What is nmarques doing?

[Mel Chua]

> I want leave this lines explaining a bit of what I am doing. First as
> people are aware I'm working on organizing an event to promote GNU/Linux
> and Fedora across students and IT Professionals (who might become
> contributors), in fact the main thing about this event to establish a
> bond between Fedora and Open Source enthusiasts.

Nelson, thanks for being so open and communicative and persistent about 
this - it's great to see you bringing so much new energy and new ideas 
to the team.  One of the most valuable things I've seen from watching 
you get started is your ability to see and articulate your perspective 
of someone from the marketing world who's getting started in open source 
for the first time. You're gaining the ability to stand in both worlds 
and informally translate between them, which is great because you and 
others like you will see things and make connections that the others of 
us may not notice. They're very different cultures, and the open source 
way of doing things can sometimes be difficult to see and learn, so... 
please keep doing this!

Comments inline.

> Currently I'm rallying organizations who might contribute to this,
> amongst them city halls, IT giants (who are employers of IT
> professionals and Linux enablers), higher education students (future IT
> engineers) and local students.
>
> The event I'm planning is to hold several conferences (between 8 to 10)
> during 2 days and have a small Linux Install Fest/Party for the general
> community.

Wow. That's a pretty ambitious start. Who do you have - or who can you 
find - in terms of other Fedora people near you who can help organize 
and run and support this magnitude of an event-spread?

> This event is going to provide feedback on the local community and their
> probable future involvement in projects such as Fedora, thus, it will
> also prepare ourselfs for a possible official PT_PT Fedora community.

This also sounds like something to approach the Ambassadors team with (I 
know this has been suggested in the past, and Rodrigo is a good person 
to get you started with that as well) and perhaps lurk in #fedora-latam 
with to get ideas from the others in your geo.

> On a personal level I'm working on a project to present to the Aveiro
> City Hall, the share holder of EMA (Aveiro Municipal Stadium)
<snip>

So you are thinking about getting the stadium to use (existing? 
developed, already deployed in other places, supported?) FOSS products 
for their infrastructure? I'm not sure where this fits, but keep talking 
(maybe start blogging?) about it and perhaps someone will see it and go 
"Aha! A perfect connection!"

>   I would like also to get my University involved in this as up to a
> point my contributions go from a student of them and they indeed have a
> lot to teach/preach that we can learn.

One place that might be useful to look for this is 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Campus_Ambassadors - Ryan Rix (of 
Marketing and KDE fame, rrix in #fedora-mktg) is heavily involved with 
that and might be able to help you get started with this.

> I don't know if this makes sense, but the theorical stuff should
> provide the support needed to create a local Fedora community, which can
> be sponsored by the City Hall. If such a community appears, there are
> other things that need to be done, else it will disappear shortly after.
> So we need to keep events up and keep people being present. For such to
> happen having a space we can use is great. We can do local hack fests,
> meetings, conferences, etc. If we can accomplish this, eventually go to
> schools and give conferences about FOSS/Fedora, we can start nursing
> future enthusiasts and such to be fond of us and foment their needs of
> being a part of something great like Fedora.
>
>   This is what I am trying to accomplish, maybe a fool's dream, but like
> the CEO of Coca Cola says:
>
>   "we only fail when we stop trying".

Congratulations, you're a community builder. :)

http://www.theopensourceway.org/wiki/Main_Page may be helpful - it's 
still in the early stages and is rough and incomplete, but reading 
through might give you some ideas, and be the basis for the spark of a 
discussion with the folks working on it. (Hi, Karsten!)

--Mel