How To Organise the AGM

The Annual General Meeting (AGM) is our combination of a business meeting, yearly work planning session, and opportunity to meet others in our international team in person.

This document is a guide that assumes that the meeting will be held in person. If a situation occurs that prevents that, it is acceptable to execute it virtually, as was done in 2021 and 2022 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Roles

Expected participants:

Who Role
Project Leader (PL) Should be physically present if possible, dialed-in if not. Regardless, needed to provide content for meeting.
Lead Maintainers (LM) Should be physically present if possible, dialed-in if not. Regardless, needed to provide content for meeting.
Maintainers Should dial-in or participate in person if possible.

Delegated maintainer roles of responsibility for planning and execution:

Who Role
Logistics Coordinator (LC) Coordinates with meeting venue, restaurants, vendors, maintainers
Agenda Coordinator (AC) Coordinates agenda and content to be presented
Technology Coordinator (TC) Coordinates video conference audiovisual setup

A person may have more than one role but one person should not have all roles.

Logistics Timeline

Past practice and future intent is for AGM to coincide with FOSDEM, which is held in Brussels, Belgium annually typically on the Saturday and Sunday of the fifth ISO-8601 week of the calendar year, calculable with:

ruby -rdate -e "s=ARGV[0].to_i;s.upto(s+4).map{|y|Date.commercial(y,5,6)}.each{|y|puts [y,y+1].join(' - ')}" 2026

AGM should be held on the Friday before or the Monday following FOSDEM.

:information_source: Regenerate the dates for the WHEN lines in the next several headers using this quick command:

ruby -rdate -e "YEAR=ARGV[0].to_i;puts ([[49,YEAR-1]]+(1.upto(4).map{|wk|[wk, YEAR]})).map{|wk,yr|Date.commercial(yr,wk).to_s}" 2026

Two months prior

When: Week 49 of YEAR-1 :date: 2025-12-01

  • LC: Seek informal count of maintainers intending to attend in person.
  • PL: Review maintainer activity per Homebrew Governance.
  • PL: Open travel assistance pre-approval process.
    • This is primarily to enable maintainers to begin planning travel by asking for time off, requesting employer reimbursement, arranging childcare or pet sitters, applying for a visa which may take 2–7 weeks, etc.
  • PL: Remind those traveling from countries exempt from EU visa requirements (e.g. US, UK, AU, CA) to file for ETIAS travel authorization (generally processed in minutes but could take up to 30 days), advisable to get processed before buying airfare.

Four weeks prior

When: Week 1 of YEAR :date: 2025-12-29

Three weeks prior

When: Week 2 of YEAR :date: 2026-01-05

  • PL: Close travel assistance pre-approval process.

Two weeks prior

When: Week 3 of YEAR :date: 2025-01-06

  • AC: Create agenda, solicit agenda items from PL and LM.
  • LC: Seek committed maintainer attendance and dietary requirements for each.
  • PL: Close proposals for new Governance changes.

10 days prior

When: Week 3 of YEAR :date: 2026-01-12

  • PL: Resolve all open Governance PRs, roll-up changes, and open PR with changes to docs/Homebrew-Governance.md on homebrew/brew.

One week prior

When: Week 4 of YEAR :date: 2026-01-19

  • PL: Open voting for PL and Governance changes.
  • AC: Solicit agenda items from maintainers.
  • LC: Secure a venue and reservation for dinner.

Day before

  • LC: Confirm reservation count for dinner with attendees
  • LC: Hand-off venue AV contact to TC

Day-of

  • LC: Confirm reservation count for dinner with venue
  • TC: Connect to video conference, ensure audiovisual equipment is ready and appropriately placed and leveled periodically
  • AC: Keep the meeting paced to the agenda, keep time for timeboxed discussions, cut people off if they’re talking too long, ensure remote attendees can get a word in

Pre-planning

Finding a Meeting Venue

In the past, Homebrew hosted the AGM at the THON Hotel Brussels City Centre and arranged for a room block checking in the day before FOSDEM and AGM weekend, generally on Friday, and checking out the day after, generally Tuesday when the AGM is Monday.

Who Qualifies For AGM Travel Assistance

Travel assistance is available for AGM participants who are expected to attend the AGM in-person. Those who have employers able to cover all or a part of the costs of attending FOSDEM should exhaust that source of funding before seeking Homebrew funding.

PL, LM and maintainers can expect to have all reasonable, in-policy expenses covered.

See also the Expense and Reimbursement Travel Policy for process and details on what is covered. It is important that all attendees expecting reimbursement stay in-policy.

Dietary Requirements

Track dietary requirements centrally for in-person participants.