You thought you had seen every post about Randa Meetings in 2014, right? Or perhaps you posted about Randa and thought you were super late? Well, abandon all hope: this is the definitive latest post about Randa Meetings 2014 :D
The title may not be surprising to you if you have organized a developer meeting before or if you have attended one in which you are close to the ogranizers (e.g. as a volunteer or as a curious person). But coming from a country in Latin America where no serious developer meetings happen, and reading about KDE sprints here and there all the time, you might have an impression that those things happen out of the blue. In my case, I thought there was some sort of machine sprint organizers turned on, put in some money and it would spit out a sprint. Notice that I don't consider Akademy a developer sprint, so I was very much aware Akademy is an organizational nightmare challenge.
But attending Randa Meetings 2014 changed my perspective about organizing sprints. Starting with the fundraiser, then the coordination of arrivals, and other things we could follow through e-mail and blogs, I was able to see that this organization was big. But that was just part of it. You would have to arrive to Randa and see how the organizers were taking care of details like network access, food, name tags, food, coordination of visit days, food, our field trip and most importantly, and I think I have not mentioned this before... food. This was, of course, the result of the collaboration of many, not only Mario Fux, who is the usual name associated to Randa Meetings. In particular, I have to thank Mario's family for all the food, which I think was an important part of the meeting and I haven't mentioned it. I was able to discuss many matters of the organizational details with Mario while we walked from Zermatt to Randa, and this helped me understand the dimensions of organizing a sprint like that one.
KDE has many sprints throughout the year and my experience in Randa has helped me appreciate both the importance and the challenge of organizing these. BlueSystems office in Barcelona has been really helpful in making it easier for people to organize these sprints, but there is still a lot of manual work organizers need to do. You can help and be part of this by donating to KDE.