Hi, co-organizer here. I definitely hear you on this. I actually ran something called the “NOSQL Summer” a few years back and we ran into a similar question, so we created a bunch of “NOSQL Winter” aliases to cover people in the Southern hemisphere. We may do something like that for the SoS as well.

It’s hard to resist names with Summer in them, because it’s a handy trope with lots of positive connotations. Summer (no matter which months of the year it happens in) is a good time for passion projects and the like. Plus there is the trend established by the “Google Summer of Code”, “Rails Girls Summer of Code”, “Infinite Summer”, etc.