José Miguel Parrella Romero

DebConf 11 will be held in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Munich, Germany arrived on a close second and our bid, Quito, Ecuador, arrived last, allegedly because some points flipped over since DC 11 was meant to happen in Europe. So, after having three DebConfs hosted in America in the last four years, DebConf 11 will travel to Europe in 2011! Good news for all our fellow DDs and contributors over there.

The Banja Luka team managed to get an important support from their Government. They even met with the Prime Minister and got him to sign an offer of full support. I think this becomes dangerous for a DebConf, given that I’ve worked and have had mishaps while funding conferences with at least three governments (Ecuador, Venezuela and Brazil) with stronger levels of support (Law-like level) for free software and I know that at least other two governments in the World have unfortunately done this in the past. So we need backup plans and lots of follow-up activities with the stakeholders.

However, this agreement sets an important milestone in government support for free and open source software as well as Debian. I’ll use it in my Debian slides, and congratulations!

IMO, Munich would have made a great host for DC11 in terms of air travel connectivity, at a bigger hit on local costs, but nothing that would differ that much from DC7, though! I don’t think I’ll be able to make it at this moment to Bosnia (struggling for NYC) and at this point it’s premature to think on supporting Quito’s again for DC12. People and sponsors get gradually tired, even with spiritual commitment.

The DC10 decision meeting was long and lots of things needed to be improved. At that moment I thought the Project learnt useful lessons for future meetings, but we’re repeating ourselves now on the DC11 decision meeting. And now, I’m just hoping for the best, for the sake of the time and sanity of all us here. Ditch the priority list altogether, increase the stakeholders on the global team, filter bids early in the process and use more technology to improve the information flow before the decision!

So, DebConf 10 will be held in New York City! Congratulations to the NYC bid team, now DC10 local team, which managed to provide a sound proposal for 2010. As time allows it, I’ll be happy to help out and be there!

I’d also like to congratulate Boston’s bid, who provided an outstanding proposal, and also the rest of Quito’s team, whose bid I led: I think we provided an extraordinary bid to host an important event as DebConf in an amazing city as Quito, and as long as we can keep guaranteeing extraordinary quality, we’ll be glad to present the bid for future DebConfs.

Finally, the decision was taken after a long meeting, where we as a Project learnt useful things for future decision meetings. So, DC11 bidders, keep up the good work and enjoy the ride!