[Ambassadors] My trip to FISL

[Igor Pires Soares]

Em Sex, 2008-04-25 às 15:43 -0400, Tom "spot" Callaway escreveu:
> I'd never been to South America before, so when Greg asked me if wanted
> to go to FISL to help represent Fedora, I said sure. Yes, I'd have to
> miss Lug Radio Live, but we weren't invited to that anyway. I'd never
> heard of FISL before, and all I knew about Brazil was that it was in
> South America, they like soccer, and they speak Portuguese.
> 
> When I arrived in Brazil, I quickly learned several additional facts:
> 
> 1. Most Brazilians don't speak any English, only Portuguese.
> 2. There are noticeably more women than men in Brazil. (The Economist
> says that the ratio is about 95 males to 100 females, but the locals
> said that it was more like 60/40).
> 3. Brazilians are really really really excited about Linux and FOSS.
> 
> When we got to FISL on the first day, all that we saw were lines!
> 
> http://ausil.us/gallery/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=3214&g2_serialNumber=2
> 
> We really weren't sure which line to get into, because, well, there were
> no signs and none of the locals spoke English, so we just got in one of
> the lines. It took more than an hour to get inside and get our badges,
> then we had to rush to the Fedora presentation (I'd made some F-9 slides
> the night before, and David Barzilay had translated them). We missed all
> of the presentation, but we got there in time for Q&A... which went
> well, thanks to David's quick translation skills.
> 
> FISL had over 7000 people in attendance, it was really overwhelming, but
> awesome! The language barrier was a pretty significant problem for me,
> as I really wanted to talk to people visiting the Fedora booth and folks
> in other booths. Eventually, I just gave up and just observed what was
> going on, and helped out whenever I could. I got laptops working with
> MPEG video to a TV output, installed Fedora 8 on someone's system,
> researched a sound driver for a rather obscure arm handheld device, and
> helped get Sugar running on top of Fedora (it is worth noting that
> ghbuild kills kittens).
> 
> The Ambassadors did a wonderful job with their booth, and the attendees
> definitely noticed. They had professional polo shirts, high quality
> pressed media of Fedora 8 (livecds and installs), and they were
> constantly talking to people. They even had a setup where people could
> register as they got a free DVD. They were very helpful to us Americans,
> and were very patient with our inability to speak to them. :) If it
> wasn't for them, our trip could have easily been a real waste, but they
> really made it worthwhile.
> 
> We ate a lot of good food, buffet style meals are extremely popular
> there. As reported, I am indeed a "culinary coward", because I did not
> partake in the eating of chicken hearts. The fact that I don't eat beef
> or pork made things... difficult, but if you like meat, Brazil is the
> place for you. We went to a churrascaria (aka, Brazilian BBQ) one
> evening, and that was just wild. Never ending meat, plus dancing and
> bolos! We also took some time to go sightseeing, hitting up some of the
> local museums (no English there either, but we got the jist of things),
> and to check out one of the large parks nearby. The park had a
> "mini-zoo" with monkeys and birds of paradise (real birds, not flowers).
> 
> In summary:
> * Brazil is a HOTBED of Free and Open Source activity. We have a lot of
> good Fedora talent in the region, and we're looking at ways that we can
> get more involved with them.
> * If I get the opportunity to return to FISL, I will surely learn some
> Portuguese first. :)

FISL is getting better year by year and it was really cool to have Spot,
Dennis and Greg around here. Although the language was a barrier I
believe we did our best to try to communicate and we had fun with it.
The problem is that we are used to write and read in English, but meet a
English native speaker personally is bit more rare.

We are pleased to have more people interested in our country and I hope
you guys keep coming to our events, because we really need to interact
more and share our experiences about open source software.

We distributed a huge amount of DVDs and LiveCDs at FISL. Everything we
had was distributed. We also installed Fedora in some usb sticks, did
some troubleshooting (Spot really helped us a lot), collected cases
about Linux migration and answered a lot of questions at our
presentation.

In addition I had a meeting with the leaders of many translation
projects such GNOME, KDE, Debian and Mandriva. It was the fist official
meeting of LDP-BR (Linux Documentation Project - Brazil). We are trying
to create a unified infrastructure where we can get smaller projects
translated. Since most people here doesn't speak english, as Spot said
before, localization is crucial for the growth of free software and this
initiative will benefit not just Fedora, but Free Software as a whole.

> Thanks,

No, thank YOU!

Regards,
Igor Pires Soares
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/IgorSoares