i am currently discussing with @mae about options for a “get-to-know” meeting for Discourse instance operators and supporters in Europe. An “official” international Discourse meeting needs planning effort and preparation time. But there is already a big event at the end of this year which could be used for some informal networking on a smaller scale:
The CCC congress in Hamburg 27.12 - 30.12.2025 is one of the biggest events for both professional and non-professional IT people in Europe, with about 15.000 international participants every year. Many folks, even from overseas, are already there. This could be a chance to meet colleagues who are operating either self-hosted or CDCK-hosted discourse sites - you just need to know about each other…
I am curious if there will be other “Discourse people” at the 39C3 Hamburg and if there is some interest here on meta. If so, I could speak with the CCC orga team and look for a room and time slot at the congress center.
@mae Update: I checked options to have a Discourse meetup at the CCC Hamburg between 27.12 and 30.12. There are some larger rooms at the CCH (for 60 pers. or more) and also smaller locations. Before I make a final room reservation, I would like to know if there is some support from CDCK side. And we should discuss about a possible agenda.
See detailed infos about “self organized sessions” (SOS) at
As for now, I would wait for replies in this thread from the community and from CDCK staff. I can make a reservation for a location at the CCH Hamburg, but this should be prepared in good time (before christmas). The 39C3 orga team (Infodesk) will assign a room for it and it will be published at
Before we commit any resources, it would be great to see confirmed attendees. That would help us with planning etc.
Even if we don’t move forward with a meetup at this particular event, we’re for sure interested in helping plan other ones where there are confirmed attendees.
I just returned from Hamburg. It was a very nice meeting with a very big community of 16.000 to 17.000 “nerds” from all over Europe and beyond. All the talks from the central conference rooms are available online at
Most of them with translation (in cases where the talk was not already in english). Highly recommended!
thanks for the “resuscitation” of this thread. I think that both an online meeting of Discourse operators from Europe and also a personal meeting would be inspiring and helpful. A personal meetup could be organised as a workshop session inside one of the larger and already established open source community meetings we have in Europe (e.g. the CCC Hamburg and also the FOSDEM in Brussels).
Re:Publica just created a new branch with the first Re.publica event in Vienna which is scheduled for October this year ( Startseite | re:publica Vienna ).
I would hope for some interest from the official CDKC staff, e.g from @Danielle and @HAWK to discuss this. And we need more people expressing their interest in a personal meeting of “Discoursers” in Europe and an idea about an agenda for such an event. For me, the connection between the Fediverse /ActivityPub and Discourse and how this could link “regional” with “global” context-oriented information and communication, would be a really interesting aspect.
Hey Thomas,
Meetups and events are @mae’s wheelhouse and I think she left the ball in your court.
This would be a good start. Now that we have returned to a profit-first operating model, we have to carefully consider the costs and ROI of every decision—and that usually starts with data.
To be clear, we love the idea of people getting together to talk about Discourse and we want to support that as much as we can. Sadly, under the current economic climate we don’t have a lot of discretionary budget so we have to scrutinise everything pretty closely. That won’t be the case forever.
That makes sense to me. A low-cost first step could be an online meetup for Europe-based Discourse operators/supporters, partly to see who is interested and what topics people would actually want to discuss. That would also give some useful data before anyone considers a physical meetup attached to a larger event such as FOSDEM, CCC, or Re:Publica.
Possible agenda ideas from my side:
introductions: who is running/supporting which kind of Discourse community;
self-hosted vs hosted operational experiences;
community moderation and governance patterns;
ActivityPub/Fediverse integration and where Discourse fits;
public-sector, education, libraries, and civic/community use cases.
I would be interested in attending an online session, and potentially a future European in-person meetup if the timing/location worked.
I agree that it should not require much from CDCK at this stage beyond perhaps visibility or light guidance. The first useful thing is probably to see how many people are interested and what they would want from it.