In February 2019 we had our first Homebrew maintainer in-person meeting at and around the FOSDEM 2019 conference in Brussels. Maintainers travelled from as far as India and Canada in order to get face-time with each other and have high-bandwidth conversations.

Maintainers arrived on Friday and met informally to socialise and get to know each other. On Saturday we released Homebrew 2.0.0 and on Saturday and Sunday attended the various talks at the conference (including a Homebrew 2.0.0 talk).

After getting to know each other better over the weekend we met in a hotel meeting room on Monday for the main purpose of the maintainer meeting: discussion of the future direction of the Homebrew project. 14 Homebrew maintainers were present in the meeting room and 3 others called in remotely.

Perhaps due to Mike McQuaid arranging to resign as Lead Maintainer on the same day the majority of the discussion was about Homebrew’s project governance. We agreed on having an elected Project Leader position, Project Leadership Committee and Technical Steering Committee. Representatives were elected to each of these positions.

If you’re interested in more details on our agreed governance structures you can read Governance documents (https://docs.brew.sh/Homebrew-Governance) and read the representatives for all positions in the Homebrew README’s “Who We Are” section.

Homebrew spent $11,965.85 in total on this meeting on the 14 individuals who attended. Included in this are some group meals, meeting room hire, travel (i.e. flights or trains) and hotel rooms in line with the Software Freedom Conservancy Travel and Reimbursable Expense Policy.

We felt this was a disproportionally valuable use of project funds. Most of us met each other for the first time, had some difficult conversations in-person and built bonds that make us all more committed to the project.

Thanks so much to everyone who has ever donated to Homebrew for enabling this meeting. If you would like to support similar events in future and can afford it, please donate through Patreon. If you’d rather not use Patreon (our preferred donation method), check out the other ways to donate in our README.