I like the area myself, but I remember hotels being expensive when folks looked at it for past Flocks, and I’m not sure about how accessible flights are for contributors from outside North America.
My recommendation to fellow FLOSS conference organizers in the last few years has been to avoid US-based locations. Within the same continent, Canada would be a safe alternative.
I know most (if not all?) of the main local desktop FLOSS people in Montréal, and since it is my home turf, I know it very well and have some business & venue connections. This city checks all the boxes in @jflory7’s wishlist at the beginning of this topic, and I would be happy to professionally help organize this in Montréal, and have some past experience organizing events. I even maintain this wiki page about Montréal on the GNOME wiki, check it out for more details.
Alternatively, I could attend if it ends up being somewhere else accessible by train (or bus 
) like Toronto, Québec city, Ottawa, but obviously my home turf is Montréal and that’s what I can help with.
I’d be very interested in Montreal - you can get by in English, but it’s French enough that it likely feels different than most other cities in Canada and the US. And it seems to have excellent public transportation facilities.
Not based there so I can’t help much before the event, but would be happy to pull booth duties and help otherwise during the event (except if/when I end up presenting, of course)
I was born there, it’s a great Canadian city, but make no mistake it is very Canadian.
that’s not necessarily a bad thing :). I really liked Vancouver compared to Seattle.
If Montreal is chosen as the location, I highly recommend visiting Schwartz’s Deli - it’s the one place every Canadian associates with Montreal for good reason 
Oh I don’t see it as a bad thing in the least. I have always found Quebec and Montreal in particular to be very welcoming. I really enjoy the Jazz festival and miss going the last number of years.
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Indeed, they have the best smoked meat and hot peppers!
I would not feel comfortable being in Québec as a principally English speaker, given the rise of Anglophobia and anti-English laws in the province.
Most recently, a law was passed to forbid civil servants from communicating in English as a means to force a requirement for French in daily life. There’s a whole bunch of other weird stuff going on there that I don’t know what the implications would be.
IANAL, but I would say: not to worry.
I am not going to get into politics, but from what I can read in the article you cite, this has nothing to do with the subject at hand. The provincial government declaring that the official work & service language of public servants in non-emergency situations would be French… is irrelevant to tourists (and therefore conference attendees).
- Customs & Borders (and airports) are federal jurisdiction, which obviously has no such restriction and will serve you in both languages.
- Healthcare and social services (hoping you don’t end up in a situation where you need to use them during your conference attendance…) are excluded from that, so you’d get service in whatever language both parties speak. This is also confirmed in the first bullet point of this statement (in French, because of course monsieur…).
- 911 and first responders will, similarly, serve you in both languages (or more if they can, because, well, they’re there to save your life, not do paperwork for you)
- From 2026 onwards according to this recent article, businesses will have to “greet you” in French, but then afterwards “any language can be used for service afterwards” (my rough translation).
- The bill specifically excludes “tourists”. I have double-checked now by looking up the bill/law for you now (see further below), it is written black-on-white as article 22.3’s clause “F”.
Some might be zealots about trying to promote the official working language where reasonably possible, but we ain’t dumb enough as a society to put health & safety at risk, or to completely destroy tourism/business. And you are not going to get anglophobia in Montréal (or as a tourist in general), this is not some redneck rural village. In fact, in some networking events I attend, I am hard pressed to find people who will speak in French by default even if they actually are francophones.
If someone really really cares about finding out what the law actually says on paper, you can look at it yourself (in French, of course) here; look for article 22.3 (on page 15) with its exception clauses A to F.
As far as I can see, none of this linguistic regulation bogeyman applies to non-residents or anyone in a healthcare & emergency situation (and many other exceptions). I cannot see a problem for Flock attendees, unless they decide to immigrate here after the conference, in which case yeah, they will have to learn the province’s official language if they want to be able to deal with its government.
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+1 I attended Libre Graphics Meeting - as have many FLOSS folk - at least once if not twice in Montreal and had no issues not knowing a lick of French at the time.
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I’ll also throw in my name to help on the ground for Boston. I think the closer in town (at least walkable/transit accessible) would make it an easier event to plan.
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You’ve also got Jim Bair who you could rope in to service in SAT. Downtown SAT is nice.
I can confirm this. I’ve been to Montreal a few times to visit family, and my lack of French was never an issue. US tourists are so common that everybody expects tourists to speak English and seemingly all locals are able to speak English, even if with an accent.
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I can also confirm this. I’ve never encountered anyone in Montreal who didn’t speak English in the 100+ times I’ve been there. In fact, someone I was talking to at a Starbucks in Montreal years ago joked “Yes, Montreal has two languages: English and Bad English.”
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Thanks everyone for sharing your feedback and willingness to welcome the Fedora community in your hometown! This thread took off in true Fedora fashion, and I appreciate the enthusiasm that everyone has given to this topic. Safety for our community members of different backgrounds came up, and I want to underline that this is important to the Fedora Flock organizing team. Any location we choose will take under consideration legal and safety concerns for our most vulnerable community members. I cannot promise that we will meet every concern, but we are also committed to our virtual events for contributors to connect in ways that are most comfortable and convenient for them.
To move this conversation forward, I need a list of no more than three cities to research for bids (since the research and bids takes time and money for Fedora too). I am seeing representation from Canada, the United States, and Mexico, so I am thinking that one city from each of these countries would give us a diverse range of options to explore. But realistically, I could not consider more than three cities for this initial phase of researching and selecting a city for the next Flock.
Boston scores highly on local presence, but the prices for accommodation for Boston are a concern for me. A major part of the Flock budget spend is sponsored travel and accommodation. I am worried that going to Boston would eat up a huge part of our sponsored travel budget and ultimately reduce the amount of need-based assistance we could provide for Flock.
We could consider a location in the Boston periphery, but I remember the challenges we had trying to do that with Flock in Cape Cod. Portland, Maine is interesting, but then we really don’t have any locals who are from there to help us in the capacity that the Irish folks were able to help us.
The strong backing from our Canadian folks is nice to see. I didn’t know there were so many of you! Although as I catch up on this thread, I am not sure the verdict is in on which Canadian city best fits the needs of Flock. I see that Ottawa is a common denominator of many replies here though. Would there be folks local to Ottawa who could help us navigate questions about local transit, finding restaurants and evening socials, and working with Flock organizers on navigating the city?
Another important factor, like with the Boston nomination, is price of hotels and accommodation. I have not checked which of these Canadian cities is most cost-effective for hotels and conference venues. Our Flock organizing team can help dig on finding rates for hotels and conference spaces, but I would need to narrow down the Canadian cities down to one choice.
Is Ottawa the best fit for the requirements outlined in the top-post of this topic?
The support for Rochester is nice to see. I am obviously biased for Rochester since I lived there for five years too, which makes me more familiar with the city too. We went to Rochester in 2015. On one hand, this might make it a less exciting location for some folks because it is a repeat. On the other hand, it is a city that we have some experience going to before and it is has been a long enough time that it would likely be fresh and new for a lot of folks who have come into Fedora since 2015.
I would be interested to explore a Rochester bid more. 
Yes, I do remember México fondly from GNOME GUADEC 2022. 
I am thinking that while Guadalajara has a lot to offer, the airport connections were tough. I would be more inclined to consider CDMX based on the airport accessibility. And aren’t many of the Fedora México team members locals of CDMX as well? I have not looked at costs for hotels and accommodation, but my default assumption is that it would competitive to either the Canadian or USA locations.
Do we have some folks from CDMX who could be our local contacts for local transit, finding restaurants and evening socials, and working with Flock organizers on navigating the city?
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For GUADEC, the GNOME Foundation traditionally did two things to bring costs down:
- Struck deals with local university student accomodation / dormitories, to provide mass accommodation at reasonable cost.
- Attendees would be sharing rooms that have at least two beds.
At least that’s how it was when I last needed the Foundation’s sponsorship for travel & accomodation. I presume the local organizers or travel committee probably did the pairing behind the scenes to ensure some sort of reasonably compatible pairings.
A nice side-effect of that is that you also got to know more people that way.
I reckon that the student dormitories trick might not work if FLOCK happens outside of the summer months, but does the Fedora project use the “pairing up” trick so that, even if it were to be in a hotel, sponsored attendees would share a room?
@nekohayo Right! I benefited from GNOME Foundation support to attend GUADEC 2022 in Guadalajara, a little bit before I joined Red Hat. The model worked well for the GNOME Foundation, but it is not the right fit for Fedora, at least not anymore. We used to have a community bidding process before 2017[1] that relied on this kind of unique connection facilitated by locals.
While this does have cost savings, it adds complexity by separating the event venue from the primary accommodation. Starting in Flock 2015, the Flock organizing team adopted a policy for Flock where the conference venue is always shared with a hotel with a discounted block. Our learnings from Flock 2013–2014 compared to after Flock 2015 was that this made a significant difference on engagement and participation during the event. Of course, people can stay outside of the event hotel, but the convenience for attendees of having a combined venue and hotel is hard to write off. I am not sure that student dormitories could offer this benefit to us. We also have to write off some of the travel support that we rely on from the hotel (e.g. a staffed hotel desk that can help us book taxis and create individualized invoices for sponsored guests).
This also can help with cost, but one of the improvements we adopted from the Fedora DEI Team a few years ago was a recommendation to not mandate room-sharing for sponsored attendees. Of course, someone could always request to share a room with someone else if both parties consented, but for safety and liability reasons, we cannot force someone to share a room with someone else or to make that a condition on which to receive sponsorship or not.
If I remembering right, 2017 was the last year we did this. I think Flock 2018 in Dresden was the first year we transitioned from community-owned bids because we were asking a lot of our local volunteers back then to do a lot of the heavy-lifting that really should be owned by someone who is fairly compensated to do that kind of heavy work. (RIP Venice Flock
) ↩︎
Indeed, I would never think of forced shared accommodation, but offering the option for attendees (maybe with some preferences or something) could be nice, with disclaimers etc etc. And instead of solving the matching manually, it could hopefully be solved by throwing the problem at the LibreOffice Calc solver with the set of linear optimization constraints from the individuals’ preferences, or something like that.
I have zero experience organising such things - but my offer of hands still holds true for Ottawa (and as much as I can for Montreal/Toronto if they are preferred)
I don’t know about costs, Ottawa is a fairly touristy destination so I suspect it’s not very cheap - but it’s smaller than Montreal/Toronto so I think it would be cheaper (I could be wrong…everything is so damn expensive these days…)
We do have an airport but it’s small and flights can be a bit limited. Connections via Montreal/Toronto/Newark/Detroit/Chicago are common (though we do now have direct flights to Paris)
There is Carleton University which is close to downtown - and they seem to do group summer accommodation and conference facilities. Likely not as plush as being in a hotel but if cost is critical I’m assuming it’s cheaper. I’m happy to find out more if this is the sort of thing that interests:
The Glebe part of town is a few blocks away and has nightlife/restaurants/etc for those who want that stuff. Downtown Ottawa is a bit further (4km)
Activity wise there’s a bunch depending on if you’re outdoors active or prefer quieter. This page seemed good:
and as WW rafting got called out you can do it in Ottawa itself (relatively tame):
Or go bigger out of the city (about an hours drive - I’ve done this and it was big…)
FWIW I personally love cycling around Ottawa.
As I’ve never attended a Flock in person (
) please let me know what the requirements are and I can ask around and do some sleuthing to figure out if there’s something suitable.
Mark
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