Iceland, where YAPC::NA and YAPC::EU can meet

brian_d_foy on 2008-07-03T03:41:45

For the last year I've been mildly advocating that a Nordic Perl Workshop be in Iceland, mostly because I'd like to go to an NPW in all of the Nordic countries and Iceland has as much of a chance as Finland of hosting one. Heck, let's even have a YAPC there.

I just found another good reason to have it in Iceland: it's literally on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Well, duh, of course Iceland is where the Earth's crust is pulling apart, but I never really thought about it since it is way up there almost not in the Atlantic anymore. Because of this, Iceland straddles the tectonic plates of North America and Europe. There's even a bridge that you can walk across to go from one plate to another (which is definitely cooler than seeing a dusty ditch Californians call the San Andreas Fault). Iceland is expanding by a couple of centimeters each year, so eventually it should take over the world and Perl will already be there.

North American Perlers and European Perlers can meet at the bridge. We could even have the conference taking place on the North American and European side at the same time. There could be t-shirts showing geology nerd stuff.

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That's a crazy idea

wirebird on 2008-07-03T04:18:17

Where do I sign up?

I suppose holding the conference in the Perlan would be both impractical and excessively expensive.

It's still a dtich ...

perigrin on 2008-07-03T17:09:09

Technically it's still a ditch, though the day I was there it was raining sideways and my daughter* and I couldn't do more than dash out look around and dash back into the car.

I'm with wirebird though, where do I sign up? I love Iceland and recommend a stop over there to anybody who's traveling between NA and EU.

* Here's a fun vacation game, try explaining Plate Tectonics to a 3 year old :)

Re:It's still a dtich ...

wirebird on 2008-07-03T19:18:51

I used to work for an airline that borrowed Aer Lingus planes during the off season to run vacation charters out of the (USAn) East Coast. At the beginning and end of the season, us employees had the chance to ride the placement flights for free. Unfortunately, since I didn't want to (well, I *wanted* to, but you know what I mean) stay in Ireland throughout the charter season, I would still have had to pay for the one-way trip the other direction. As I recall, flying to/from Dublin one-way would have been like $4k. Only going as far as Reykjavik (being 737s, they of course had to stop there) would have been only slightly more accessible.

Either way, there was the whole "do I really want to be locked up in a 737 with partying upper management for that many hours?" question. I figured I'd be getting off for good at Reykjavik one way or the other...

Other than all that, it seemed like a really cool opportunity.

I like Iceland

kudra on 2008-07-03T18:18:23

On the plus side, Iceland is a very beautiful country and a wonderful place to visit.

On the negative side, airfare is expensive, and I don't think there's anyone offering to organize it.

Re:I like Iceland

brian_d_foy on 2008-07-03T18:40:22

Well, I'm looking into what the costs would be, and from there we'll see how to go about it if the NPW people think it could work.

And the Australians...

Alias on 2008-07-03T19:19:59

... will be under the bridge, where we'll emerge from to collect tolls.

Center of mass

gwolf on 2008-07-04T00:01:33

Several years ago, a Debian developer (using DD's coordinates, http://www.debian.org/devel/developers.loc, over the sphere) found out that Debian's center of mass is very close to Iceland. Sadly, that does not mean that airfare is cheap...
But anyway, European DebConfs since I joined (2003, 2005 and 2007) were respectively in Oslo, Helsinki and Edinburgh - relatively close to Iceland at least!

NPW in Iceland

avar on 2008-07-04T01:16:23

jonasbn approached me informally about this (on irc.perl.org)
recently. For those that don't know I'm probably the best known Perl
guy in Iceland amongst the regular conference going crowd having
written a few CPAN modules and hacked core a bit.

There's no monger group in Iceland which would somewhat impede the
execution of a plan such as this one, however that's no /real/
obstacle really. Arranging everything could be done through the help
of local organizations such as the newly-formed FSFI (which is holding
a large conference this Saturday in Grand Hotel Reykjavík which I'm,
incidentally, speaking at), some local help (such as myself or other
interested parties), or in the worst case by people outside of Iceland
since everyone here speaks English anyway and we have Internet and
telephone access.

Now, to answer some questions here:

wirebird: Yes, Perlan would pretty much suck. They're not equipped for
holding conferences at all. Perlan was built as a penis extension
mechanism for a former mayor and as such works just splendidly, but
mostly doesn't have other functions.perigrin: We have a saying here, there's no such thing as bad weather,
only bad clothing. But having said that weather here over the summer
is on par with say the British Isles (and you know how famous they are
as a beach resort!).

Air fare:

Iceland would most certainly be more expensive overall in
transportation for the regular NPW crowd than say going from Sweden to
Denmark. But if you factor the North American crowd into it it gets
cheaper.

Icelandair and the Iceland Express travel agency make a largepercentage of their money by offering cheaper flights across the
Atlantic with a stopover in Iceland than the cost of going non-stop
cross the pond.

Expenses:

On the up side (for you guys) the Icelandic Krona is in an economic
recession as of late (we now have the highest interest rates in
Europe, take that Turkey!), I think it's fallen 40% against the US
dollar since 2007 so Iceland isn't as expensive as it usually is if
you're in posession of some petro-dollars/euros.

Venue:

Personally, given that Reykjavík is a boring gigantic suburb I'd hold
NPW somewhere out in the middle of nowhere (plenty of that in Iceland)
in the vicinity of a hotel with an accompanying camping site withplenty of communally bought beer (or, any other drug you fancy), BBQ
and non-stop partying/hacking. But that's just me :)

Re:NPW in Iceland

Burak on 2008-07-04T11:43:56

...take that Turkey!

Heh! I don't think this is comparable to TR Lira. We used to buy Coke for half a million (old) lira you know :p Anyway, YTL does not have that annoying zeroes :)