Each year the Fedora Project holds a conference for contributors known as Flock. The Flock 2018 conference will be in Dresden, Germany from 8-11 August. The conference is open to all contributors. Here’s a message from the Flock organizing committee about this year’s conference.

We are very grateful to the bidders for this year’s flock. While in the end we could not accept the bids because of administrative, monetary, or calendar issues, we were definitely inspired by and are appreciative of the very hard work that went into the bids. The bids this year were for a diverse range of cities, and each was interesting and inspired the final choice. You’re encouraged to let these folks know how much they are appreciated:

Conference Program

We are continuing to tweak the program concept to help the conference keep pace with the evolution of the Fedora. Project Leader Matthew Miller started a discussion about this year’s content and schedule on the flock-planning mailing list. We encourage you to subscribe to that list and join the conversation.

The call for submissions for talks and workshops will open once the programming conversation has completed and we have picked some tooling. If you’re interested in helping with tooling, please let us know on the flock-planning mailing list.

Registration

We are working on changing the registration system to one more easily supported by our accounting system. Therefore we will be opening registration as soon as those details are confirmed.

The registration this year will again include a small voluntary fee to offset swag and setup costs per attendee. The fee for USA attendees is $25. This fee has been scaled via the Big Mac Index to other countries and geographic areas. This means the fee in each country should roughly be the same level of spending, rather than the exact equivalent in local currency. That makes it easier for people in each area to register.

Barring technical issues, the registration system will again also allow you to contribute some extra money toward funding travel for those who need it. This means anyone can contribute to make it easier for someone else to attend.

Venue

The event will be located at the Radisson Blu Park Hotel & Conference Centre, Dresden Radebeul. We will be posting details on how to reserve a room on the Flock website (see below). Rooms will be 100 EUR per night for double occupancy and 75 EUR per night for single occupancy.

Ongoing Communication

There is a Freenode IRC channel for real-time communication about Flock. We will bridge this to a Telegram channel for those who choose to use this client for easier mobile communications.

We are working on setting up a Flock-attendees-2018 mailing list. Details will be posted when they are available.

Last, but not least, we will begin working on the updated Flock to Fedora website and will post an announcement when it is ready. The website will list several hints for transportation to the event venue. For now, those of you trying to plan air travel should consider flying into either the Dresden Airport or to a neighboring city with easy train access such as Prague, Czech Republic or Berlin, Germany. The train trip from Prague to Dresden is particularly beautiful and highly recommended.