DebConf4 - Final Report

1. Introduction

The 5th International Debian Conference took place in Porto Alegre, Brazil, from May 26th to June 2nd 2004. It was a great event and involved a lot of work behind the scenes from the DebConf4 team. Apart from this team of fine people who took their own spare time to help with the event, it involved some sponsors and entities that will be mentioned in the right section of this report. But one of these entities deserves a mentioning right here: ASL.

2. Demographics

3. Sponsor List

What follows is the list of DebConf4 sponsors. We know that this is the section people usually skip when reading event reports, but we would like to ask the reader to take just some seconds to read this list since these were the companies/organizations that really made DebConf4 possible.

• Hewlett-Packard (HP). Thank you, Bdale Garbee, very much.

• Associação SoftwareLivre.org (ASL). Thank you, Mário Teza.

• O'Reilly. Those books are being of great use!

• Cisco. Rubens Cavancanti Lima will always be remembered as the antenna guy.

• XandrOS.

• Linspire.

• 4Linux.

• LinuxMall.

4. Schedule

26 - Wednesday

• 15:00 BOF: Skolelinux/Debian-Edu

  Petter Reinholdtsen

  Mini-Auditorium

• 16:00 Public Speaking - For the speakers

  Jeff Bailey

  Auxiliary Room

• 17:00 Helping Debian - A Workshop for non-DD's

  Rudy Godoy

  Mini-Auditorium

• 19:00 Official Welcome

  Main Auditorium

• 20:00 Capoeira workshop

  Gym

27 - Thursday

• 10:00 BOF: d-i organisational

  Joey Hess

  Mini-auditorium

• 11:00 The GNU Auto*Tools

  Scott James Remnant

  Main-Auditorium

• 13:00 The Shuttleworth Startup: What We Do

  Mini-Auditorium

• 14:00 Escaping the Dependency Hell

  Steve Langasek

  Main Auditorium

• 14:45 Autotools Workshop

  Steve Langasek, Scott James Remnant

  Main Auditorium

• 16:00 BOF: Backporting Packages

  Matt Taggart

  Mini-Auditorium

• 16:00 BOF: Debian Hardware Database

  Roland Stigge

  Main Auditorium

• 21:00 Party in the City

28 - Friday

• 11:00 PICAX CD creation system

  Jeff Licquia

  Mini-Auditorium

• 14:00 Componentized Linux: Overview and Status

  Ian Murdock

  Main Auditorium

• 16:00 Debian-Edu

  Petter Reinholdsen and Andreas Schuldei

  Main Auditorium

• 17:00 BOF: Debian Desktop

  Gustavo Noronha and Rob Taylor

  Mini-Auditorium

• 18:00 BOF: Mail/Spam

  Jesus Climent

  Auxiliary Room

• 20:00 Speech from the throne - Formal Dinner with the DPL

  Restaurant

29 - Saturday

• 07:00 Trip to Gramado/Caracol

30 - Sunday:

• 11:00 Strategical, and Social Challenges - Technical Challenges of internationalisation

  Kenshi Muto, Christian Perrier

  Main Auditorium

• 12:30 BOF: SPI

  Benj. Mako Hill

  Main-Auditorium

• 14:00 Redenção Park and Popular Fair Visit

• 18:00 pbuilder

  Junichi Uekawa

  Main-Auditorium

• 19:00 BOF: Configuration Management for Clusters

  Martin Langhoff

  Main-Auditorium

• 21:00 Keysigning Party

  Benjamin Mako Hill, Scott Dier

  Main Auditorium

• 22:00 Forro Dancing

  meeting at bus

31 - Monday

• 11:00 Porting

  Bdale Garbee

  Main Auditorium

• 14:00 Build-Deamons

  LaMont Jones

  Main Auditorium

• 15:00 Privilege-Neutral Networking: Considering a 2nd Generation Free OS

  Jason Gerard DeRose

  Main Auditorium

• 16:00 Custom Debian Distributions are the last, ultimate step towards Total World Domination!

  Mako Hill and Enrico Zini

  Main Auditorium

• 17:00 BOF: Arch

  Robert Collins

  Mini-Audotorium

• 18:00 Debian in Brazil and the Debian Brazil Project

  Gustavo Noronha Silva

  Main Auditorium

• 20:00 BOF: Removing useless packages from the archive

  Martin Michlmayr and Petter Reinholdtsen

  Mini-Auditorium

• 21:00 Amateur satellites

  Bdale Garbee

  Main Auditorium

1 - Tuesday

• 07:00 Optional: Wineary Valley Visit

• 11:00 Multi-arch - why and how, a proposal

  Tollef Fog Heen and Matt Taggart

  Main Auditorium

• 14:00 Ethical Volunteerism in Debian

  Biella Coleman

  Main Auditorium

• 16:00 Women in Debian

  Erinn Clark

  Main Auditorium

• 17:00 Soccer match: Another approach for the NM queue

  Soccer field

• 18:00 BOF: Multi-arch

  Tollef Fog Heen and Matt Taggart

  Auxiliary Room

• 20:15 BOF: New Maintainer Process

  Martin Michlmayr, Brian Nelson, James Troup

  Main Auditorium

• 21:00 Cosmonaut Training and Space Flights

  Mark Shuttleworth

  Main Auditorium

2 - Wednesday

• 12:00 - 17:00 Debian-NP Day

  (Everyone Welcome)

  Debian-NP Sub-Project

  Mini-Auditorium

• 12:00 Debian-NP Bagunça Week in Review

  Bagunça Team

• 13:00 Extending the Bagunça: Debian-NP and the Future

  Bagunça Team

• 15:00 Custom Debian Live CDs

  Alex de Landgraaf

• 16:00 Discussion with NGO/NP Users

  Tactical Tech Collective

• 11:00 IPv6

  Fabio Massimo Di Nitto

  Main Auditorium

• 14:00 Towards a Systematic Quality Assurance Approach in Debian

  Martin Michlmayr

  Main Auditorium

5. Place Report Summary

Right after the Brazilian Debian developers decided the best suited city to hold DebConf4 were Porto Alegre, a research in seek for the place to hold it were run during 5 months by a group of locals.

This local team attended over 20 meetings and enlisted 11 places from which 7 were chosen to be taken to the negotiation table. Everything concearning this 7 places can be learned from the Place Report.

SESC were recommended by the local team as the best suited place to hold DebConf4. The cost of this choice, according to that report, was estimated in R$ 53,833.50. This considered 150 people and only the DebConf4 days stay. The actual cost raised to R$ 77,562.70 as can be read in the next section. That is explained in full details in the Financial Report and more on that is out of scope for this document, but it has to do with more people than previously planned, special dinner not originally counted, and all the little details that we never predict. Anyways, we had a 30% error margin and some days before DebConf4 we already knew we would surpass that. Fortunatelly that was not a problem, as can be understood in the next section.

SESC's facilities and personnel proved that to be a good decision. It's local team common opinion that any other place enlisted in the Place Report would not have been as convenient.

6. Financial Report Summary

The following table summarizes the information in the Financial Report (which is only available in hardcopy archived with ASL, since it deals with paper bills and tickets - some day it may be scanned, but do not count on that!). It does not include any detail and only show the financial data from a higher perspective.

Also note that all values are written in Brazilian Reals. One can use Bloomberg's Calculator to convert it into any other currency.

7. Extra Money

When we realize that we would have extra money, and that such money belongs to Debian, we called on a meeting with the Brazilian Debian developers and the DPL to decide what to do with that money.

Unwarned people may think at this point "what does it mean 'decide what to do'? Since it is Debian's money just give it to them, right?"... well... not quite.

The accounting for the event was not really finished (and it was only finished some days ago), but our predictions were that we would have some money left. We still had one bill: the travel sponsorship some attendees had. Then ASL legal advisors came in the scene...

Since that money had to leave our account, and being bound by strict laws as a non-profit organization, ASL had to have a good excuse to "take that money out of the country". Some NGO scandals had being popping up every day and our legal advisors were scared to death. The same thing goes for money entering ASL's account. HP was dealt long before and an international agreement were signed, but other sponsors such as Linspire and XandrOS were left for the last minute, not being feasible to build another agreement in a nice timeframe.

Scared or not, it is really a complicated thing to take money in or out of the country, and, besides paperwork, the government charges huge taxes, so that it is not very attractive to try it. Besides, we still had another drawback: a huge portion of our sponsors' money was blocked. This happened because one of our sponsors had given us a check, and it takes 30 to 45 days for it to became available in our account. So, even if it were easy to take money out of the country, we would only be able to do that a month after DebConf4 were over. That was explained in detail during that meeting, and another solution was built: the extra money (we didn't know how much by that time) would remain Debian's, but credited in ASL's account (on Debian's behalf) in Brazil, invested by ASL and at DPL's disposal. SPI would pay the travel sponsorships DebConf4 had pending and would receive Linspire and XandrOS' sponsorships. Later on, if Debian needed the money, an international agreement would be necessary so ASL can have a plausible excuse to take the money out of Brazil and deposit it in SPI account. Meanwhile, if the Brazilian developers had some Debian-related use for that money, it could be used if the DPL agrees. This arrangement in similar to the one with FFIS in Germany, which takes care of Debian's assets in Germany and other parts of Europe.

That saved a lot of trouble and solved the issue. The amount named as "Credit" on the table in the previous section is invested by ASL (so it may have grown as for today), on Debian's behalf, in Brazil. A 10% administration fee is charged and it can be withdrawn after a 30-day notice (that is common practice in these cases) either in credit of SPI (by means of an international agreement) or to be used in Brazil as explained before.

8. Impressions and Lessons

DebConf4 was a great event, indeed. But it had problems and not everything went well as planned. Below is a short narrative from the local team on the impressions DebConf4 caused and lessons we learned with it.

First of all, one thing surely was quoted by more than one people attending DebConf as a major problem: DebConf was too short! We know that, but as there was no way to foresee how many people would attend, and the money involved wasn't, by any means, a small amount, we decided to play it safe....

Next, the profile of the event was decided in an IRC meeting (about which more information can be found in DebConf4's website), and, if we choose one thing we wanted to see different in the next editions, surely that would be chosen. DebConf4, unlike previous editions, was mixed with DebCamp. It was made so mainly for convenience, but also because people at that meeting thought it would make DebConf more dynamic, with several things happening in parallel (after all, also unlike other editions, the hacking space and the dorm would be in such a mix that one could hack in the sleeping room if one wished).

Mixing DebConf and DebCamp ended up being a bad idea mainly because people got too fragmented in what they were doing. Many people, more than once, had to choose between attending a wonderful lecture or BOF and keep on some productive piece of hacking. Maybe it is still a Good Thing™ to mix them, but when more time is available.

The Capoeira workshop and the cultural events, on the other hand, were a score! Most of people we talked to enjoyed to learn something about southern Brazil (and some of them still ask us about Chimarrão - that green tea - or the "balls-of-fire" dance). The visit to Redenção park made people want to understand what Porto Alegre inhabitants found so enjoyable in just a park. That brought up the obvious conclusion: hackers are, after all, curious people, and as curious people, they take every opportunity to learn. For a lot of non-local-team advisors that was a surprise... they had that concept of hacker as a stereotypical nerd... I am happy that we have not listened to every advice they gave us. :-)

Mixed opinions on the trip to the mountains were collected. Some of them found it too "touristic". Others enjoyed it and regret it was only one day long. We kind of agree with both: Gramado is a tourist place, and people we hired to conduct the trip thought they're dealing with regular tourists. On the other hand, it is also a very pleasant place and, maybe, it could have been a good choice of an optional trip to be taken before or after DebConf... but not during it.

The social parties and all the non-geek activity were another score. If not by any other reason, it was the most funny thing to watch Junichi trying to dance forró, or Mako walking around Cidade Baixa neighborhood.

Another thing, this time related to the backstage, can be taken as a lesson: use your own computers, but if you need to borrow some or to rent some, always ask for more time than really needed. We lost our main servers too soon (in the last day, indeed, but there were still people working on them), and we were left without hacklab also sooner than the ideal.

Two considerations should be made regarding the hacklab. First, the obvious, there were too many unused machines and little space for laptops. Second, since the hacklab was a "hot zone" (a place where people were supposed to leave valuable things such as their own laptops, digital cameras, and so on), we asked the hotel to increase its security. That sure was a Good Thing™, but brought us another problem we have not predict: what to do with people without badges? Security guys were instructed to not allow people without badges in the hacklab, and that was a problem for people that just "wanted to take a peek" at the hacklab (but were not really DebConf4 attendees). On the other hand, what else the security guy were suppose to do?

With regards to money, always fully understand local laws to get money in and out the country, how long does it take to enter your account, how much does it cost to move it around, and all this boring stuff. We worked with a 30% error margin, and I recommend that! That made us sleep in peace during the event since our strength would be needed for other activities.

One final thing that was already mentioned, but deserves another mention. Hosting is not a good place to cut costs. That is one of the things we got very right. SESC's facilities and personnel were invaluable and sure deserved what we spent on it.

9. Conclusion

DebConf4 was a great experience. To be part of that experience was great, indeed, but to be able to organize it surely was an honor. A lot was learned from this experience and we, the DebConf4 team, hope this document serve the next to organize DebConf as a good source of information.

We first though of mentioning here everybody that helped, in any way, to organize DebConf4, but this conclusion had to be short (since the document is not), so if you helped DebConf4 to happen, consider yourself mentioned: many thanks to you all.