While the streets of Barcelona were filling up with the referendum conundrum, there were spotted, a bunch of people chattering and bantering, sometimes with pillows and colorful socks, searching for gelato.
Yes, that bunch of people would be us.
Our annual MusicBrainz summit was held on September 30th–October 1st in the colorful, lively city of Barcelona. We had people (and chocolates) from nine countries: Spain, India, Germany, UK, USA, France, Estonia, and Denmark, and Iceland.
From left→right, top: Wieland (Mineo), Sambhav (samj1912), Sean (Leftmost Cat), Nicolás (reosarevok), Ben (LordSputnik), Jérôme (loujin), Alastair (alastairp); middle: Leo Verto, Freso, Michael (bitmap), Elizabeth (Quesito), Chhavi; bottom: Yvan (yvanzo), Rob (ruaok), Param (iliekcomputers), Suyash (ferbncode). Laurent (zas) behind the camera.
Having a majority of our team in a room with food, obviously, lead to lots of productive discussions. We talked about translations, recommendations engines, voting, and packaging. We also talked about SpamBrainz, user scripts being included as part of our projects, documentation, single sign-on for all Brainz, and a bunch of other things.
One of the nice things we could do this summit was to go over our user survey results. As you might remember, we had this banner on our site, asking us to take part in a survey. The results gave us a good idea of our community in regards to what language they use, what Brainz project they use more, how do they come to know about us, and so on.
Summit session in progress.
We got to know what you like, but more importantly what you don’t. We heard all of you, and we are on it. We will publish a detailed report on that soon.
You cannot be in Barcelona with such a good lot of people and not end up exploring the city. The team ended up cycling on the streets of Barcelona (many times on the wrong side), climbing up to the mosaic-y Park Güell, snacking on pinchos and tapas, visiting the Pompeu Fabra University (where our AcousticBrainz resides) and taking their daily after-lunch strolls through the Arc de Triomf.
Apart from that, some of the record-breaking points from the summit would be:
- We had nice colorful pillows with all our kids (we mean, Brainz projects) printed on them. And summit t-shirts too.
- The summit was live streamed on our YouTube channel, for all those who couldn’t make it. That went pretty well, only minor technical difficulties, and it provided a good overview, literally.
For those who missed it (or want to rewatch it), the archived streams are available on YouTube.
- We finally decided to better the user experience of our projects (more on the blog about that later),
- New wonderful Sound Team recording while having a terrace barbeque hosted by Elizabeth.
- More gelato was eaten than ever before. (That shouldn’t be surprising.)
Wrapping up the summit with this blog, but we have all the memories preserved. Find the amazing moments captured by our in-house photographer Zas in his Facebook gallery, and those moments in motion in my own video here:
Until next year,
Cheers
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