[Chicken-hackers] FroSCon 2010 - It's been great!

[Christian Kellermann]

Dear fellow chicken scheme enthusiasts,

I want to give you a short heads up of what happened at our first
real life event @ FroSCon near Cologne last weekend.

Peter Bex, Mortiz Heidkamp, Ivan Raikov, Felix Winkelmann, Joerg
Wittenberger, and myself could find the time to meet up in person.
We met on friday and had a nice evening together, Joerg joined us
on saturday.  We also have had a little booth in the exhibition
area where quite a lot of people showed up and asked questions about
our fine project.

Pictures of this event can be seen at http://www.call-cc.org/froscon-2010/
once the upload is done.
(As you can see I suck at taking pictures.)

If any of the fellow chickenistas that took pictures can send me
these I will integrate them in the sigma gallery.

We would like to thank the following persons that made this whole
FroSCon so much fun for us:

Moritz Heidkamp for being such a great host and organiser for the
event!  Johanna for fighting Cologne's traffic and missing road
signs, Pablo Beyen of bevuta IT for lending the equipment and
providing us with the great posters!

To repeat it again it was a great event which everyone dearly
enjoyed. Yes, all these people on the mailing list really *do* exist
and are really nice guys :)

Apart from showing that chicken is a real practical scheme and an
alive-and-kicking project we have had loads of 'internal' discussions
about the project itself and its current issues and how to go about
them. Some even found the time to fix some bugs in the code :)

Legal Entity

One recurring topic has been the idea of having some kind of legal
entity for the chicken project. We have brainstormed and agreed on
the following goals:

* It should be easy for people to donate to the chicken project in
  a non-shady way. Tax deductible donations may increase the
  willingness of companies to donate.

* It should support the chicken community. Infrastructure costs,
  merchandise, conference fees, etc. if possible.

* Consolidate copyright issues

Motivation:

At first the attendees agreed that the running server costs for
call-cc.org and the infrastructure needs to be compensated for
somehow. At the moment Mario Goulart pays all the fees out of his
own pockets and we all agreed that while this is incredibly generous
and awesome of the fine Gentleman this is not a long term solution
and we should support Mario financially there.

Ivan raised the question of who is the copyright holder of chicken
core atm. In memory of the ongoing extension license discussions
on trac I don't want to go into details here. We agreed that this
might be a problem that needs to be adressed in the future somehow,
but of course details need to be discussed.

Further steps:

To be able to make a well funded decision there are still a lot of
open questions to be answered. For this we decided to ask around
for possible ways to build this legal entity and discuss our findings
on this list.

* Moritz will ask the german Chaos Computer Club about how they
  approached this.

* Ivan will ask the python foundation

* Felix will find out what it takes to fund a german "Verein" which
  seems easy to set up and is a full legal entity under German law.

* Christian will ask Eric Kow of the darcs project about their
  experience with the http://conservancy.softwarefreedom.org/
  Software Freedom Conservancy which they are a member of.

Openness:

As the people at FroSCon where just a fraction of people enthusiastic
about chicken the above represents just the opinions and ideas of
that fraction. Therefore these should be read as ideas and are
rather in a state of flux. So by discussion it on chicken-hackers
we invite you to be part of the whole process!

There is only one rule that has been stated over and over again
during our discussions @ FroSCon so I will repeat it again here:

We want to keep things as simple and with the least bureaucratic
overhead as possible.  In the end we all want to hack and improve
chicken in our spare time.

Summary - We like to hear from you and see you soon:

So all the nice readers on this list are invited to participate!
We are curious about your views on the topic.

So thanks for your attention and I hope more people can come to the
next meeting opportunity which will be T-DOSE (http://www.t-dose.org)
on 6th and 7th November 2010, in Eindhoven, NL.

(Disclaimer: I took some notes during brain storming and I am
expressing the facts as I remember them. If anything bothers you
feel free to comment on it and/or clarify some points. You are
allowed to collect all spelling errors until they comprise a complete
passphrase of your choice.)

Yours truly,

Christian