Hello, For those of you that might not know me, I’m one of the openSUSE Board Members.
We are having openSUSEcon 2025 in Nuremberg Germany this week, and having our yearly face to face Board meetings.
Part of what we are discussing is the “How, What, When, Where” of oSC for 2026.
I briefly discussed this a bit with Aoife at Flock, and is there any possibility we might be able to coordinate a bit, between Flock and oSC, when it comes to Dates and Locations, or potentially even co-locating the two conferences, as they are of similar size, scope, and topics, in my experience?
I know that the decisions regarding the dates and locations for Flock for 2026 are still undecided, so I thought this would be a good time to reach out.
The important part is the lack of overlapping attendees. That means that colocating the two events together and combining forces would result in doubling the attendee size.
I would be very happy to see this happening. It could help me a lot to attend both conferences and it would be good for both conferences to increase the number of attendees.
Just for informational purposes, for oSC 2025, we had 229 registrations for the conference, and while we don’t have exact numbers, it looks like we had about 240 folks show up, based on badge count.
So slightly larger than Flock, I think, but as oSC was in Nuremberg, the numbers are slightly skewed, due to the proximity of SUSE Employees.
We once had an attempt at the Fedora London Meetup to make it a joint one between us and openSuSE. Although the meetup did not become the joint experience we originally planned for, it created useful ties between the communities during the planning process (back then we were collaborating with Patrick, afaik at the openSuSE & geeko boards at the time).
I think there is a lot of potential for synergies & exchange up to collaborations between the two communities, and I appreciate and support any attempt to bring people from both together
Beyond the possibilities for attendees, it might also help to share costs and efforts (which in my experience from the London Meetup also can create useful exchanges, ties & outreaches itself:)
Afaik, it is always there, right? Have you already considered if a joint event would have to take place at Nuremberg as well or if a different location would be fine? Just to add the consideration
So the possibility of it being elsewhere is absolutely possible (and to some extent, probably wanted)
At the moment, we’ve had Istanbul, Turkey floated as a possibility for 2026, as well as coordinating with the SUSE Labs corporate event somewhere likely in Czechia, but nothing concrete has been decided yet.
Unlike Fedora, we don’t have a person like @jflory7 that’s on anybodies payroll for organizing things, so when we don’t have somebody in the community really driving a different location, Nürnberg is an easy default due to the proximity to SUSE offices.
There’s nothing saying that oSC can’t happen in the US. It was always intended, from what I understand.
Although I’m not sure that having any sort of conference here in the US that’s expecting attendees from all over the world is such a great plan in 2026, regardless of what the customary schedule might dictate.
Also, for the record, we also have a Event Policy. While it is not yet finalized (we are lacking actual criteria), I am working on that part and I am proposing a 1st one, I just need to find a co-sponsor (the search is on going).
I did suggest to @amoloney a couple weeks back that perhaps Flock could be done next year the week before the openSUSE Conference in Nuremberg. That would put it the week after DevConf.cz, making things at least contiguous for those who attend all three (like @sfaulken and I did this year).
As for a North American place, while it’s a bit trippy to do, eastern Canada would be an option. Toronto or Montreal maybe?
That would be nice. I also mentioned to Fedora team that I am available to help as a local organizer if it happens in Seville. But you have my support to whatever place if it helps to coordinate them
I’d be +1 to get to the next step and make discussions more formal. I would love to see the two communities to collaborate more deeply. Joint events can be facilitators
Given I don’t really know how these decisions are made in Fedora, I’m not entirely certain, I would think there would need to be some sort of discussion involving the folks that do this work for Fedora, and the ones that do it for openSUSE, to see if there’s any common ground to start from
I think that is what Fernando means too. However, I am actually not sure what team of Fedora is the “owner” of Flock… @jflory7@jonatoni I could imagine you know which team/person should be involved first in order to facilitate a more formal exchange/evaluation about this?
So we are doing planning right now for Flock 2026.
And due to some budgetary things, we’ve settled on doing a very similar setup to what happened in 2026.
This is probably a disappointment for some people. But please take heart, I am committed to figuring out how to get to a new location (outside of Europe) for Flock 2027. I want to start the planning for Flock 2027 soon so that we can pick a location with confidence as to the cost, and announce intention on where to go in 2027 at the end of Flock 2026.
So some personal opinion time as the FPL on this process,
How Flock is planned right now sort of puts everyone on the back foot. We’re leaning pretty heavily on some Red Hat teams to help with events and budgeting whose job isn’t strictly Fedora and because of the way we have been approaching Flock planning its just not enough time for us to make fair use of their skillset. So we have to fix that.
The way I think we can fix that is we make it as easy as possible on those people as we can for 2026, which means going back to Prague. And we use the time we save this year that we would have spent trying to find a new place, and we do that work on planning for 2027.
Part of that will be doing a call to action for the community in different regions to be our hands and feet and pitch proposals for us to choose from. New places, places where we have an opportunity to engage a different set of faces. We bring Flock to new places, we also get a chance to energize our friends in the region to do some solid outreach. In fact I hope we can add a day specifically for outreach topics to sit side by side with the technical work that will be interesting to users in new places. It’s a lofty goal, but Flock is our best tool to do so.
And well hopefully we can build a repeatable, more transparent process around how we plan Flock itself as an extra bit of this, that doesn’t weigh so heavily on the events professionals that have to do the details of booking and logistics.
For my part, I’m going to work up an Antarctica pitch as a fall back plan, because I want to go back to the South pole again. But I’m really hopeful there are people out there who can make solid pitches for other regions and can stand up to be regional points of contact to help us do the final planning and logistics. There’s probably a specialized FAS badge in it for everyone who submits a location pitch that qualifies for review, and a signed copy of baseball card of me wearing a hot dog costume… or whatever passes as sincere thanks from me in my capacity as FPL that would be appreciated by the contributors who respond to my call to action when it comes.
