SeaMonkey/Developer Meeting:2010

Overview

The first SeaMonkey Developer Meeting will take place in late October 2010 in Vienna.

The target of the meeting is to bring the most active SeaMonkey people together in one place, discuss the future of the project and get to know each other better.

Date and Location

• Vienna, Austria (in native language: Wien, Österreich)
• October 23-24, 2010
• From Saturday noon to Sunday afternoon
• Monday/Tuesday are optional hacking days for those people who can afford the time.

Getting There

Arriving by plane

Needs review from KaiRo:

Schwechat airport is situated in the east of Vienna. There are several options on how to travel from the airport to the Europahaus:

• Taxi: about 18 € with C&K Airport Service.
• Airport Express Buses of the Vienna Airport Lines: to/from Morzinplatz.
  • Duration: 20 minutes; every day from about 6:20 am to midnight; runs every 30 minutes; charge: single ride 6 €, round trip: 11 €. (Information: Vienne Airport Lines)
  • This arrives at the Morzinplatz. There you have a 10 minute walk to the subway station "U- Schwedenplatz". You need another ticket there (1 zone, 1.80€).
• Airport City Train (Schnellbahn) S 7: You need to pay two zones (3.60 €).
  • From the airport to the centre of Vienna, you should choose a train with the sign "Wien Mitte/Wien Floridsdorf". Leave at Wien Mitte. More information at http://www.oebb.at/
• From Wien Mitte/Schwedenplatz to Hotel Europahaus: Get on the subway U4 heading for Hütteldorf. From Hütteldorf it is a 10 minute walk or 4 minutes by bus (149B,150B,151B, 153B,249B) getting off at Wolfersberggasse.

Accommodation

• Europahaus / Rosen-Hotels Wien (Haus 1 on the site map below)
• Located in a park, 10 min walk from the end station of a subway that runs to the end station of the airport train.
• Possibly you will be asked for a credit card as a deposit against damage and room charges; Mozillians are personally responsible for all room charges (excluding the cost for the room itself) such as room service, pay per view content, minibar charges, and any damage.
• Mozilla Europe has booked and pays for the night from Saturday to Sunday, additional nights are possible at your expense, give them the reference to our event to get our special rate (€59/night, including breakfast) applied as well.
• Site Map
  

  Site Map

Venue

In Europahaus Wien, directly where the hotel is located.

WiFi / Internet

• In the conference room, WiFi is available, in the hotel rooms, we have wired Internet.

Attendees

20-25 people from the core SeaMonkey community, invites will be sent out shortly.

Reimbursement

All travel and accommodation for invited participants will be covered by Mozilla Europe. If you are not based in Europe, your travel will be covered by SeaMonkey's directed donations at Mozilla Foundation instead. Participants are asked to book air/train/bus travel and we will reimburse them after the event is over. Participants are expected to arrive on Oct 23 in the morning (we'd like to start at or slightly before noon) and leave on Oct 24 after 18:00. Please do try to book the cheapest travel fare possible and tell Robert or William when exactly you arrive/depart so we can plan accordingly.

Additional nights other than the one from Saturday to Sunday need to be paid by participants, please refer the hotel personnel to our event to get a better-than-standard rate on your room.

Schedule

• TBD

Session Proposals

Contact Information

• William Quiviger (Mozilla Community Manager):
  • wquiviger at mozilla dot com
• Robert Kaiser (SeaMonkey Project Coordinator):
  • kairo at kairo dot at

Goals

• Bring the most-active (20-25) community members of the SeaMonkey project together in one place.
• Discuss the future of the project in terms of visions, policies, organization.
• Strengthen the project as a whole through getting to know each other better.

Motivation

• The SeaMonkey project has been founded more than 5 years ago, and has done a good job so far to bring the aged Internet suite up to date with recent developments. Now, having done a good job on that, the time has come to look into the future and plan where the project is going from here.
• At the same time, the web is taking larger steps than ever before due to the re-ignited competition and rapidly evolving standards for richer web applications, and the Internet messaging world is moving on as well with lots of alternatives to the established email and newsgroup protocols we already support well. Those developments need our project to act if we want to continue providing top-class web and messaging experiences and might need us to apply new strategies.
• Additionally, a number of processes inside the SeaMonkey project, like reviews and code ownership, marketing, UI oversight, or QA are not running as smoothly as they should and have shown problems in situations where we need to ship significant changes or releases. We need to discuss those, improve policies and try finding ways to improve on what we are doing there.
• To round things up, discussions have been ongoing for a while about potentially setting up an organization to help supporting the project with much-needed resources and process money that can probably be acquired rather easily through the product in a way that benefits the project as much as possible.

All those points can be discussed and solved much more easily and efficiently in direct face-to-face discussions of the major stakeholders of the project than solely online, and are enough in size that that they cannot be handled as a side-talk in some other event not focused on SeaMonkey itself. All that said, a lot of the core SeaMonkey community members have never met in person, and it's pretty well-known that people work together much more easily once they have actually met in real life (compare this Ted Ts'o quote from July 2010 - first on the linked page).

In conclusion, to discuss where SeaMonkey is going in today's fast-changing Internet world, how project internals can be improved both process-wise and organization-wise and to get to know each other better, we need to bring the core SeaMonkey contributors together to meet in real life.

During the event

Food & Drinks

• 3-course lunch (vegetarian alternative available) on both Saturday and Sunday at noon at the hotel.
• Breakfast in the hotel, of course.
• 1 coffee break on Saturday, 2 on Sunday included.
• Saturday night dinner (see below).

Fun

Saturday night in town

Aftermath

Slides, Photos, Blog posts, etc.