Planning a hackfest is not an easy process. You need an:
- organizer – someone willing to put some time into making the whole thing happen
- topic – what are you going to be hacking on, what do you hope to accomplish
- attendees – this is usually a particular group of people that work on a specific project or team
- date – have you ever tried to schedule a multi-day meeting with multiple people? Agreeing on a week can be really hard.
- place – a place with affordable lodging and food with a comfortable place to hack with great internet. Preferably some place easy and cheap to travel to.
- sponsors – flying a group of people to the same place often costs quite a bit of money
Luckily we’ve had people and companies willing to invest the time and resources to make this happen. During the past year we’ve had a record number of very productive hackfests and we have even more coming up!
- Accessibility during AEGIS conference, Seville (Spain), October
- GTK+ Hackfest, A Coruña (Galicia, Spain), October 18th-22th
- Development Documentation and Tools Hackfest, Berlin (Germany), December 2nd-5th 2010
- WebKitGTK+ Hackfest, A Coruña (Galicia, Spain), December 5th-12th
And we have more opportunities! Not only are a lot of teams looking to have hackfests in the near future but we have people offering up venues!
- Dave Richards from the City of Largo is interested in hosting a hackfest. Many of you know Dave from his participation in the Boston Summit. The City of Largo is a big GNOME fan – they use a lot of thin client solutions.
- Daniel Siegel has once again offered up Bolzano and the Free Software Center of South Tyrol as a GNOME hackfest location in conjunction with their annual event in November. It’s a beautiful location and we’ve had several successful GNOME hackfests there over the years like the Zeitgeist one. This year all of the groups that I’ve contacted can’t make the dates work, so if you know of a team looking for a venue, this might be right for you!
So if you are interested in organizing a hackfest, please let us know. The GNOME Foundation is here to help – we can help find sponsors, venues, mentors, checklists, etc. The Board of Directors have even offered to act as mentors for any one planning a hackfest!