FrOSCon funding request - Partner level #124
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This is a request for sponsorhip of the event not a person coming to the event. If this is not correct place for it - let me know.
About you
Name: Aleksandra Fedorova
FAS username: bookwar
How do you primarily contribute to Fedora? (2-3 sentences): Fedora Council member
About the event
Event name(s): FrOSCon
Event dates: 15-16 Aug 2026
Event location(s): Bonn, Germany
Event URL(s): https://froscon.org/
Event description(s) (2-4 sentences per event): This a rather large and generic FOSS conference with free attendance, multiple dev tracks and project booths.
Requested support
Support requested: I'd like to propose for Fedora to become a partner of the event https://froscon.org/en/partner/
I do not have a clear estimate on the budget. The event now is looking for sponsors and asks for help. The first step required is to contact them over the e-mail.
Upd: the budget range is from 500 Euro to 3000 Euro. The 3000 number comes with a couple of additional perks, like free meals for 4 people, but I don't think we really need them. Since it is the first time in years we are giving something to the orgs back, i'd suggest to aim for 1000 Euro and a generic supporter status.
This event & Fedora
As a Fedora Project we requested a booth at the event. we also requested two seats at the booth which come with a speaker pass and free meals.
We have a booth at the event for many years. See for example https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:FrOSCon and https://badges.fedoraproject.org/explore and were always welcomed completely free of charge. It can be a good opportunity to give something back right now.
This is a generic FOSS, hosted at a German university, with free attendance, multiple tracks and booths presenting free software. It is also bi-lingual - talks can be held in English and in German.
The event is kids friendly and has a separate track for kids contributing to OpenSource as well as support for parent bringing their kids to the venue.
The event gives a great opportunity to connect to the local German and generally European community, while not being too overwhelming like for example FOSDEM.
This year more folks from the Fedora community expressed the interested in visiting, including the @humatron
The event is not focused on a single technology, it also has some local businesses doing onsite hiring, as well as presenting their FOSS-based solutions.
Thus the target audience of the event is very relevant to the Fedora Project.
OpenSUSE is already participating as a partner.
Other
/labels ~"?::needs committee vote" ~"category::physical events" ~"team::ambassadors"
So, the budget estimate is from 500 Euro to 3000.
3000 Euro comes with a meal for 4 people, which is nice for us as we will have more than 4 people in attendance. It can offer also a nicer place for a booth, but tbh, I like our booth being together with other distro's, so I wouldn't ask for a special treatment here.
500 is just a supporter fee with no additional bonus and no obligations.
The deadline for the decision is May 31 - sorry for that.
While we do have a meeting tomorrow, I just wanted to go through this ticket first to see if there are any more information that you could help us with, before we ultimately have to take the decision on this. The ticket was opened well in advance for the actual event, but the deadline is pretty tight for the partner level commitment decision. I do not want to dismiss this proposal due to this, but at the very same time, FrOSCon being a premier event in EU, needs to set the right examples for other events to follow.
I see that there have been sporadic participation since 2014 onward (14 awardees) with it happening on 2015 (6 awardees) and 2017 (10 awardees) before becoming an (almost) regular thing from 2022 (5 awardees) onward, that is 2023 (8 awardees) and most recently, 2025 (10 awardees). With the exception for 2024 (when we were not there I guess or the event did not happen) in the recent years, it seems like Fedora Project has been a (almost) regular representation at the event, which is a great thing, of course.
But have we been leveraging this presence to the maximum potential? Heck, I do not have any other metrics apart from the badge ownership but it indeed looks alarming to see that we have a fluctuating count which stays mostly under 14 people. If I remember correctly, we had a community booth during FrOSCon 2025, no? Did you folks print out a QR code for the badges to be scanned by the attendees? Did we look into why we did not have enough visitors at the booth? Are we doing something about this case?
I want to stress this that this is not solely on you, @bookwar but as event organizers - I want you to please encourage our attendees to write event reports to help us understand the value proposition of the event. Take, for instance, we did not receive any event report or a wiki page for FrOSCon 2025. If we do not these or heck, impromptu social media postings for that matter - then I am afraid the attendance would stay flatlined indefinitely (in best case scenario) or decrease drastically (in worst case scenario).
I cannot in good faith approve the a budget closer to the higher ceiling of 3000 Euro until we have a documented commitment for working on these lacunaes. In addition to the aforementioned points, please consider opening up a coordination discussion like there was in FrOSCon 2025 to see if you can get more people attending. I would also strongly recommend enlisting a event co-owner to help you get through these tasks and hopefully, we can attempt applying as an event partner from the next year onward.
FrOSCon is one of the largest FOSS events in Germany and around. The only other relatively big one is Chemnitzer Linux Tag. So I don't feel there is a need to defend the event that much.
I linked to badges not to use them to estimate the numbers, but as easy way to show the consistent history of participating. I should have linked to https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:FrOSCon I guess. We had a booth at FrOSCon long before the badges were created, and we continue to have it over years with various levels of consistency based on the availability of local ambassadors, Flock overlap and the impact of the pandemic.
I understand the intent to have some measure for the attendance and for the impact, but we need to be clear here that FrOSCon badges currently do not represent the visitors at the conf, they represent the booth staff and speakers.
10 awardees means we got 10 people representing Fedora at the event with basically no funding from the project.
There could be no documented commitments to a thing which can not be reliable delivered before the start of the event
https://pagure.io/fedora-badges/issue/964#comment-982327 despite the work has been requested two months in advance.
Same goes for event box, which was shipped to Frankfurt on the last day before the conf, so that @jbley had to pick it up while on the road already.
And same for stickers which I had to print myself https://floss.social/@bookwar/115034406033222699
Yes, we could have organized event better, but there are also quite a number of things which make the organization process not easy. And we either work in a more or less good faith together within reasonable expectations from a volunteer community, or we go full bureaucracy way, but then it should start from documented commitments of the Mindshare committee.
If 3000 is a too high bar for the ask, let's go 1000 to stay in the medium category. I do fear that it will cost us more in human-hours to argue about the number than the sum itself.
I will open it and create a wiki page once we get the booth approved, which should happen in about a week. But for now we are coordinating on a Matrix channel #event-froscon:fedoraproject.org
P.S. I also do plan to write the event report. I only posted on social media last time https://floss.social/@bookwar/115039241029111584
Hey there,
In addition:
I know of at least 6 more people who have FAS accounts (but would need to find out what their IDs are), are also from Red Hat (around the area of Cologne, D'dorf, Bonn) who attended FrOSCon last year (2025). We also had a least 2 non-Fedora members (at that time) who started chatting to other internal people I referred them to reg getting started/engaged in Fedora.
I may say that this is a great event as there are a lot of young(er) people and the times I attended, the curiosity increased around Fedora every time. It would be great to support this event and help grow the community with younger talents (which Fedora lacks) ensuring a sustainability in the future. There are also quite a few customers of Red Hat attending who are also pleased to see Fedora being present (Dt. Telekom, Allianz, BND, Deutsche Post/DHL and some others) - after being absent for some time.
All attending personnel did it in their own time & resources (incl @bookwar & myself) with no compensation.
So I agree with @bookwar: If we cannot commit to 3,000 let's aim for 1,000 to establish a dedicated relationship with FrOSCon going forward.
(i hope this is somewhat helpful)
The purpose of the event reports is not to defend a certain event but to share its value proposition to not only the Mindshare Committee but to also those who might be seeking to represent the Fedora Project's local presence at the event. Also, the point about the badges being exclusive to those representing us does not make sense since the badge clearly states "FrOSCon 20XX Attendee" there with descriptions like "You visited the Fedora booth at FrOSCon 20XX!" (FrOSCon 2022 Attendee) or "You visited FrOSCon 20XX!" (FrOSCon 2025 Attendee). Why is there a major disconnect between badge requests and actual usage?
I am afraid this conversation has devolved into fullblown whataboutery since my previous points about FrOSCon EU's exemplary nature and regular local community representation have been ignored. I do not claim that the Mindshare Committee has perfect processes but the least we can do is stick by the guidelines like every other event does. Arguments like these neither help the event organizers nor the proposal curators in any means, even though I am very open to having an issue ticket reporting these apparent lacks on our end. After all, we do care about this event and want people to follow its example - albeit not in the current state.
Oh my point & intention wasn't to oppose your directive. I just wanted to add additional context in case it's useful for the general process (wherever this may be helpful).
To answer your badges question: Many did (and do) not care about the badge and also didn't leave their FAS initial for later assignment as there was a delay between availability & the actual conference. (and there is no one to blame it was just a unlucky delay within the process)
For what it's worth, I am +1 to the 1000 Euro request - it is a far more reasonable ask than the 3000 Euro one (for now, at least).
We have lacunaes to deal with here. Both on the FrOSCon EU's Fedora Project representation part as well as on Mindshare Committee's process management. But that does not necessarily mean we hold up this proposal while we sort them out. I would still stress that the event reports are made available - at least, for this occurrence to begin with, but if done retroactively, that would be even better overall. As long as those are shared on the Fedora Wiki event page, it just helps the digital ambassadorship aspect alongside the usual regional event support that we are going for here.
Also, please take some time to detail on the logistics gaps that you have faced in the previous iterations of the event. It is just as not ideal to have our community ambassadors face problems like those as much as it is for us to not have enough information to curate budget. Regarding the recognition service aspect, please open up the badges to the attendees too. If our community ambassadors have talks, ask them to share QR codes in their slide decks and also have it printed to be shown on the community booth. It is a valuable method for us to gauge the engagement at in-person events.
I am sorry it came out that way.
To be clear - I do not intend to go against the guidelines. I am trying to follow them as much as I can, but sometimes fail.
But i think we need to separate the tracks here.
There are a lot of things which could be done to make FrOSCon better. If you have ideas and willing to help - I would accept all the help I can get. There was some feedback from @Peter Boy for example provided in December https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/fedora-mindshare-committee-meeting-2025-12-11-2026-swag-proposals-digital-ambassadors-year-end-wrap/176583/2
As soon as I get the booth confirmed I will open a thread and tasks for some of the work items for anyone to join, including request for a badge and so on.
But this is not what this request is about. The current request is to become a supporter of the event on behalf of Fedora within the scope we can deliver.
And I am concerned that you are asking about some undefined "maximum potential" and "documented commitments" to things like badge counts as a prerequisite for the funding discussion.
Tbh, I expected this to work in the other direction: I request funding and support, Mindshare may agree and also may prioritize my requests enough so that at least things like badges and stickers and event boxes can be done and sent on time.
And if the badge will be ready and working before the beginning of the event - we will of course show it to the visitors. But also personally, I am not going to stress out about it and aggressively chase visitors with the QR code, because I believe it is rather inappropriate.
Having said all that, 1000 Euro sounds absolutely ok for me. If we can simply get that approved and paid this week, I would gladly close this task and focus on the follow-ups.
Minus the (unfortunately, repeated) strawman argumentation, I am glad to see that we finally are converging here. I trust I need not separately state as to where the coordination discussions are to happen, badge requests are made, design requirements are created and support followups are requested. My feedback would more or less remain the same for the actual request so I think it just helps to have it conveyed well in advance. We will now wait for the votes from the remaining members so, fingers crossed. 🤞
Discussed in 2026-05-28 Mindshare Committee meeting.
Summary: The Committee reviewed the FrOSCon funding request. Due to mid-year budget constraints, a full 3,000 EUR sponsorship is not feasible at this time, but the committee agreed to a 500 EUR initial commitment to allow organizers to begin planning. To fully pass per policy, async votes are required from the absent committee members.
Action Items & Next Steps:
!agreed+3/0/-0— 500 EUR for FrOSCon event sponsorship (excluding speaker/booth staff travel)!halpTo fully approve this vote (per policy), either the medium event voting period needs to pass, or full unanimous consent by all Mindshare Committee members is needed.!agreed
jflory7 referenced this issue2026-05-28 21:31:23 +00:00