the conference. Having such a board for further advise in upcoming decisions shall help to shape a summit in the sense and the name of our community.