2009-11-23 Report Developers Meeting 2009-2

The second openZIM Developers Meeting took place November 20th to 22nd.

Participants

1. Tommi Mäkitalo (tntnet)
2. Emmanuel Engelhart (Kiwix)
3. Tomasz Finc (Wikimedia Foundation)
4. Mirko Lindner (Qi Hardware)
5. Mirko Voigt (OpenWrt)
6. Pascal Martin (Linterweb)
7. Guillaume Duhamel (Linterweb)
8. Manuel Schneider (Wikimedia CH)

Topics

future planning

Developers Meetings

As the personal meetings are vital for the project we think that at least two meetings during the year would be helpful. The next meeting should take place around April in 2010.

As always the location and organisation is open for everyones ideas, the planning page is already opened at Developers Meeting/2010-1.

For this meeting it was planned to rent an appartment which is big enough to accommodate all participants, offers internet access, a meeting room and a kitchen for cheap catering on-site. It was great that the number of participants increased that much, but we were not able to find a suitable appartment for that many persons. As an alternative we wanted to rent a conference venue with full-service. Even though we got good offers it was still too much to fit into our budget. So we sticked with the cheap self-made solution.

Marketing

As the target group of LinuxTag has big overlaps with ours, but is not the one we are aiming at, we are unsure if we should participate in LinuxTag 2010. We will decide that by the time as this is mainly dependant on volunteers offering support to run a booth.

Peering with other groups that have a similar mission is considered to be more fruitful. If possible we would like to see openZIM presented at SkoleLinux, Linux4Africa, OLPC and of course Wikimania. If someone has contacts to these groups or is willing to participate in conferences and give talks about openZIM, please go ahead and get in touch with us.

Budget

As described above we are planning to increase our budget to be more flexible on how to organise the Developers Meetings. As the team and the expectations to the projects grows we need to professionalise our organisation. Especially as we are all volunteers we have to reduce all work which does not directly support the development of ZIM and openZIM software.

The plan is to calculate two Developers Meetings plus two participations in other conferences according to our experiences and the offers we got this year. This calculations will be the basis for the budget we want to ask for from Wikimedia CH.

The budget will also include costs for the openzim.org domain and server hosting, but these are only a very low percentage (~ 250 EUR / a).

project lead

Manuel offered his position as project lead to whoever might be interested in doing it, especially as he feels committed to the project and gave some talks, but does not actively work on the development.

The team decided to keep Manuel as project lead with the order to keep on giving talks, careing for marketing and maintaining contacts between openZIM and other projects.