Don’t get too excited yet — we don’t have dates to announce yet, but we should have them fairly soon. One of the most important considerations in planning a FUDCon is making sure the facility will acommodate 100-200 Fedora hackers. You need a fairly robust network, ample seating for hackfests, breakout rooms for sessions, and so forth. We keep logistics information on the Fedora wiki so anyone can look at our event setup and requirements and, potentially, run a FUDCon.
The wonderful people at Boston University have graciously hosted us many times in the past, and hopefully will do so again in the future. But for a variety of reasons they can’t do it this December, so we are looking for alternate facilities. I have a number of people to call on Monday and discuss our needs and plans.
My hope is that we will land FUDCon at another area educational institution, because .edu’s tend to have good classroom and hall setups for FUDCon, as well as excellent network support. They also tend to be hotbeds of grassroots activism and open source use and contribution, and we do hope the students and professors at any hosting institution will attend FUDCon too.
We are considering a couple different weekends in December, without trying to get too close to Christmas, or having to wait until mid-January (too late in the development cycle), or interfering with final exams at schools. December 5-7 or December 12-14 are the likely targets thus far.
What we generally try to find at an educational institution hosting a FUDCon is simply one or more faculty sponsors who can connect us with the people who handle logistics for these events. That usually means IT departments for wifi network support, A/V for the lecture and session rooms, and anyone else with whom we need to coordinate the physical setup and proceedings of a FUDCon.
If you have deep contact to faculty members who might be able to do this at a .edu in the Boston area, you’re welcome to get in touch with me!
If we can’t secure facilities at a school, we can still hold FUDCon at an appropriate hotel venue; we’re considering a couple places around Boston as well as Providence, Rhode Island, depending on the economics. We want to make sure that hotel rooms are as affordable as possible for our community members who are attending. We also have a set budget for the event, into which all our costs must fit. I’ll post more about that on the FUDCon F11 wiki page soon.