[Ambassadors] Event report: FrOSCon 2011

[Tye Castor]

So wish I could attend anything like this. My area is a little dry =/

On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 1:43 PM, Christoph Wickert <
christoph.wickert at googlemail.com> wrote:

> Hi fellow ambassadors,
>
> last weekend the 6th FrOSCon took place in St Augustin. Once again it
> was a nice event, but this time we tried something new: A Fedora
> Activity Day (FAD) as part of the conference.
>
> I arrived at St Augustin on Friday around 7 p.m.. A lot of people were
> already there and it was nice to meet a lot of friends and many of the
> typical suspects again. Unfortunately we could not yet build up the
> booth as Robert, who had the event box and the banners with him, was
> stuck in heavy traffic jam. When he finally arrived at half past 8 we
> quickly prepared the booth before we left for dinner with our friends
> from Xfce.
>
> We decided to go to Bonn because Christian lives there and he
> recommended an Ethiopian Restaurant. Of course we were a little skeptic
> and made bad jokes (“Ethiopian? We’ll go home hungry!” and alike) but
> Roha Café has completely proven us wrong: Nice atmosphere, friendly
> people and awesome food that is eaten just with the hands by wrapping it
> in bread. We were nine people and ordered 3 different plates for 3
> people each but we didn’t manage to finish them because we were
> completely filled up. Each of us had 2 drinks, some also had a delicious
> Ethiopian coffee after dinner and in the end the bill was ridiculously
> cheap (less than 14 EUR per person). So if you ever happen to be in
> Bonn, go to Roha Café.
>
> Some of us wanted to go wild afterwards and decided to go for more
> drinks, but as FrOSCon opens doors at 8:15 a.m. on Saturday, most of us
> decided to go back to the hotel. I went to Cologne with Enrico because I
> stayed at a friend and commuted to St Augustin.
>
> On Saturday we had a German Translation team leaders of GNOME, Xfce and
> LXDE. We had Hendrik Richter and Christian Kirbach from GNOME, Fabian
> Nowak and me from Xfce and me again for LXDE. Even though the meeting
> was a little short I consider it very successful. Our goal is to have
> consistent translations throughout the different desktops and it was
> nice to see we agree on so many things, even on tiny details. There is
> still a lot of work to do but harmonizing our translation guidelines is
> a first step in the right direction.
>
> Saturday was the better of the two days: The number of visitors was
> lower than last year (somebody even said it was all time negative
> record) and Sunday was even worse than Saturday. I don’t think it was
> that bad, we had visitors at the Fedora booth most of the time, but
> Sunday definitely could have been better. Not only the exhibition, but
> also our FAD.
>
> The FAD began at 10:00. Benedikt gave a talk about his “Fedora Home
> Server”. The title mimics the “Windows Home Server” and so does the
> feature set of the server. Of course you can add more services and the
> audience came up with interesting ideas. After that Robert delivered a
> talk about SELinux. It seems SELinux still causes people a lot of
> headache and thus a lot of people came to Robert’s presentation.
>
> Next up was Anreas with a talk about Func, the Fedora Unified Network
> Controller. It was perhaps the most entertaining talk because Andreas
> made a dry topic a lot of fun, especially when he started showing stuff
> on not on a demo machine but a real production environment.
>
> After a short lunch break I gave two more talks, one about remixing
> Fedora and the other about RPM packaging. I hardly had the latter
> prepared, I just used the slides from one of my many previous talks
> about packaging and we made it more like a workshop. People liked this a
> lot: It definitely makes a difference if you just go through some slides
> or if you have a RPM package or a live CD ready at the end of the
> workshop. The audience was very experienced, most of them already were
> Fedora users or had at least used it, so we could even address advanced
> topics.
>
> Having a FAD or a FUDCon as part pf another event is always a difficult
> decision. On the one hand a lot of people there, both contributors as
> well as visitors. The contributors don’t need to pay for travel again
> and you reach an audience that you would not reach with a Fedora-only
> event. On the other hand people get distracted by the main event. There
> are many other talks and so much to see. Because all contributors want
> to attend either the Fedora event or one of the other talks, it’s
> difficult to have enough booth personnel all the time. So if you you are
> hacking on something special and you just want to get things done ™ it
> is maybe better to meet somewhere in the middle of nowhere to not be
> disturbed.
>
> Nevertheless I think this FAD was worth it: It was not a hack fest but
> more like a one day mini-FUDCon full of talks and as such it makes
> perfectly sense to have it at FrOSCon: FrOSCon is famous for it’s talks
> while the exhibition is secondary. We managed to address a new audience
> and raised awareness for Fedora.
>
> I’d like to thank all Fedora contributors who helped us to make FrOSCon
> 2011 a successful event, namely (and in no particular order)
>
>      * Benedikt for his 1st Fedora talk
>      * Raphael for doing booth service
>      * Dominic for his dry humor and for delivering Fedora swag to
>        Hamburg for Software Freedom Day
>      * Christian who also is part of the FrOSCon team and helped us a
>        lot with the organization
>      * Sven for doing endless hours of booth service while we held our
>        FAD
>      * Jens for showing up and helping out even though his spare time
>        is very rare
>      * Sirko for the FAD posters and the Inkscape workshops
>      * Gerd for showing up so I finally had the chance to finally meet
>        my sponsoree in person after 2 years
>      * Andreas for his brilliant and entertaining talk about Func
>      * Robert for bringing all the booth material to St Augustin and
>        delivering his SELinux talk
>      * Sandro and Marcus for showing up although they were not
>        officially part of the Fedora team this year
>      * Zoltan for sending us flyers and Cheat Cubes
>
> Regards,
> Christoph
>
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