Today Jared announced FUDCon Tempe 2011, which will be held January 29-31, 2011 — the next big North American FUDCon event. And as always, FUDCon is free and open to everyone to attend.
Most importantly: the wiki page for FUDCon Tempe is now open for pre-registration!
We’re offering a significant number of travel subsidies for contributors this year because we know the hotel is a little higher cost than at previous FUDCons. That happens because during the winter, obviously lots of people want to vacation in the Southwest, where it’s warmer. (That’s the same reason we’re going there, after all!) So demand for hotel rooms is higher, making prices rise somewhat.
Despite the costs, we want to make sure that people can stay together in the FUDCon hotel because lots of the collaboration that happens there goes on after hours, when people get together to share ideas, hack on code, and plan for the future of Fedora. So we boosted the amount of funding this year for travel subsidies to compensate for higher costs.
Because FUDCon is global, we have events all over the world. So just as most of the people we subsidize for a FUDCon in the EMEA region come from that region, we expect to subsidize mostly people from North America for this FUDCon. Of course, we’re always very mindful that people from around the world love coming to any FUDCon event, so we’ll consider all requests.
We’ve made it easier to request funding this time around, by visiting our new FUDCon planning issue tracker. Instructions are on the issue tracker wiki — just look for the links on the front page.
It’s worth noting that our location this year came about because some Fedora Project volunteers decided to help organize the event. We opened a bid process back in April to find our next location, to allow our contributors to work on the process of putting together FUDCon, just as we encourage them to get involved in other parts of Fedora. In fact, you might have seen the announcement on the mailing list, or this entry on my blog, talking about our open bid process back in April of this year.
A couple of our contributors, Robyn Bergeron and Ryan Rix,have been doing a bunch of leg work to bid for FUDCon in Tempe. They also got help from friends at Arizona State University and ASULUG — much appreciated, folks! I think it’s great to see contributors stepping up to help in this way, and I hope that other contributors who want to see the North American FUDCon in another new location next year will feel empowered to do the same.
We’re still finishing up some of the wiki page, but I encourage everyone to pre-register now — which will help us finalize details with the hotel. Please help us out by letting us know you’re coming!