On Thursday 05 May 2011 20:41:03 Andreas Jaeger wrote:
This is not an official announcement. This is meant as a heads up to inform you of the progress we have made in selecting a venue and date and as a kick-start for other activities around the openSUSE conference. We have to finalize some questions with the proposed location now and once everything is clear, "official" announcements will be made - if you like our proposal;)
After reviewing several potential locations, we propose that the 2011 openSUSE conference be held at a very cool location, the Zentrifuge in Nuernberg, Germany. The conference dates will be September 11th to September 14th, 2011.
Robert Lihm, Klaas Freitag, Oliver Fecher and myself have been scouting locations for the openSUSE conference for the past several weeks. We looked at several places and feel that this location will provide the best venue for this years conference. We are very excited about the potential that this location offers.
This years conference will be larger than ever. The event will include experts from the SUSE Labs developers (mainly kernel, GCC and Samba developers). In past years SUSE Labs has held their own conference. This year we plan to do the conferences together with more attendees, content and collaboration.
* Location: Zentrifuge Nuernberg
This is an independed culture centre for the greater Nuernberg region, it's located in the previous industry complex from AEG. It's not an "usual" place for IT conferences, but a place where art projects happen in a very creative and open space. We will use their main room for the keynotes and use some other rooms in the building for the seminars.
URL: http://www.zentrifuge-nuernberg.de/
The location has a good public transportation to the city centre and I was suprised to see the motto of the complex which is "Creating communities".
We'd like to use the location to make some kind of cool art event there as part of the conference. Klaas will send some ideas later.
* Join us at a cool location!
Zentrifuge will be a great conference location but will require more help from the community members than previous years. Oliver, Klaas and Robert have some great visions for the Zentrifuge and committed to help making it cool - and knowing them, I'm convinced we can do it.
Btw. Oliver is our local facilities expert and also responsible for setting up Novell and SUSE parties and events for quite some time. I would not do Zentrifuge without having him on board - I'm delighted that he will help us!
* Our next steps
Right now we're checking the feasibility of Zentrifuge and also ask for your help. We need a local team of people willing to help to make the conference a real unforgetable event in an unusual place, afterwards people will say "Wow, cool FOSS events happen in Nuremberg now instead of Berlin" :)
The next days we will go again to the location and try to get everything sorted out for signing a contract with the location.
* Sponsoring
We're also seeking sponsors. We're already in discussion with Attachmate for funding and expect them to be the main sponsor but others are welcome and needed.
* Summary
Here's our proposal: Time: 11th to 14th September, 2011 Location: Zentrifuge Nuernberg
Will you join and help us? Volunteer through the wiki (http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Conference_Planning_2011)
Let's move forward with call for paper, slogan etc so that we can announce this publically to a broader context once we have been again at the location and finalized it,
I'm on the call for paper... Help is welcome :D
Andreas Klaas Oliver Robert