We also took a couple of pictures, where you can recognize myself, sliptonic, dubstar-04, vejmarie, kkremitzki, Julian Todd (What's his nickname here?), and also the Blender directorate, Ton Roosendaal and Dalai Felinto. All in all things were great! FOSDEM is so huge that I failed to speak with all the people from other projects I wanted to, but I'll post soon a proper summary of all the things we discussed and happened.
It should motivate us to organize a FreeCAD conference, as Jim had suggested. I'm afraid the australians are currently busy with their dramatic bushfires.
Just to inform that we have not only been drinking beers (which might not be obvious looking at the pictures) but also did actual coding, the new SendToPythonConsole command has been coded during FOSDEM, which does the same as the already available functionality in the Selection view, but is now available throughout FreeCAD in the context menu (or via keyb shortcut)
yorik wrote: ↑Tue Feb 04, 2020 9:12 am
Just to inform that we have not only been drinking beers (which might not be obvious looking at the pictures) but also did actual coding, the new SendToPythonConsole command has been coded during FOSDEM, which does the same as the already available functionality in the Selection view, but is now available throughout FreeCAD in the context menu (or via keyb shortcut)
Ok here goes a short list of the topics we've been discussing:
Governance: Sooner or later we'll need a reliable, official and transparent "governance" body, which can basically decide over money, and a couple of very general technical "directions" (what is needed to say a new release is ready, etc). We should build up rules, how can one apply to such governance body, how many members, etc. Please DO NOT comment on this topic here below, as it can likely grow quite long and become heated. Create a new topic instead, and give the link here, thanks!
Tracker: The current mantis tracker has now been moved by Kurt to freecad.io. This already makes management much easier, as we have command-line access. However, we all thought the tracker is not very practical, hard to use and search by newcomers, hard to keep in sync with git commits, etc. We should be looking at other solutions maybe. We agreed that we don't want to move blindly to github issues, as it would make us trapped into github, which might screw up at some point, the same as sourceforge did in the past. One seemingly good solution might be git-issues ( https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue - there was a talk at fosdem that i didn't watch yet - https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/ ... anagement/ ) I'll test that on a private repo, but it seems to e able to sync with github issues, that might be really interesting.
Wiki/documentation: Kurt is also moving the wiki to freecad.io, which will make it a bit more manageable, but we all think we should move to a more flexible and easier to manage solution, ideally git-based. We could easily identify the "important" pages of the wiki, freeze them, and start migrating them one by one to markdown pages on a git repo, then there are many many solutions to get nice, well-formatted output, and manage the translations with an external service (crowdin,transifex), and mark certain "states" (ex: 0.18, 0.19, etc) The big problem is the translations, how to preserve all he work that has been done and export that all to another platform.
Internal documentation: The big "blob" of Qt help file that we use in FreeCAD is annoying. Too big and even so incomplete, many rendering issues, hard to get a translated version in, etc. With the change above, we could ditch the whole thin, and have the internal help simply open a browser window, and it would be possible for example to switch between offline and online versions, versions in other languages, etc.
Free Software Conservancy: We should definitely finish and file up our application to the FSC. This is not restrictive, it still allow FreeCAD to get its own money (bountysource, etc), just it would basically allow us to receive money from companies. And might offer us a bit of protection against potential patent attacks if any, at some point.
Money: We should build up a list of what could be done with money. People interested in coding for money. Something we could show to companies interested in sponsoring.
Meeting more often: This meeting did really good. We should definitely do that each year or so (not necessarily at FOSDEM)
CAD events: We could and should talk more with companies. We should have a look at all the different CAD events out there (make a list?) and maybe try to hook to some of them. Most are paid, but it might be possible to get free tickets argumenting that we are a FOSS project, or via some manufactuer that would agree to take us together...
That's about it I guess, add if I forgot anything!
*EDIT* Adding some more...
Removing obsolete workbenches: Things like CAM, Drawing, maybe Raytracing? should maybe get moved out of FreeCAD. But that also means we should set something up for the case where a file contains an object that was created with a workbench that is not there, that would help users to know better what they should do. This would also be useful for addon developers so they can safely create new object types in their workbench, as it would allow users to easily fix the situation if they miss that workbench.
looking forward for the summary 
