[Ambassadors] FUDCon Blacksburg Mea Culpa

Tue Feb 21 18:33:10 UTC 2012

great stuff!

On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 10:51 PM, inode0 <inode0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> inode0 hasn't had a blog since the great Fedora Infrastructure blog
> purge. inode0 can be a stubborn cuss and didn't create a new blog
> elsewhere in the meantime. Hence, inode0 failed to blog during FUDCon
> Blacksburg this year. inode0 speaks in the 3rd person often when his
> tail is between his legs after receiving a good scolding.
>
> In an attempt to make amends inode0 will now share with his fellow
> ambassadors a bit about his FUDCon experience last month hoping doing
> so late is better than never and hoping doing so is close enough to
> blogging to sort of satisfy expectations. inode0 is only pawn in game
> of life! Ok, enough of that.
>
> While the weather did delay my arrival by a few hours unlike the
> previous two FUDCons I both arrived and departed on the scheduled day.
> So yay Blacksburg for providing nicer weather conditions that either
> Toronto or Tempe! Actually the weather in Toronto and Tempe was lovely
> too and my problems in previous years were entirely due to the weather
> where I live. Being stuck in Chicago on the way wasn't so bad as I was
> stuck with other friendly Fedora faces including nirik, mmcgrath, and
> gholms. So time to enjoy lunch and chat about various things while
> hoping to catch a plane out. More friendly Fedora faces were waiting
> at the airport in Roanoke when we landed where spot and rbergero met
> us with a van to haul a bunch of late arrivers back to Blacksburg.
>
> When I talk with folks about my experiences at FUDCons, I have a
> tendency to focus on the people. Most of us do almost all our work in
> Fedora remotely and while we build large networks of friends on
> mailing lists and irc our paths seldom cross in person. But on those
> rare occasions when they do it changes the friendships, makes them
> more personal, and improves future communication remotely. Meeting nb
> for the first time in the hotel lobby made the trip worthwhile.
> Standing in the snow talking about stuff old guys talk about with
> jjmcd made the trip worthwhile. Sharing a table for dinner with my
> friends cwickert, ianweller, and MarkDude made the trip worthwhile.
> Sitting down for an hour with my oldest friend in Fedora, Máirín, and
> just catching up on things made the trip worthwhile. I could go on for
> a long time doing this. One of the Four Foundations is Friends and
> friends new and old are one of the things that make each and every
> FUDCon special.
>
> FUDCons go by fast, there is a lot to do. I attended barcamp sessions
> on Tito/Building RPMs, Katello: A Sysadmin's Fortress, Draft Trademark
> Guidelines, and User's vs. Contributors. After the Tito talk I enjoyed
> making Jesus laugh by showing him my tito-o-lantern from a few years
> ago on Thanksgiving. I have a weakness for carving open source
> pumpkins. Also had a nice hallway talk with Pamela about trademarks
> and issues peculiar to ambassadors doing their work promoting the
> Fedora Project.
>
> I led one hackfest devoted to ambassadors, mostly those in NA since
> this was the NA FUDCon although we had ambassadors from other regions
> present. With respect to NA we decided to try to make a few changes to
> rebuild the enthusiasm of a few years ago. One of the decisions we
> made was to reinstate weekly ambassador meetings. Those have already
> begun and I encourage all interested NA ambassadors to join us any
> Tuesday night at 9pm eastern time in #fedora-meeting on freenode. If
> you can only come once in a while that is ok. We will be there every
> Tuesday, you now know where to find us. We had quite a bit of
> discussion about FADs. I'm not sure we really reached a consensus
> about this but I think we are going to try to not call as many events
> FADs as we have in the past to in a sense protect the FAD brand as the
> Fedora Project tries to encourage more FADs in the future. I think
> I'll just let that sort itself out over time. We discussed various
> issues plaguing us of late with respect to the budget process. That as
> a general problem wasn't something that could be solved at this FUDCon
> but many people are working hard right now to straighten it out for
> the next fiscal year. We also discussed various wiki "defects" that
> need to be corrected/updated. Many of those issues have been addressed
> now.
>
> I had another hackfest on the budget merged with one on the Fedora
> Council and then both of those were merged with a Fedora Board
> hackfest into a 3 hour long marathon governance hackfest. Much of the
> early part of this one was devoted to dealing with sopa/pipa and
> similar issues that arise around the world. The middle part concerned
> the idea of developing a Fedora Council (a group of contributors from
> a wide cross-section of the Fedora universe). I think back on this
> wishing there had been more time because the more I think about the
> ideas in favor of it the more I support it. There might be reasons why
> it might be hard to pull off, but the benefits if it did become an
> effective body are potentially huge. I hope this idea hangs on long
> enough to further explore it or just give it a try and see what
> develops. Like many things in Fedora, it can succeed if enough people
> are willing to work to make it succeed. The end of this session was
> devoted to consideration of establishing a funding source intended to
> be used for technical purposes rather than for promotional purposes in
> Fedora giving us more flexibility to at our discretion fund additional
> activities. That discussion was well enough received that follow-up
> work is now under way formalizing the idea into a concrete proposal.
>
> This is probably already longer than anyone wants to read. But there
> were other hackfests and lots of hallway talks. Two interesting pieces
> of news for ambassadors in NA are that Jared arranged for us to
> replace our now ancient netbooks used at Fedora booths with some
> Thinkpad laptops that will allow us to far better share with people
> visiting our booths what Fedora is capable of. Thanks to Ruth for
> hauling those to Blacksburg for us and they were quickly dispatched to
> the various event boxes throughout NA. We also were given the green
> light to investigate acquiring a multi-touch system for booth use and
> we are currently in the process of evaluating our options. It will be
> exciting to be able to demonstrate the new multi-touch features in
> Fedora with a nice piece of hardware at events in the future.
>
> For me the event concluded with a lovely walk around the Virginia Tech
> campus with Jared, Maria, Clint, and MarkDude. And who could forget
> the epic fight between Jared and MarkDude? And that ended another
> wonderful FUDCon. Thanks so much Ben for making it possible. You were
> a gentleman as always and a superb host. I don't think I could have
> enjoyed my visit to Blacksburg more and I returned home with a
> rekindled enthusiasm and eagerness to contribute more to our project.
>
> John
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