[Fedora-ambassadors-list] FUDCon Delhi 2006 report

[Robert 'Bob' Jensen]

On Wed, 2006-02-22 at 00:33 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Hi
> 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon/FUDConDelhi2006
> 
> FUDCon Delhi 2006 was organized as part of LinuxAsia in Feb 9th 2006. 
> Though it is supposedly a business focused events it has been 
> overwhelmed by students and other developers interested in all sorts of 
> things. Foss.in still seems to do a better focusing on developers and 
> the community if thats where your interests are.  We have a full day of 
> Fedora speeches and presentations on the main auditorium and I believe 
> we did a decent job with it in getting a number of people interested and 
> some of them have even show up here as Fedora Ambassadors. The 
> auditorium was generally packed during the day and getting thinner in 
> the day leading to low amount of crowd during the end of the day Fedora 
> BOF which otherwise might have turned out to be more interesting in 
> relative terms.
> 
> The original startover from Venky and Alolita was fairly generic 
> followed by a inspiration speech from Greg Dek. Chris Blizzard who leads 
> the desktop team within Red Hat talked about the desktop changes and 
> gaps in two different presentations. Kishore Bhargava gave a update on 
> what was happening within the community in terms of LUG's and open 
> source developers in India. Sankarshan from Red Hat Bangalore rehashed 
> my general introduction presentation on Fedora with his own interesting 
> quirks.  Colin Charles who used to lead the Fedora marketing effort is 
> now on MySQL as the community manager and was fairly upbeat on MySQL and 
> Fedora presentation with changes like MySQL 5 finally landing in Fedora 
> Core 5. Ramakrishna Reddy from the Red Hat Engineering team and my 
> office colleague Ankit Patel, language maintainer - Gujarati gave a 
> combined presentation on L10N which was well received. Satish Mohan had 
> an update on what Red Hat Engineering has been doing in Bangalore which 
> includes working on odd devices such as dotmatrix printers and scanners 
> (http://oss-drivers.sourceforge.net/) that organizations refuse to move 
> off from.  I had to brush over my presentation rapidly to leave room for 
> the final panel discussion on Fedora since Klaus Knopper of Knoppix fame 
> took his own time during noon for a verbose and broad presentation on 
> where we are heading towards in terms of appliances, software patents 
> and such.  The BOF had various ideas thrown about back and forth between 
> the audience and people in the stage and many thought it went well.
> 
> Pics and videos are on the pipeline. Anyone has them, get them out. 
> 
> We had a Fedora booth running on all three days - 8,9 and 10th in 
> LinuxAsia manned by many people in Red Hat Delhi and Bangalore offices 
> attracting hundreds of people in a daily basis.  Tejas was doing the 
> videos. Kevin Verma showed up everywhere. We gave away thousands of 
> goodies like Free DVD's of  Fedora Core 4 an t-shirts.  There were many 
> introductory basic questions around how Fedora relates to RHEL, the 
> licensing terms, how we sustain it, the schedule and roadmaps. There is 
> a lot of interest and goodwill  in the project out there which could be 
> turn out into contributions if we figure out more means to do it.
> 
> I think we came away with the idea that driving changes towards getting 
> individual CD's for people on low bandwidth connections and Live CD 
> would be useful. The traditional way of throwing away packages to slim 
> down Fedora wouldnt work for us since we already have a large existing 
> userbase to worry about. Figuring out a reorganization that does what we 
> are already doing for the existing users while giving a desktop or 
> server or any other odd ball combination within individual CD's with the 
> help of tools like Kadischi seems to be the way forward.
> 
> We havent been doing a good job in getting users aware of the existing 
> features or the changes we helped drive within Fedora.  The handout that 
> we gave way on the Fedora stall helped in a large way towards that in 
> the conference though we might have included that in the LinuxAsia kit 
> too.We just have to keep doing what we are doing and use the material 
> that piles up on a regular basis and organize it. The good thing in 
> Fedora is that we get to do it every six months or so and every new 
> release gets a lots of attention in the form of downloads, new users, 
> negative criticisms and praise. Helping the community involved in a more 
> open fashion and communicating both within the project and to the 
> interested users and everyone out there is what we need and what are 
> going to continue doing. Others feel free to pitch in with their own 
> comments.
> 

Great report Rahul, thanks for sharing it with us.

-- 
Robert 'Bob' Jensen <marketing-list at fedoralinks.org>
Fedora Marketing Projects
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