Place to make a separate Thunderbird Summit

[Ben Bucksch]

Hey,

I've just had a discussion with the head of LinuxHotel, a training
institute around open source, with an attached hotel, 14 rooms. He
deeply believes in open source.

This is why he offers the hotel and rooms at the weekends for a very
cheap price. This is a special offer for open source projects, to gather
together and discuss or hack together.

This offer includes: several meeting rooms, each for about 10 people, 14
hotel rooms for 1-2 persons, breakfast, and unlimited softdrinks all
day. Lunch can be booked, too. The price is 25 EUR/person and day, plus
10 EUR for lunch.

If you guys would cover your own travel expenses (esp. flight), I would
personally cover the room costs. This is in Essen, Germany, and close
airports are Düsseldorf and Dortmund.

I think this is an excellent opportunity to hack and plan together.
What do you think? Who (of the core developers) is on board?

Once we have the list of persons, we can arrange a date with the hotel
(it's obviously not always free).

Ben
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[Ben Bucksch]

http://www.linuxhotel.de/community.html

[Kent James]

On 4/4/2013 6:58 AM, Ben Bucksch wrote:
> If you guys would cover your own travel expenses (esp. flight), I
> would personally cover the room costs.

My understanding is that Thunderbird earns a modest income of the order
of many tens of thousand of dollars per year, and that income is
available only for "engagement" activities. A summit is a good
opportunity for that, so I don't believe that it should be necessary for
key individuals to pay their own way.

I've asked in the past about information on the incomes earned by
Thunderbird that are available for engagement activities, but have not
received any information on that (probably more from neglect than any
unwillingness to share the information). I think that we need to
understand the available funds before we can make any decision about the
accommodations and terms of a summit.

That being said, at the moment I am certainly willing to devote several
days to attending such a summit. I am not yet willing to say that I will
pay for my travel, though there might be circumstances where I am
willing to do that. I am also willing to be involved in the planning of
such a summit.

:rkent

[Mark Banner]

Hi Ben,

Thanks for thinking about this.

On 04/04/2013 14:58, Ben Bucksch wrote:
> If you guys would cover your own travel expenses (esp. flight), I
> would personally cover the room costs. This is in Essen, Germany, and
> close airports are Düsseldorf and Dortmund.

As Kent said, we should investigate how much we can provide from our
engagement fund and see how that affects things. I've already sent the
email to start finding out.

Depending how much we have may influence the time and location.

> I think this is an excellent opportunity to hack and plan together.
> What do you think? Who (of the core developers) is on board?

I'd like to get peoples thoughts on the aims of an event. For me, we
have the opportunity of doing things around the Mozilla summit which may
also help gain interest from those at the summit, and possibly reach
more folks and raise the profile more than we could otherwise.

Mark

[Andrew Sutherland]

On 04/04/2013 09:58 AM, Ben Bucksch wrote:
> I've just had a discussion with the head of LinuxHotel, a training
> institute around open source, with an attached hotel, 14 rooms. He
> deeply believes in open source.

Wow, that's a very nice looking venue and a generous offer on your part!

Given how little time I have to spend on Thunderbird, I don't think
there would be much planning benefit for me to attend such a gathering.
A hackathon makes more sense, but even as someone on the East Coast of
the US, that's still a lot of travel for me for a relatively short
hackathon. (Especially since I'd likely end up hacking on gloda, which
could find me hacking on my own.)

Like others, my personal preference would be to try and see if we can
route all the Thunderbird-interested people to the same physical site
and tack on an extra day before the summit proper. Right now, I think
Thunderbird expertise is centrally located in Toronto. Assuming the
residents of the Toronto office are going to be kept in Toronto with
minimal shuffling to other sites, that might be the ideal location.
(And I'm assuming hotel costs are cheaper there, so perhaps the
Thunderbird budget or the general Mozilla budget could cover it without
trouble.)

Andrew

[Blake Winton]

On 04-04-13 17:08 , Andrew Sutherland wrote:
> Right now, I think Thunderbird expertise is centrally located in
> Toronto. Assuming the residents of the Toronto office are going to be
> kept in Toronto with minimal shuffling to other sites, that might be
> the ideal location. (And I'm assuming hotel costs are cheaper there,
> so perhaps the Thunderbird budget or the general Mozilla budget could
> cover it without trouble.)

I have it on good authority that that's not a good assumption. Actually,
neither of those are good assumptions… ;)

Later,
Blake.

--
Blake Winton UX Engineer
bwi...@mozilla.com

[Ben Bucksch]

Mark Banner wrote, On 04.04.2013 21:41:
> how much we can provide from our engagement fund and see how that
> affects things. I've already sent the email to start finding out.

Thanks!

> Depending how much we have may influence the time and location.

I think this is a good location either way, independent of amount of
money. (Unless you want 4-star or higher :) .)

> I'd like to get peoples thoughts on the aims of an event.

For me, it would be:
1. Exchange of ideas, inspiration, motivations, plans
2. Hacking together, for fun and benefit
3. Concrete discussions some people might want to have

> For me, we have the opportunity of doing things around the Mozilla summit

To clarify: This proposal is not to replace a gathering around the
Mozilla summit. It is to amend. The Mozilla Summit is geographically
distributed, and also later in the year. I think it is good to convene
more than once per year.

[Atul jangra]

That's a great venue. :-) I doubt if many of us would be able to fund their flights.

But on the other hand, we should judiciously use the resources that are present for Thunderbird. Maybe we can do something like this: Thunderbird can fund the flights only for the people who are not able to fund their own. This thing can work out if somehow we can implement this thing in a fairly manner.

Regards

[Ben Bucksch]

Hey,

nobody confirmed that he would come. Most people said the airplane would
be too expensive for them.

Therefore, I assume this event doesn't happen, unless people change
their minds.

Too bad.