I’m organizing this year’s Fedora presence at FOSDEM with bexelbie, and I’d like to request funding for travel and lodging for all the participants.

FOSDEM is the biggest free and non-commercial event organized by and for the community in Europe. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet. This is probably the biggest (in terms of participants, and the amount of interaction we have with them) and most important conference we have every year in EMEA. Fedora has always participated in FOSDEM for the past few years with a booth. I would like to request funding and lodging for ~6-8 contributors to man the booth.

This is a developers conference, and along with experienced Ambassadors, I would prefer to have some experienced developers as well to answer more technical questions that we are usually asked. Last year we made a call to the dev-announce list, and I would like to make a similar call this year to have some developers on the booth with more technical experience. Our theme is about extending the Fedora Project by developing new solutions, packaging, helping users get installed, and troubleshoot any errors that they may have. We are looking for experienced packagers and developers who have extensive knowledge on packaging, rpm, Gnome, or in general have extensive knowledge of the ins and outs of Fedora, willing to help users and answer technical questions. Also experienced Ambassadors will have to work with new users and have extensive knowledge around the not so technical stuff of the distribution. We want to focus on helping users be successful with Fedora, and not try to be a general helpdesk for all technologies as most of them have their own communities present. We would prefer to have new contributors with us who didn't get the chance to come in the previous years. Finally, we prefer contributors from EMEA over those from other regions as this conference is EMEA focused, and transportation costs would be cheaper for those traveling from EMEA. At the booth there will be constantly 4-7people.

Finally, as last year, in cooperation with our friends at CentOS, we are producing some hand bags that carry both the Fedora and CentOS logos. We have our booth colocated with theirs and we support each other as part of the Enterprise Linux family.

I would like to ask a total of 2700 EUR to be allocated for this event. This is the rough allocation for how this money will be spent:

*Hotel: 750-850 EUR (for 6-8 people for 3 nights max)
*Travel: 50-300 EUR/person 
*Food: ~100EUR