Hi Didi.

This is organised by someone we all know from the ML. Who wants to do the CentOS project part? Who is thinking of going?

Thanks for picking that up. It would be great if we could manage to have a booth and some talks.

Btw. here is the 'official' English announcement:

Dear friends of freedom,

The time has come to announce yet another event focusing on free and open source and on free contents. As you might be aware of the OpenExpo used to take place twice a year, once during spring time in Bern and once in autumn in Zurich/Winterthur but the latter was now cancelled. To fill this gap we started to organize a new (even better) event, the FrOSCamp. While this is the first time it's being organized we hope for your support to quickly make this the #1 event in Switzerland and southern Germany and one of the biggest and most important events in all of Europe in the future.

So here's the important facts and you'll quickly noticed we try to combine the best parts of many existing event (while trying to leave away the not-so-good parts). The first annual FrOSCamp will happen on Friday and Saturday, 17/18 September 2010 in the city of Zurich on the premises of the ETH Zurich. There will be an exhibition similar to past OpenExpo events, talks for developers and administrators similar to FOSDEM, talks for end-users and work-shops for varios audiences similar to LinuxTag and hackfests similar to any of these project-specific developer conferences. We'd also like to enable projects to hold their annual users/developers/whatever meetings as some sort of side-event. What we won't allow is commercial exhibitors of any kind (no worries, projects are allowed to sell their shirts and stuff). So instead of '.org meets .com' it's more some sort of 'MIT meets ASL meetings GPL meets CC...and so on'.

Of course there will also be a social event but instead of geeks sitting (or standing) around with a beer in their hand we will have party with live music from creative commons friendly bands. And the beer won't be just any random brand but locally brewed Free Beer with its recipe available under CC-BY-SA. We're also trying to get a sponsor to make the beer free (as in beer) and not "only" free (as in freedom).

So if you're interested in actively participating at this event make sure to answer the calls for projects/papers on our website [1]. We're also looking forward to local people to answer the call for volunteers as volunteers are important to any non-commercial event to become a huge success. We also have some mailing lists for further communication and discussion and you're free to subscribe yourself to any of them [2]. If you have anything to tell or ask us that you can't find on the website and that doesn't fit onto any of the mailing lists feel free to drop us a line [3], particularly potential sponsors are very welcome to do so!

Don't forget to tell people around you about our event! Forward them this message, point them to our website or join our events and groups on those well-known social networking platforms [4].

Last but not least let me mention #FrOSCamp on Freenode (irc.freenode.net) which is open for your questions, remarks or if you simply need another channel to idle in.

Free Regards,

The FrOSCamp Organizational Team

[1] http://froscamp.org/ [2] http://lists.froscamp.org/ [3] mailto:contact@froscamp.org [4] http://wiki.froscamp.org/Social_Networking