Re: [Wikitech-l] Fwd: [FOSDEM] FOSDEM 2009: Call for devrooms, stands and lightning talks

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.

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.