In response to some concerns I've heard, I'd like to address the private (and late) decision process here. These are my words, not the committee's as a whole.
I'm sorry the decision took a while. And I regret not announcing our full decision process in advance. This is simply because we hadn't yet decided how we wanted to make the decision. I'll cover the whole timeline since bid submission. Bids were due by 2019-01-01. Haifa and Lisbon had bids in in time, but neither was quite fleshed-out enough to make a decision on, yet. Additionally India had a bid wiki page up, but seemed to have dropped out of the contest. In very early 2019, Nattie and I visited both contenders, to see venues, meet the teams, and help them finish their bids. On 17 January, we had the teams present their bids in public, and the DebConf team, as a whole, was able to discuss the relative merits of the bids. It was quickly obvious that both bids were viable - there was no single obvious candidate. At FOSDEM, the committee got together to discuss our initial positions, and see how we wanted to handle the decision. A this point, we'd got some wider informal input on both bids, and had an idea of how many attendees each potential venue could expect. We asked both bids for some more details on a few issues. Some time passed - we all got a little busy, and I apologise for my part in this delay. And then, last Friday, we had a private meeting to select a bid. Personally, I have a strong preference to have all discussions in public, where possible. But, this was something we thought would be difficult to do well in public. There is obviously a delicate political side to this decision. We wanted to be able to speak our minds to each other, and make a decision as a team, without having to be to carefully mind every word to avoid causing offence. I hope you can understand that. Was there a rationale for the decision we made? We said in the announcement that it came down to a close vote, and really, that was it. Different team members had different rationales for their choices. You can probably guess what they are, but here's a summary. Most of these came up in the public team meeting, before. Not all of us agree with all of these points, but they were all discussed: * There hasn't been a DebConf in Europe (where the majority of regular attendees live) for a number of years now - by the old norms we are long overdue for one. * There are regular DebConf attendees (and orga members) who have stated that they wouldn't attend a DebConf in Israel. Although Israel is near Europe, we could expect lower attendance than Lisbon. * The Haifa bid has on-site University accommodation. This massively simplifies things for the organisers. * Neither bid has a local team that is as strong as we'd like, but Haifa appears to have a small edge here. * There are some nationalities that may find it difficult or even impossible to visit Israel. This isn't new territory for us; we regularly have to deal with attendees being denied visas. * Israel has big political issues. I would imagine that a large part of our community objects to the country's behaviour toward the Palestinian people, for example. * We've held DebConf in politically questionable countries before, and don't want to preclude a bid for political reasons. Obviously no country is perfect, and it's all relative. This may be further than we've been, before, though. * Along those lines, it would be unfair to a bid team, to let them do all the work to prepare a bid, and then reject it because of an issue with their country. If there are political requirements for host countries, they should be laid out in the submission guidelines. * We don't want DebConf to be endorsing a country or a city. But we're aware that those optics are unavoidable. Wherever we go, we will bring a large portion of our community, have a (presumably) great time, and share memories of it for years to come. Again, we were divided in which of these we supported, which we thought the most important, and which we'd state less diplomatically :P We spent a good couple of hours trying to build a consensus on a selection. Once it was clear that that wasn't going to emerge, we went with a vote. I hope that clarifies things for anyone who feels cabalized. SR -- Stefano Rivera
