[Funding]: SaltSprint 2025-06-30 - 2025-07-04

[zupo]

Event Name

SaltSprint

Event Website

https://saltsprint.org/

Event Purpose

This is a showcase sprint. A showcase of how easy and how little financial investment is needed for a Nix company to organize a sprint.

@ctheune (Flying Circus / Gocept) and I (Pareto Security / Niteo) have attended several Python sprints many years back. He knows how to run a sprint. On the last NixCon in Berlin, I pitched him the idea to use FlyingCircus to set an example of how various Nix companies around the World can throw easy-to-organize sprints, without all the fundraising and logistics of an over-the-top sprint like OceanSprint. And that I'll help out.

The idea that we want to set an example of is:

• make room in your office or book an adjacent office
• ask the Foundation for sponsorship to cover the extra office space, coffee and some snacks
• invite people to come!

That's it! No fundraising needed, no logistics with catering, dinners, activities. Let people self-organize.

I hope that by showcasing how basic sprints can be organized fast and with minimal investment, we can get a constant stream of sprints happening in different places, all year round!

Event Visitors

25

Event Organizer

Christian Theune @ctheune Neyts Zupan @zupo

Budget amount

2000

Budget description

• 1250€: office space adjacent to Flying Circus that can fit 25 people
• 750€: 150€/day coffee, snacks, fruit

[zupo]

Hey @refroni (and others), this is the second half of my effort to making sure sprints have continuity / redundancy if I ever get sick of running OceanSprint. Would be great if the Foundation could help us set an example of how any Nix company can organize a sprint!

[infinisil]

Great concept, but we do not feel comfortable with approving funding for this, since we're currently assessing our financial position with the board transition going on and we want to prioritise community-organized efforts over ones from organisations. We wish you the best with it and hope other Nix companies join in with co-sponsoring.

— NixOS Foundation Board

[zupo]

I take full responsibility for not being clear enough about this event. Let me try to provide more context.

In-person events are invaluable for a community such as ours. It's basic human nature that we're faster to give the benefit of the doubt to someone we've personally met. Painting real faces on top of github/matrix handles helps prevent a ton of misunderstandings.

I've seen this happen so many times. Just by being in the same room, people started to resolve longstanding issues and started to collaborate. Others witnessed this too (see the second paragraph).

NixCon is absolutely amazing as an in-person event, but it happens once a year. OceanSprint is my darling, but it happens once a year. So for the last two years, my mission has been to bootstrap a steady stream sprints, for the benefit of the Nix community.

All the logistics and organization knowledge that went into OceanSprint is stored in a GitHub repo, that I am freely sharing with anyone that is organizing a sprint (@DavHau and @brainrake can affirm). I am giving them my name to put on the organizers list, to give their sprints credibility, and helping them with fundraising.

But there's the big blunder: I've made people think that to do a sprint, they need to raise a bunch of cash from sponsors, organize intricate activities throughout the week at an amazing location. But that cannot be further from the truth! Sprints should be easy (and cheap!) to organize.

I only needed a company that I can use as a showcase of how a low-effort sprint could be organized. And then I bumped into Christian at NixCon and realized FlyingCircus is a perfect choice for the following reasons:

• they've been nix users for over a decade
• they've organized (non-nix) sprints in the past
• they are a very generous member of the nix community, hosting https://discourse.nixos.org/ for the past 5 years and asking nothing in return (apart from a small Hosted by Flying Circus. mention in the footer).
• they do not sell a product to nix people, they have nothing to shill on the event, this is not a promotional stunt

With SaltSprint, I want to do a showcase how any company with a few Nix people can do a sprint. They can convince their manager / financial people that:

• there is no currency cost to the company, since the Foundation covers the costs
• they get a nice recognition in the community, that helps with hiring, <insert marketing speak>

They only need the permission to work on Nix opensource stuff for a week. This brings the barrier to organize a sprint down several orders of magnitude, helping us have multiple sprints per year as a community -> more facetime -> less online drama.

To reiterate, the Foundation's money goes only to cover the currency expenses of Flying Circus, i.e.:

• renting a nearby office space that can accommodate 25 people
• daily shopping run for snacks, fruits, etc.

Flying Circus is donating the worktime of many of their employees to organize and attend their sprint, on top of their hosting donation I mentioned above. I am 100% certain that they can cover the 2000€ expense for the sprint too. But that misses the point. They are awesome people, and of course they will take one more for the team and do this. But I want SaltSprint to be the showcase for other companies! For companies with a very stringent CFO, demanding clear justification for every € spent. A lot of you are working at such companies. And for you, it's going to be a much easier "internal sell" if you can say: "we don't have any expenses with organizing a sprint". Please allow me to show you how!

[infinisil]

Speaking personally as just @infinisil:

Thanks! For more transparency, @zupo initiated a personal chat with me where he clarified some things for me, after which I asked him to post the summary of our chat. Though there are some points missing that I feel are important:

• The fact that Flying Circus got a good deal for the adjacent office to theirs (1250 EUR for 5 days and 25 people) since they are a long-term renter in the same office space.
• That it would've been great to ask the board in advance whether such a sprint could be funded, before investing a lot of effort into it and announcing it.

Later @ctheune also reached out and we chatted a bit. From that conversation I also want to add some points:

• Since the board message didn't reflect that, I want to clarify that I think of everybody here as part of the community ❤
  • Follow-up: Please also check out the "People come first" community value
• By planning the foundation to be the only sponsor and not getting that approved in advance, you're putting the board in a bit of a predicament now: We can either decide to fund the 2k (while in the process of assessing our financials!), or waste everybody's time already invested into this.

This predicament unfortunately still exists, so I can't guarantee that we'll change our decision with the current proposal, but I'd at least like the entire board to reconsider this, so I'll reopen this for now.

[zupo]

I am fully to blame for putting the Board in this position. I have talked unofficially about doing such a sprint with a number of people, but never sent an actual proposal email to an official address. I should have.

And when Christian confirmed he has availability to do the sprint, I wasn't clear enough that the website shouldn't have a proper design. I mentioned in passing to "just fork the oceansprint.org" website and change the date & location, and was caught by surprise when the FlyingCircus folks published a fully designed website. I should have been more clear.

These will all go into the "how to do a sprint" guide with the hope that others don't have to repeat my mistakes.

Finally, while on one hand I would of course love the Board to reconsider their decision, I wouldn't want to set a precedent of reconsiderations for future decisions. The Board positions are filled with volunteers with limited time, and having people request reconsiderations of every future decision is not something I would be proud of causing.

[ctheune]

Alright, thanks everyone for being approachable to talk about the various perspectives!

I agree that this is a learning process and I'm happy to change the original plan. To make things easier for the foundation I'm suggesting this:

1. Step: we'll cover 1.000€ from the budget from the Flying Circus and we're asking for 1.000€ instead of 2.000€ from the foundation. I agree with Necj's overall plan to demonstrate how to do a budget-friendly sprint and see whether we can establish this format in a way that purely community-driven events can be financed without going down sponsor hunting.
2. Step: I'll approach some more potential sponsors and the foundation will not have to take over their part if it doesn't work out. Nevertheless, I'd still mention the foundation as a sponsor - because providing collateral is valuable, too!

Let me know whether this helps move things forward and feel free to approach me personally as well.

[ctheune]

So, to let you know: we've received a commitment for 1k€ of further sponsoring, so I'll keep up the 1k€ from the FCIO side and foundation doesn't have to put in their potential 1k€.

I will still add the foundation as a sponsor due to the fallback potential that was in the air.