This evening, the final decision on which city will host Debconf11 next year will be taken.
For the last half year, mostly Andreas Barth, Jan-Marek Glogowski and I have been working hard to make the Munich bid as good as possible. One thing we wanted to make clear from the beginning was that we would go for a conference in the city center - not some conference center in some nearby village or in an industrial area far away from where the city life happens.
It was not easy, since the german-wide decision, we had to reshuffle venue plans a couple of times.
In the end, thanks to Jan-Marek, we managed to get an excellent venue offer. Our bid consits mostly of:
- Venue: Computer Science building (recently built) of Munich University for Applied Science, we can get as much as we need, for free. The only thing we would have to pay for is additional security personell during the night.
- Network: Leibniz Rechenzentrum is the operator of the Munich Research Network (MWN), the venue is connected with at least 1 GBits fibre optics, and the MWN is connected to X-Win at the same speed. This will be free as well.
- Food: We can either take up the offer from the Studentenwerk, the organisation operating the university restaurants. Of course, the quality is not like in a Michelin-star restaurant, but I have eaten there for several years during my studies and it is on par with previous Debconf offerings. Alternatively, we could look into food catering.
- Accomodation: We tend to go for hostels, similar to Edinburgh, probably 4-6 bed dorms. Munich is pretty expensive for lodging, so this is something we decided early on to keep the costs reasonable. Again, I think this is in line with previous Debconfs. Of course, hotels at a broad price range are available.
The biggest strong points about Munich are, in my opintion:
- Our local team has lots of experience with Debian and Debconfs, as well as organizing conferences
- We have government support via the LiMux-project, and the city mayor of Munich, Christian Ude, has agreed to be the patron of the conference
- Munich is very easy to get to, both for european (via train or car) or american/asian attendees (via plane). The airport is one of the biggest in europe and has direct connections to e.g. Atlanta, New York, Boston, San Fransisco, Los Angeles, Sao Paulo and Tokio.
- Network connection via LRZ/MWN/X-WIN should be superb, especially to Debian machines hosted at euro
It the end, it seems Banja Luka seems to have the stronger bid, especially due to their 150000 EUR governemnt sponsorship. We will see who wins, I believe we did the best we could.