Hello Everyone!
We have just finalized our kickoff meeting for the Ubucon Europe 2022.
Below are the meeting notes of our first meeting, and the next steps that we want to take towards organizing the conference.
We are still looking for volunteers who want to help out on organizing and setting up the Ubucon Europe 2022, feel free to join our Jitsi at our next meeting, or send an e-mail in case you want to volunteer but don’t want/can’t join the Jitsi, details below:
URL: https://quentinho.ubcasts.com/StartUbucon2022
E-mail: 2022@ubucon.eu
When: 12th February 2022.
Below are our meeting notes.
Kickoff Ubucon 2022 organization
Welcome
Welcome everyone, this is the first meeting for the organization of the Ubucon Europe in 2022, thank you all for being here.
Hope you are all keeping healthy mentally and physically during these weird times, things are looking brighter right now, so lets hope for some good well deserved vacations on your favorite places.
Format
This year we will organize the Ubucon completely online, since having to deal with tight safety measures, different countries with different restrictions, the easiest this year would be to have the con online.
The idea is that the talks will be pre-recorded, and we will play them at the scheduled times, where the present will be online answering questions during the video/after the video.
Our current target to organize the con is the last week of October, on the 29th and 30th of October, after the release of 22.10.
With this in mind, I would like to align on some of the tasks that we want to get started in terms of what comprises the basics of a Con.
Starting with something that I and Tiago Carrondo already started to work already and set up the basics is e-mail.
I have registered already an account on mailfence, a Belgium-based hosting provider that gives parts of their profits to EDRI and EFF, so seemed like a good option to host it, at least for the time being.
To handle the inbox, with the kind sponsorship of ANSOL, the portuguese free software association, we have freescout, which is a ticketing system where I and Tiago have access and as we go forward on defining who does what, more people might require also access to freescout to organize and reply to e-mails sent to the Ubucon e-mails in a shared way.
To add to this, just to bring awareness but I don’t think the discussion fits this particular meeting, there is the possibility coming from Canonical to sponsor some infra for the e-mail, but that would be temporary, me and Tiago chimed in on the way forward but would like for others to give their opinion on Telegram, or we can have a separate chat about it. Again, this is not a topic for this meeting.
Website
The next topic is website/branding.
The Ubucon Asia team has already done some heavy lifting with the website for their con which I would like to use and remix for our needs.
Is there anyone who wants to start looking into this, templating it, and defining the strategy to update the website?
- Tiago Carreira taking the lead, Tiago Carrondo and Diogo Constantino helping out.
Branding
Graphic design, logo, swag I am a bit out of touch with these things, so I am looking for people in the community who can help with those and somewhat bridge with what we are doing with the website. Without pointing fingers 
The Ubuntu French community seems to be on top of their game here, with a store already set up, with some people that can do awesome graphic designs, maybe you can help with this part?
- Since the meeting was quite empty, I will reach out to the French community, Michal also stepped up to help out in this part, but prefers that the French team takes the lead.
CFP/Scheduling software
Used pretalx in 2019, still being maintained nowadays: https://pretalx.com/p/about/
I am happy with it, but I am happy to hear other people’s opinions/look into what the Asian community used. I can take this on myself, is someone wants to join this, let me know.
- Website team to look into which integration is possible, and check what Ubucon Asia did, in the meantime David will try to set up something with pretalx as a test.
- Ubucon Asia used eventyay: https://eventyay.com/
Conferencing/Talks/gathering software
I have been out of this for a bit so I am unsure of what is out there. I know about bigbluebutton, but I don’t know if it is the right tool for the job.
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Look into what FOSDEM is doing next weekend, and what Ubucon Asia did.
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Gather town? Looks cool. https://2021.ubucon.asia/venue/
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David to look into conferencing software, check what Ubucon Asia team did as well as what FOSDEM is doing.
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Jitsi + Matrix might be a good idea.
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Michal Gonna check the Jitsi + matrix option in his university.
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Michal gonna have a look into spinning BBB easily.
Other non-prepared topics
Sponsorship, partners (hosting servers), etc…
- Tiago Carrondo and David Negreira.
- Diogo Constantino will contact Digital Ocean
Testing
- are we going to “test” the conference with some minor conference? (a meetup maybe?)
- setup meetings after the infra is setup
- Open several sessions to load the server
Organizing
- Are we going to create a group for the organizers? (telegram?)
- We do have a Telegram group, who volunteers will be invited.
Github
- Tiago Carreira and David Negreira owners of Ubucon Europe on github, sharing the ownership with Diogo Constantino and Tiago Carreira now.
Next meeting
Next meeting on 12th February, 21:00 GMT.
