Fedora Activity Day at Indiana Linux Festival March 25-27, 2011

[Pascal Calarco]

Hi Fedora Community Team and Fedora Insight Logistics folk--

I have been working on preparation for the Indiana Linux Fest at the end of March, in
Indianapolis.  I'm excited that we have great response, with at least six people from
the Fedora community expected to attend!

I would like your input and thoughts in regard to the Fedora Activity Day we would like to
have at ILF.

Initially, I was thinking that we would have a FAD around Fedora Insight.  This would
dovetail nicely with the DrupalCon that is being held at ILF on Sunday, March 27 after the
main conference day on Saturday.  I have confirmed with the conference organizers that we
can have room either on Friday, March 25 or Sunday, March 27 for the FAD.  Great!

The thing I am worried about is the fact that I am perhaps going to be the only person
on-site who is involved with Fedora Insight right now, and so am rethinking the benefit of
having a FAD around that when everyone else will be remote.  

So, I wanted all of your feedback on another possibility: have a FAD around The Open
Source Way.

At FUDCon Tempe, I talked to Mark Terranova at some length on this project, kind of as a
follow up to Karsten's interest in perhaps having a hackathon on TOSW at Tempe, but
events transpired such that he wasn't able to join us there.

I think a FAD around TOSW would have broader interest and draw those in from outside the
Fedora Project, and we could either run this on the Friday or on Sunday.  Mark intends to
attend ILF as an Ambassador, and so I wanted to throw this out to the Community
Architecture team to see if any of Karsten/Mel/Max/Paul/Jared intent to be at ILF and if
any of you think we'd get more value out of a TOSW FAD than a Fedora Insight FAD.

Comments and feedback very welcome!  Thanks!

  - pascal

[Robyn Bergeron]

On 02/17/2011 08:02 AM, Pascal Calarco wrote:
>  Hi Fedora Community Team and Fedora Insight Logistics folk--
>
>  I have been working on preparation for the Indiana Linux Fest at the end of March, in
> Indianapolis.  I'm excited that we have great response, with at least six people from
> the Fedora community expected to attend!
>
>  I would like your input and thoughts in regard to the Fedora Activity Day we would like
> to have at ILF.
>
>  Initially, I was thinking that we would have a FAD around Fedora Insight.  This would
> dovetail nicely with the DrupalCon that is being held at ILF on Sunday, March 27 after the
> main conference day on Saturday.  I have confirmed with the conference organizers that we
> can have room either on Friday, March 25 or Sunday, March 27 for the FAD.  Great!
>
>  The thing I am worried about is the fact that I am perhaps going to be the only person
> on-site who is involved with Fedora Insight right now, and so am rethinking the benefit of
> having a FAD around that when everyone else will be remote.
>
>  So, I wanted all of your feedback on another possibility: have a FAD around The Open
> Source Way.
>
>  At FUDCon Tempe, I talked to Mark Terranova at some length on this project, kind of as a
> follow up to Karsten's interest in perhaps having a hackathon on TOSW at Tempe, but
> events transpired such that he wasn't able to join us there.
>
>  I think a FAD around TOSW would have broader interest and draw those in from outside the
> Fedora Project, and we could either run this on the Friday or on Sunday.  Mark intends to
> attend ILF as an Ambassador, and so I wanted to throw this out to the Community
> Architecture team to see if any of Karsten/Mel/Max/Paul/Jared intent to be at ILF and if
> any of you think we'd get more value out of a TOSW FAD than a Fedora Insight FAD.
>
>  Comments and feedback very welcome!  Thanks! 
My $.02 (and you know how much that
buys these days :D) -

First - I think that in general, we've seen FADs where specific things 
are being set out to be accomplished as being more successful than FADs, 
particularly at conferences, where things are more introductory or 
"orientation"-al in nature.

I think a FI FAD would be a great idea (obviously I am a little biased 
here because of the marketing and news nature of FI).  I'd be happy to 
avail my meager technical abilities for testing, etc. in the same manner 
I did with Zikula, but I don't know that we're at that point yet.  I 
don't know that we necessarily need to say, "Who's going to be at X" to

have a FAD - plenty of FADs have been born of things like, "We need to 
get things done, and let's get the people here to do it."

If we (a) think we can get the appropriate people to Indiana to put 
things together, and (b) we are reasonably sure that a FAD wouldn't be a 
distraction for those working on FI who might want to go to the 
Drupalcon (because the worst thing is when you don't have 100% focus in 
one place or another) - I don't see why we couldn't make that happen 
(save for people's time). We've been working on FI (and I say "we" while

fully acknowledging that I haven't been much help while we've been 
spinning up the Drupal stuff) for FOREVER  and it'd be nice if we could 
knock out a good chunk, or complete it, over a day. No, more than nice. 
AWESOME. :)

WRT TOSW - I think this *could* suffer from the 
"introduction/orientation" problem I illustrated earlier - we've done 
this with varying degrees of unsuccess with "Fedora Smorgasboard" type 
FADs at other linuxfests, and I'm having a hard time seeing how this 
would work.  Unless the goal was "hack on the textbook" or "teach others 
how to pitch TOSW" - i'm curious as to what the end product would be, 
what would be getting accomplished. While obviously I'm all for 
spreading the word of TOSW, I wonder how we'd fill a whole day and make 
good use of people's time, or what we'd do that couldn't be done in an 
hour-long session at a conference or even a 2-hour workshop / BOF / etc.

Of course, maybe there are some ideas there, and I think everyone would 
be happy to hear them.  I'd venture to guess that setting up a FAD 
planning page for each of them wouldn't be a bad idea, just to gauge 
interest/participation.



>     - pascal
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