Notes from the Akademy 2025 Meta BoF

What is the hardest part? (it depends: fundraising, building, and streaming are top)

What would make the Call for Hosts feel attainable? make "if you have questions talk to the akademy team" more prominent.

Biggest issue is not find a functional venue or having connections
Cold(ish) emailing and building a relationship with uni faculty
Community run event spaces are also options
Cultural centers? Hacker spaces?
In the proposal mention any venue options that might be available or that you have connections to.
Not having enough local people for a local team

(don't need many local people for the local team)

Why in Europe? it's expensive to ship the team internationally. How do we expand our reach? can Akademy be for more than the devs?

tagline used to be developer and _user_ conference so we could market more for them too
make it more of a celebration, esp next year for KDE's birthday
who are the people we want to be here and how do we reach them? maybe we do tracks?
can we get more data?
Can we have tracks for users/devs?
how do we make users feel welcome to come and learn and join?
make KDE a festival!
Make it easy to contribute/have an intro to contribute thing (_and_ Build this out locally in tandem)
What if instead of going to Akademy we also went to the users? what if KDE participated in other conferences too?

MAKE IT EXPLICIT ON THE WEBSITE and design the program accordingly (make tracks). In tandem, prioritize sprints.

Take aways: - need users and devs - need to show up outside our own circles and get people excited about akademy - make sure people feel like they can show up - can Akademy piggy back on another conference?

Action Item: update language on the website