Report on the GNU Hackers' Meeting 2022
“The GNU Hackers’ Meetings or ‘GHMs’ are a venue to discuss technical topics related to GNU and free software” says the web site. And GHMs are in fact events structured as technical conferences, with presentation slides and all. But if we attend every year since 2007 or so, and organise, it is mostly for the fun of spending time with our GNU friends in a relaxed environment.
After many years in which GNU Hackers’ Meetings took place in Europe for no particular reason other than we GHM regulars living in Europe, we opted to hold GHM 2022 in Turkey.
I organised the talks, schedule, web site and most of the remote communication with participants; E., a more practical person than I am who speaks the language and knows the region, dealt with the hotel and restaurants. She also proposed the dates and the place: October, when the weather is more comfortable; and İzmir, a large university city on the Mediterranean coast.
Turkey has the advantage of being reasonably easy to reach not only from Europe but also from several countries in the Middle East, from which one can enter Turkey without a visa — visas for Europe, on the other hand, are notoriously difficult to obtain from the Middle East. In fact since the beginning we were thinking about one specific friend and GNU contributor from Iran, that we would have really liked to finally meet in person.
And then of course the main reason: reaching out to new people. Local people in Turkey who might see the announcement about a GNU meeting nearby and attend out of curiosity; and then maybe become friends, and contribute to some common project.