Re: Free Beer Sessions: 11 June 2015 Linking up with Cape Town

HI Angela

Thanks for passing on the info Jonathan!

Just to add, there is a (probably incomplete) list of the coding community groups in Cape Town on the bid page [1]. There's also plenty of great speakers around, both from a very technical point of view, and more general in the coding // open source space (I used to organise TEDxCapeTown so had a good mining of talent there, not all could get on stage). Also, I love beer. A lot.

Numbers: with no PR we get around 10 to 30 people at the CLUG meets. The other meet-ups I've seen up to about ... 100? What numbers would you like? I'm sure we can make it happen.

Cheers

[1] https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf16/Bids/Cape_Town#Community

On Fri, May 1, 2015 at 10:53 AM, Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) <jono.ixr@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Angela

On 22/04/2015 12:06, Angela Ho wrote:

Thanks for being excited about the open source link in Cape Town. As per
our discussion this morning we would like to kick-off to test the following:

1. Test the interest of the open source community in Cape Town
2. Finding interesting speakers willing to share at the event
3. Growing the open source community in the rest of South Africa
through FreeBeerSessions

Herewith a few links to give you an idea about the event:

1. http://freebeer.linux.co.za/
2. We will do some PR but it would be great if you can hook me up with
local community "meet-up"
3. We also need to plan for budget and would like to gauge what number
you think this initial event for a first would bring.
4. The format will be same with 30 minutes maximum 45 minutes (a
speaker in Cape Town and one in Johannesburg link-up)

Let me know your initial thoughts my details are below.

Kind regards,
Angela

Apologies for the delay in reply, it's been an eventful week, I'll just jump right into it... :)

Our local Linux User Group and Debian team put together a bid[1] to host Debconf[2] (the annual developer conference where Debian developers get together from all over the world) for Cape Town next year. Our bid was successful, and we also plan to host a Debian day[3], where we'll promote Debian to the public and attract new contributors. It's likely to be one of the most influential and important local free software events for 2016.

I thought that this might be a good topic for the free beer session, from our side, we could get some practice at presenting the conference (which we'll have to get polished real well for sponsors and for our presentation at this year's Debconf) and at the same time, it will give the local free software community a good chance to catch up with what's been going on and an opportunity to get involved early on.

I'm including Bernelle Verster from our local team who's also keen on the idea and I also took the liberty to cc the debconf16-team mailing list.

I'm sure we can generate some two-way interest from the local community so it sounds like a great topic to discuss over beer. Any thoughts?

-Jonathan

[1] https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf16/Bids/Cape_Town
[2] http://debconf.org/
[3] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianDay