Announcing Flock 2024 in Rochester, New York

The Flock to Fedora 2024 organizing team announces the next edition of Flock to Fedora. It will take place in Rochester, New York, United States from Wednesday, August 7th to Saturday, August 10th. Flock is the Fedora Project’s annual contributor-focused conference. The conference provides a venue for face-to-face meetings and conversations. It is also a place to celebrate our community. Major changes to Flock 2024 include a fourth day and our first return to the United States since 2017.

Read on for more details on Flock 2024. This includes travel and location details, call for proposals and registration, sponsorship opportunities, and registration. You can also learn the story behind how we selected Rochester for this year’s edition of Flock.

Flock 2024 travel & location

Flock 2024 will be in Rochester, New York at the Hyatt Regency Rochester hotel and conference center. The conference begins on Wednesday morning, August 7th and ends Saturday afternoon, August 10th. A hotel block is reserved for Flock to Fedora attendees and will be available soon. We encourage all attendees to book rooms through our hotel block for a discounted rate.

The Rochester airport has easy connections with other major US airports like New York City, Atlanta, Chicago, and Boston. There are also Amtrak trains with daily service to Rochester from Toronto, New York City, and Boston. Downtown Rochester has a bus network, but coverage by public transit is limited. See below for more about Rochester from visitrochester.com:

“Rochester is the cultural capital of Upstate New York. The third largest city in New York State offers an abundance of cultural experiences and institutions, and has previously been named the 17th most arts-vibrant city in the country by the National Center for Arts Research, ranking alongside large cities such as New York City, Los Angeles and Washington D.C.“

www.visitrochester.com

Flock 2024 call for proposals (CFP) & registration

The Flock to Fedora call for proposals (CFP) is open until Monday, April 29th, 2024. Apply at cfp.fedoraproject.org and read the CFP announcement for more guidance and insight to what the Flock reviewer committee is looking for this year.

We invite our contributor community to submit both presentations and workshops to this year’s call for proposals. Remember, Flock is not just about presentations and talks! We also use our valuable time together to work through challenges and opportunities. While thinking about content to submit for Flock 2024, consider adding interaction and participation into your submission proposals.

This year, we encourage submissions that connect to one or more of the following themes. These themes are aligned with the Fedora 2028 Strategy. Proposers will be asked to connect their submission(s) to one of the following themes:

• Accessibility (a11y): Fedora websites and docs use the current best-practices for a11y. Fedora Linux Editions use the best-available open source a11y tech. Our project tooling follows best a11y practices.
• Reaching the World: Fedora Linux is available pre-installed on more systems from more vendors. Fedora Linux is widely available in cloud providers and CI services. Fedora maintains a strong network of thriving local communities around the world.
• Community Sustainability: Everyone in Fedora can have a mentor, and everyone in Fedora can be a mentor. Modernize our communications tooling.
• Technology Innovation and Leadership: Fedora is a popular source for containers and Flatpaks. Atomic Desktops are the majority of Fedora Linux desktops in daily use. We integrate programming language stack ecosystems.
• Editions, Spins, and Interests: Each Edition has a story for each release. It’s trivial to create and maintain a new Fedora Spin or Remix. More (active) SIGs, fewer images.
• Ecosystem Connections: Better collaborative workflow with CentOS Stream. Get people working on downstreams directly involved in Fedora as an upstream. Collaborate on tooling, practices, and offerings with peer distros and upstream projects.

Flock 2024 sponsorship opportunities

We are now accepting sponsorship for Flock 2024. Our sponsorship tiers will remain the same as 2023:

• Bronze ($1,500 USD)
• Silver ($5,000 USD)
• Gold ($10,000 USD)
• Platinum ($20,000 USD)

An assortment of additional sponsored activities (e.g. Meal & Beverage, audio/video, DEI, and Community Social) are also available. See the sponsorship prospectus for details.

How we chose Rochester for Flock 2024

If you made it this far, you might be wondering… how did we choose Rochester, New York? If you attended the Fedora Linux 39 Release Party & 20th Anniversary last November, you might remember that we announced Mexico. It is true that this Flock nearly went to Mexico City. We were excited to bring Flock 2024 to LATAM. However, we ran into unexpected pricing difficulties at the last minute with our negotiated venues. In fact, the price we targeted nearly doubled when we were about to sign contracts for Mexico City. However, we found that the high price from our planned hotel was not unique. Price was also a challenge for other Mexico City hotels that met our requirements for Flock. When we faced this pricing challenge, we went back to the drawing board for our options.

In the original community discussion, we also evaluated Montreal, Canada and Rochester, New York, USA. We originally ruled out Montreal due to higher costs for international travel and venues. The ongoing civil dispute between the Canadian and Indian governments also presented a challenge for visa sponsorship. So, we looked again at Rochester, which we had originally ruled out due to poor availability of dates. We went back directly to our venue of choice. The dates we wanted for Flock were actually available! So we quickly worked to finalize them.

A return to 2015?

Rochester is not a new place for Flock. In fact, this will be the first Flock that returns to a city we have been to before. Flock 2015 was also held in Rochester, New York. Yet it was our top contender this year for a North American city due to a range of factors. One reason is the strong open source connections via the Rochester Institute of Technology. Both Open@RIT and the open source academic curriculum foster a community of open source in the academic space. We are well-positioned to deliver an amazing Flock to Fedora experience in Rochester this year. We hope to offer a new experience for first-timers and also some surprises for our old-timers and past visitors of Flock 2015.

Questions about Flock 2024

The best place to ask questions for Flock 2024 is on Fedora Discussion and Fedora Chat. Post on Fedora Discussion using the #flock tag. Message on Fedora Chat/Matrix in the #flock:fedoraproject.org room.

More details about Flock 2024 will be shared in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for next updates like the Flock 2024 call for proposals.