The GitTogether

For the last few years, there has been a gathering of Gitty people in Mountain View directly following the GSoC Mentor Summit that is referred to as a GitTogether:

https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitTogether

A few of us have been talking about what we would like to do this year and thinking about the gatherings the past few years and how we could get the most out of it.

I would like to see two different gatherings this year - one that would be user-centric to gather people that use Git together with some of the developers and talk about Git from a user's perspective. The other event I would like to see would be a gathering of many of the core Git developers in a sort of hacker summit.

GitHub would like to volunteer to organize and pay for these events this year. I would like to hold the developer-centric one in Berlin in early October (a few weeks before the Mentor Summit this time) and the user one in January or February of next year.

The general idea of the developer one in October would be to get 30-40 people who work directly on Git core, JGit and libgit2 (or closely related projects) together to discuss core issues, new features, etc. GitHub can help with travel and lodging for participants who need it, but attendance would be limited to people actually working on Git the most. Similar to some of the earlier GitTogethers.

The user conference early next year would be held in San Francisco or nearby and would be a chance for people using Git to share how they're using it, what they would like to see, etc. I would expect to host far more people at this - closer to 100, something like the last GitTogether.

I'm working on putting together websites for the two events for registration, schedule and to gather topics that should be discussed. I am planning on having the talks recorded and put online as well. I wanted to get some general feedback from the ML about what they think about this plan before I finalized everything though.

For those of you who *have* been to a GitTogether, what did you find useful and/or useless about it? What did you get out of it and would like to see again? For those of you who have never been, what do you think would be useful? I was thinking for both of them to have a combination of short prepared talks, lightning/unconference style talks and general discussion / breakout sessions.

Finally, is there any feedback on the times and places - especially the Berlin one. If nobody can agree on a better specific time, I'll push forward with early October in Berlin, but if there is a concensus around a different time, I'm fine moving it.

Scott