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Siebrand Mazeland wrote:
Hi Roan and Henna, and others,
There has been some discussion about this in the past few months with some German developers, and with Tim and Brion. Initially the German developers had something planned during CCC late December, but this was cancelled for reasons unknown to me. Daniel has been pushing me to give more clarity on the FOSDEM 2009 idea a few weeks ago, but I was not able to give more clarity because the FOSDEM organisation had not been able to announce a date up to a little more than hour ago.
Yay, a date now! That's good news! :D
Ok -- February 7-8, 2009... good news is this doesn't conflict with RecentChangesCamp in Portland, which I was also planning to attend if possible. Yay! (Now I have to double-check if my travel budget allows them both, of course...)
Definitely count me in on FOSDEM -- I'll go over the CfP and put in a talk or something... and it would be awesome to get the dev room, I'm trying to get us to organize more regular hacking events going both "at home base" in San Francisco and at conferences like FOSDEM and Wikimania...
(If I have to choose between FOSDEM and RCC this year I'm taking FOSDEM, since we've got a more solid group of MediaWiki-specific folks to connect with in Europe.)
Given the number of developers that we have in Europe, quite close to Brussels, I think the goal of 12-15 developers isn't insane (Semantic MediaWiki, Collection, API, OmegaWiki, Translate, possibly one or more of the Wikimedia employed developers, and whatever I didn't mention but is there). As MediaWiki is quite a hot application, I think we cannot only inform and improve amongst ourselves, and push MediaWiki further, but also inform others, and maybe 'score' some new developers (even though PHP sucks, as you can read in at least a handful of places in the MediaWiki source).
For now we have to wait until our request gets accepted or denied (before 30 November). Meanwhile I very much support ideas for tech talks in case we *do* get the dev room, and I would like to know if any other people are interested in joining the 'staff' for the dev room. We may have to organise a few things, which may or may not cost some time.
Woohoo!
- -- brion