Inkscape Contributor Meetings

Our dedicated volunteer Inkscape developers are spread across the globe and rarely have the chance to meet face-to-face. Thanks to technology, we are able to work remotely on most things, but we've noticed that in-person meetings bring about stronger relationships, quicker solutions, and more creative results. Being together in one room also allows us to work on things that are harder to do on-line: designing a new plugin/extension system, teaming up to squash particularly nasty bugs, authoring better user documentation, and planning where to take Inkscape development in the future.

That's why we decided to organize contributor meetings, so that some of our developers meet for some days of intense collaborative work. These events used to be called hackfests and might be in older news articles below.

By all accounts, past contributor meetings were a huge success:

• Hackfest 2023 (Bensburg) from March 13th 17th, in Bensburg, Germany, with 11 attending contributors;
• Hackfest 2018 (Kiel) from September 9th to 13th, in Kiel, Germany, with 10 attending contributors;
• Hackfest 2018 (Boston) from March 26th to 30th, in Boston, USA, with 9 attending contributors;
• Hackfest 2017 from June 27th to July 1st, in Paris, France, with 9 attending contributors;
• Hackfest 2016 from April 11th to 13th, in Leeds, UK, with 11 attending programmers;
• Hackfest 2015 from April 26th to 28th, in Toronto, Canada, with 8 attending programmers.

Please consider donating a few bucks to help cover travel, room, and board so our available volunteer developers can attend the contributor meetings in person. It's an investment in Inkscape which should produce big benefits for all its users and help us make the product the very best it can be.

If you have the right programming skills, perhaps you might even want to consider attending yourself?

Thanks so much for being an investor in Inkscape and contributing to help bring the developers together. If for some reason the funds are not needed for contributor meetings any more, we'll put the money towards maintaining and improving Inkscape!

We appreciate your commitment to free, fully open source, community-developed, socially owned software, and your vision for Inkscape. We are grateful to have you on our team!

All donations are fully tax deductible in the US to the extent permitted by law.