Fosdem is a pretty big FOSS-related conference in Brussels, Belgium (Europe). ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSDEM, http://fosdem.org) They basically do/allow 4 things: - devrooms: foss projects can have rooms to meet/discuss/hack/demonstrate/plan IRL with other devs. Members of the community can go in too, although even in the biggest rooms you can get maximum 40 people or so IIRC. (the Gentoo devrooms used to be full 8-) - lightning talks: 15 minutes for someone involved in a (new) project to present it to the community - "real" talks: IIRC about 1hour. usually for bigger known projects like xorg etc. - stands: there is also the fair part, where projects can have stands to show off their project, sell merchandise,.. If any of these sounds interesting for Arch, you can still apply. See: http://fosdem.org/2009/call_for_devrooms_and_stands http://fosdem.org/2009/call_for_lightningtalks http://fosdem.org/2009/node/153 Dieter