Fedora 8's FUDCon

[Max Spevack]

Yesterday the Fedora Board made the decision not to hold an in-person 
FUDCon for F8.  Like you, I'm a disappointed, but I'm also excited for 
us to try out an organized, weekend-long virtual hackfest (more below).

The Board also began planning for the F9 FUDCon, which would be held 
around January or February 2008.  This earlier planning should give us 
time to resolve the kinds of problems we've faced with this short-notice 
FUDCon.

There's a couple of reasons for the cancellation of the Fedora 8 FUDCon.

The first is the most obvious of all -- we have been unable to secure a 
location that could offer us a place for both a FUDCon and a hackfest. 
Additionally, the administrative overhead for putting on a FUDCon is 
very high.  Becoming a FUDCon event planner becomes a full time job for 
a couple of people in order to make the event happen. Especially this 
late, just getting the logistics for a FUDCon worked out would take up 
lots of people's time that we can't really afford.

Also a factor is the financial cost of a FUDCon.  With the comparatively 
smaller scope of Fedora 8, it seems wise to save money now by not going 
through the whole FUDCon process, and allowing the financial and budget 
planners to have more opportunity to make a larger commitment to Fedora 
9.  Fedora 9 will be a bigger release, and I'd rather have one really 
good FUDCon and hackfest then, than try to do two of them on the cheap.

The feature list for Fedora 8 is coming together very well, and we're 
planning over the next few weeks how we can do a virtual hackfest for 
F8.  The idea is to pick some days, probably the same weekend (4, 5 
August), and organize energy around people having an IRC-based hackfest 
that weekend.

We can capture some of the energy that would come from a hackfest, but 
in a way that has significantly less overhead and organizational costs.

Part of the danger of trying to plan and discuss things in public from 
the very beginning is that when you're forced to pull the plug on 
something, you have to send out emails like this.  I'm willing to accept 
that, because overall I think we get a bretter experience for everyone 
by doing our planning in the open.

Sorry, folks, for the short notice coming and going!  We really 
appreciate your understanding, flexibility, good ideas, and patience.

--Max

-- 
Max Spevack
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