SeaMonkey/Developer Meeting:2010
Contents
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
Vienna Airport (Flughafen Wien, VIE) is situated near Schwechat in the southeast of Vienna. There are several options on how to travel from the airport to the Europahaus (address is Linzer Straße 429, 1140 Wien):
- Taxi: about € 33 for a one-way-ride with C&K Airport Service (can be shared by up to 4 people).
If you want to take a taxi, use this or web-pre-ordered CAT+CAB, a taxi from Wien Mitte is not much cheaper than a direct ride from the airport. - Public Transport: Multiple possibilities, you can get exact times from VOR timetable information by entering "Wien" in the City/Town field for both From and To, and "Flughafen" with the radio set to "Landmark" for the airport and "Linzer Straße 429" with the radio set to "Address" for Europahaus.
- S-Bahn Train (Schnellbahn) S 7: You need to pay two zones (€ 3.60), valid for going to any destination in the city, including the hotel.
Note that S-Bahn is always marked with blue color signs and handrails, on the airport and in the city.
From the airport to the centre of Vienna, you should choose a train with the sign "Wien Mitte/Wien Floridsdorf". Leave at Wien Mitte. - City Airport Train (CAT): Direct, faster, but somewhat more expensive connection train to the city center. Needs special tickets to Wien Mitte (€ 9 online, € 12 on board), but if you book beforehand through their website, they offer a combination of their train plus a taxi (CAT+CAB) to the destination for € 24, valid for up to 4 people, which can be an interesting alternative.
Note that CAT is marked with light-green color signs and handrails. - 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: Vienna 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€). - From Wien Mitte/Schwedenplatz to Hotel Europahaus: Get on the subway U4 (marked with dark green color signs and handrails) 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.
- When walking there and arriving from the park at the south of Europahaus (see OpenStreetMap), there is a closed gate, but you can ring the "Rezeption" (front desk) from there and they'll let you in.
- S-Bahn Train (Schnellbahn) S 7: You need to pay two zones (€ 3.60), valid for going to any destination in the city, including the hotel.
Arriving by train
If your train comes in from the West and stops at "Wien-Hütteldorf", get out there and follow the last item from the "Arriving by plane" section to get the last few hundred meters to the hotel, either walking or by bus.
Arriving by car
Follow the instructions given on the Hotel's directions page.
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, email them (rezeption at europahauswien dot at) and give them the reference to our event to get our special rate (€59/night single room, €82/night double room, both including breakfast) applied as well. Please add yourself to list of participants if you want to share a room.
- 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 invited people from the core SeaMonkey community, plus William from Mozilla Europe.
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
- Session schedule is up on its own page. Modifications possible right at the event.
- See Session Proposals for descriptions, ones we didn't take or can still stuff in at last minute if wished by the crowd.
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, travel by subway and tram to the city center, dinner in typical Viennese atmosphere at 8pm in Restaurant Zum Leupold, Schottengasse 7. For the uber-geeks among us, free WiFi is working fine there.
Clothing / Weather
Be prepared for rain and cold temperatures outside throughout the event (the venue will be heated, of course). Night temperatures may be close to the freezing point.
Current forecast:
- Friday: Starting sunny, clouds coming up in the afternoon, max 12°C.
- Saturday: cloudy and foggy, some wind, max 11°C.
- Sunday: partly sunny, windy, max 17°C.
- Monday: Very cloudy, some rain, max 10°C.
- Tuesday: variable sunny/cloudy, showers possible in the morning, max 8°C.
Info taken from the German-language ORF Wetter pages.
Aftermath
- Slides, Photos, Blog posts, etc.
- Ratty's Conrep
- Pre-meeting meetup and dinner writeup: Day 00 Friday 22nd October 2010
- Day 1
- Day 2
- Photos:
- Slides:
