Re: GUADEC 2007 in the UK?

[Thomas Wood <thos gnome org>]

Bastien Nocera wrote:
> Hey Thomas,
>
> On Mon, 2006-01-09 at 12:57 +0000, Thomas Wood wrote:
>
> > To every GNOME user and developer in the UK,
>
>
> We already discussed this a couple of years ago with Telsa, and the
> bottom line was: don't do it around London (ie. not in the South East).
>
> The prices would be far too high for a majority of people. I think that
> a venue with decent international links would be best, somewhere like
> Birmingham, Manchester or even Liverpool would decent, in terms of price
> and travel.
>
> Just need to find people on the field to organise it ;)

I think you've summed up most people's feelings here, which is why I 
chose your e-mail to reply to :-) It's great to see that people are 
interested, so the next questions are:


* Who is definitely willing to help organise it?

We need a definitive working group. If people would like to put their 
names down on a list I think it would definitely help.


* Where would be suitable?

We've already basically ruled out London. I think Birmingham would be a 
good choice in terms of getting people there. Basically any place close 
to an international airport and with a University would be a suitable 
candidate.


* Mini GUADEC

I've also learnt that there is a proposal to hold GUADEC 2007 in Lyon. 
I'd still like to propose the UK as GUADEC was held in France in 2000, 
but has never been held in the UK. It would also really help bring 
together the GNOME community in the UK, and would probably help the more 
general FOSS community here too. If GUADEC 2007 is held in the UK, we 
will definitely need some sort of get together before it anyway, so...

What I'd also like to propose (and this is something that has been 
mooted before) is to organise a mini GUADEC sometime this year. This 
could be done alongside some other event (such as LUG Radio Live, 
e.t.c), or we could organise our own day somewhere. We'd get a few of 
the GNOME developers living in the UK to come along and give a some 
talks and hopefully get some interesting discussions going. So does any 
one have any suggestions about this, such as where we could hold it, and 
what we could organise.

-Thomas