Flock 2013 - A great success

From August 9th to 12th, I had the chance to join Flock, the first Fedora Contributor Conference of a new kind, where about 200 people from 22 countries gathered to talk about the present and the future of Fedora.

Location was the nice city of Charleston, South Carolina, where the local college hosted our cheerful and motley crowd. So what did we do? Lot of stuff, really much more than I was able to digest!

Francis Marion Hotel

I will attempt here some recollection of what I saw and experienced, but before....

TL; DR; version

Flock was a great and productive experience, the best place you can be to share what you know and learn what you don't (cit.) with the Fedora community. I really look forward participating to the next one, to be held somewhere in Europe (bids will open soon).

I would like to thank Red Hat and all the other sponsors for making all of this possible, all the organizers team, and in particular to +Ruth Suehle, who spent an inordinate amount of time pulling all the things together to make the first Flock a resounding success. You made it!

Day 0.

I traveled with +Robert Mayr from Milan, the flights (we had to take three before landing in Charleston) were pretty uneventful, except in the middle of the ocean I started to feel sick and when we finally arrived at the hotel I just had time for a shower before collapsing in the bed at about 8pm...

Day 1.

Sickness was gone, but jet lag caught me with a 4.30am wake up :) Not to worry, I had plenty of time to shower, activate our USA SIMs (ReadySIM rocks!), sort some emails and prepare for the first day of Flock.

Everyone in the auditorium for the keynote

After the customary "State of Fedora Address" by +Robyn Bergeron I went to +Matthew Miller talk about Cloud and why Fedora should care about it (very well presented and informative), then +Jon Masters with 64 bit ARM goodness (but sadly, not the pile of devices I hoped to see :), and finally +Jiří Eischmann with the other Ambassadors for some updates on the program. In the afternoon, some more ARM related talk with +Peter Robinson where I could check a couple of XO laptops and finally the HyperKitty Hackfest with +Aurélien Bompard

XO laptops @ Flock

Day one ended at the Blind Tiger Pub, with lots of nice food and beer (if you picked the right one :P) and plenty of hallway chat.

Day 2.

SELinux for mere mortals. That's me!

The second day I picked very good sessions: after the fun keynote from +Aeva Palecek of +Lulzbot.com, I went to see +Thomas Cameron talking about SELinux and how to properly handle it: this was so interesting I will probably make up slides for the same talk but in italian. We will see...

The rest of the morning was devoted to OpenShift with talks from +steven citron-pousty and +Andy Grimm, if you see them around in any conference do not miss their talk!

In the afternoon I joined the OpenStack test event to see how I could install it on my laptop; regrettably, in the end I was not able to have have a working setup (the development version I installed was not playing well with SELinux enabled) and spent some time to track and undo all the changes to the system.

The evening event was at +Mynt Charleston, a nice and trendy disco bar that was really, really appreciated by most people.

Tasting Moonshine at Mynt

Day 3.

Stairs to the auditorium

Started up by a keynote from +Dave Crossland, initial author of the Cantarell font used by default in GNOME3, the third day got into gear with +Tom Callaway and his proposal to revamp how we deliver updates by default. Discussion was vibrant and productive, I think we will do much better with a revised system. I ended the morning with the ambassadors related talk by +Christoph Wickert, where we drafted the plan for running a census of active ambassadors and encourage new ones to join the program.

In the afternoon, I joined +Luke Macken for the Bodhi hackfest and this turned out as one the most productive sessions: in fact, thanks to Mathieu Bridon I was quickly able to install the dev environment and start hacking on the filtering code, and the next day I had my pull request merged in the repository!

The last evening event was at the +South Carolina Aquarium, with a spectacular dinner surrounded by fishes and other wildlife animals, I think an evening most people will hardly forget.

New Cooper River Bridge (4023m)

That's it, more or less. See you at next Flock!

FAD EMEA 2012 Rheinfelden

For the first time since I become a Fedora Ambassador, I participated to the 2012 EMEA FAD, traditionally hosted by Gerold Kassube in Rheinfelden (Germany), in the wonderful Beuggen Castle.

Main body and chapel at the Beuggen Castle

Now, as a mountain lover, I have few expectations from a trip through Switzerland: one is great landscapes, the other is snow. I was not disappointed on both accounts!
In fact, despite the Rheinfelden region is usually not very cold, we were welcome by nice snowfall. Of course that made it harder to reach Rheinfelden (me, Gabriele and Robert shared a car from Milan) but it also meant we woke up on Saturday in this environment:

Almost magical...

If you have not even been in a FAD you may now wonder what it looks like; basically, it is the place where Ambassadors discuss current issues, identify potential improvements and try to come up with a plan to reach goals. In the process, if anything turns out to be broken, we fix it right away.

Christoph made already a nice summary of the main points we touched during the event. In particular, I would like to note we will be trying to expand the range of Fedora branded goods to give away (as swag or otherwise). We also discussed several other items, like the need for more local events, and an expansion of the new Ambassadors mentoring program so new guys will find an easier way into the project. Additionally, we will be run a census among our fellow Ambassadors to understand how they feel about the program, what they are doing and what the project could do to help them more.
Finally, we will encourage all Ambassadors to host an annual get-together type of event in their own country in order to have a tighter local community.

Of course, no FAD is complete with a solid social part. In this case, the real treat was the dinner we consumed on Saturday at the blindekuh (blind cow) restaurant.

The main feature there is a large dining room completely surrounded by thick, black drapes so the room is in absolute darkness. For good measure, you have to leave in storage cabinets at the entrance everything that can emit light.

Luckily enough, reaching your seat and getting your food to the table is not a problem because waiters are blind, but managing to keep calm and consume your dinner is another story! This was a really strong experience and after a while I started to feel a bit weird, something in between drunk and scared. Of course, I was also consuming beer but I'm sure the darkness was to blame...

All in all, my first FAD was a great experience and I look forward to next year for another one. I would also like to thank all the FAD participants for a fun and productive week end: in particular Gerold for organizing our stay and for the great dinner at blindekuh, and Gabriele for driving 5 hours straight in the snow with his brand new winter tires.

LinuxCon 2012 Barcelona Report

I am happy to host the report from the latest Italian Ambassador joining the program, Giuseppe Palestra,  who broke the ice by participating to the LinuxCon 2012 in Barcellona. Well done Giuseppe!

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LinuxCon 2012 Barcelona Report

The conference started at 8:00 am with registration of attendees. Me and
the other fedora ambassadors (Alvaro and Ruth) arranged the booth and at
9:00am keynotes started. After the keynotes we waited at the booth for
contacting the conference visitors. After the keynotes I started
presenting myself to other people close to our booth, Red Hat people or
correlated Fedora Project people principally. There were a lot of
interesting talks during this day but I decided to partecipate only to a
little subset; the most interesting for me in LinuxCon was "Virtual
Machine snapshots: Overview and Illustration of Different Types of
Snapshots With libvirt/QEMU". In this day started also the Embedded
Linux Conference Europe 2012 and for me the most interesting talk was
The PF_ZIO: Using Network Frames to Convey I/O Data and Meta-Data hold
by an italian professor Alessandro Rubini.

A lot of stickers and about 30 DVD (Fedora 17) was distributed in this day.

6th November

The second day starts with keynotes at 9:00 am and at the end me and
other ambassadors were ready to speak with a lot of people at the
booth. People were very interested to our OLPC XO with Fedora, people
tried our operating system and appreciate it. In this day I follow 3
talks and the most interesting i for me were "Introduction to oVirt
Virtualization Management Platform." In the afternoon I attended the
dinner offered by Intel, at the dinner all attendees got surprised by
the participation of Linus Torvalds. :)

About 30 DVD distributed.

My experience at the booth of Fedora Project has ended, but my
commitment will continue...I knew a lot of enthusiastic fedora people,
especially from Italia, Russia, Finland, USA and with some of these I
entertain relationships about Fedora by email.
I will hope to attend at other conferences to see again the interesting
people I met in Barcelona.
Special thanks to Ruth and Alvaro.

Giuseppe

FAD Milano report

We held the FAD event in Milano last Saturday, where a few Italian Fedora contributors gathered to show interested users and wannabe how to participate to various teams of the Fedora Project.

Robert Mayr, website team

In particular, we had Andrea Veri (infrastructure), Robert Mayr (websites), Samuel Iuri (design), Mario Santagiuliana (localization) talking about how their teams work. Moreover, a talk about contributing to the kernel development was held  by Federico Vaga and Massimiliano Bugni shown how to handle Fedora respins both for home and office usage.

About me, I tried to quickly describe the importance of packaging for the whole distribution, then invited interested parties to gather in another room for a practical session. For this, I restructured an older presentation I gave about packaging, adding more workshop type material from both Tom Callaway and Miroslav Suchy. The resulting practical session lasted well beyond the original schedule of one hour, but I think it was well received, and the few but very interested users asked many questions and raised interesting topics for further discussion.

SWAG!

The event run along with the Linux Day, the main FOSS event in Italy held in more than 100 cities. With this arrangement we hoped to gather more participants as a result, but in the end this did not really work as expected. However, I quickly counted about 30 'heads' just before my introduction so in the end I think we see the glass half full and be happy for putting together a great team. I'm sure we will be able to do more wonderful events in the future!

Of course, no event is complete without a good team dinner. And in fact we had a nice one, where we commented the day and discussed plans for the next events in front of pizza and beers. Like these:

My personal PRO/CON list

PRO: location. Very nice and spacious. I think it was evaluated for the 2011 FUDCon in Milan but for some reason it did not work.
PRO: presenters. I  never saw them in 'action'
PRO: organization. Marina and Gabriele anticipated every possible need, so the sessions run smoothly.

CON: concurrency. We need to try it again on a different date, without competing with other Linux related events in other cities (this surely prevented some contributors from traveling)
CON: the University have a policy of 'no signs out of bullettin boards'. This made directing the people to the event more difficult than it should be. We could buy some outdoor standing Fedora banners, and use them to direct people in cases like this.
CON: tight schedule. Practical sessions lasts longer than regular talks, so we were forced to do it concurrently with other talks. I hope next time we can do a full day event with a single track so people do not need to pick just one (and I will not miss friends' talks!)

FUDCon Paris 2012

Robert Mayr (robyduck)
Although I was the only italian guy who at the end decided to attend the FUDCon event in Paris, I enjoyed it very much and I hope to be present also at the next one. Let's see how it was for me:

Saturday 13th october, Day 1

I woke up at 3:15 am (!) and arrived at Paris Beauvais at 8:10 am. From there I moved to the city and before registering to the event I went to the Arc de Triomphe for taking a picture .

At the Eurosites George V I got my Fedora badge and started looking for some known faces, but the operation “matching Nickname -> face -> Real Name” was not very easy at the beginning.

As I didn’t know anyone (it was my first FUDCon) I decided to explore the rooms reserved for the talks, because the first day the main event in Eurosites George V Business Center was the Open Forum. Finally I went into the main room, where Robyn Bergeron was talking about her keynotes and where the most of the attendees were listening.

Generally I would say that the target of the first day where more the new users, while the other two days were more technical and dedicated to Fedora Contributors.

After the keynotes were finished I started presenting myself to as much guys as possible and so I slowly did the match nick/face/name, one of them was Kèvin Raymond who was so kind to host me at his apartment during the FUDCon event. It was really useful and nice speaking with the persons directly after having spent so much time chatting on IRC or Mailing List.

In the afternoon I decided to attend the talk held by Marek Jelen about Openshift, it was very interesting and I'll soon try to deepen the arguments which he talked about.
When finished I went to the Infrastructure talk (pingou or Pierre-Yves Chibon) and 'How to be a Leader in a non gerarchic structure' like the fedoraproject.org is (Christoph Wickert).

It was time to go around in Paris before going to Fudpub, so I started a little tour with Fabian and Gerold in which we met also the hungarian guys. We also decided to eat something before joining the others at Fudpub and then continued eating a lot of french Pizza and drinking 2-3 liters of beer...

 Sunday 14th october, Day 2

The second day was held in the Citè des Sciences and it was a very beautiful location. We started presenting the talks planned for the day and so I jumped all the day from a talk to another.

I attended the talk held by spot (Tom Callaway) about the end user experience and what we could expect from the future. It was quite interesting to hear his opinion about this topics. Obviously I heard the presentation of the websites team by shaiton (Kèvin Raymond) ad then also the XFCE environment by cwickert, who gave us also some background about the development of this DE.

I appreciated very much the swag session, where I got the necessary material for the event we are going to organize in Milan at the Linux Day. I'm able also to give some swags to other LD locations, where other ambassadors will held some talks about Fedora. Thank you Jiri and Robyn!

In the afternoon I attended the Kernel talk and then the discussion about EMEA ambassadors held by Fabian Affolter. As we actually have only one mentor we solved this problem proposing new mentors and this was very important. We also discussed about improvements of the mentoring process, because it should be easy to do but at the same time filter the candidates avoiding to have too much inactive ambassadors. In the end the only thing we can do is to try to do as much as possible, and events like the FUDCon are motivation to do more.

After the talks I departed, because monday I had to work, but thank's to the french organization team for this event. It was really nice and well organized, now I'm looking forward to next year...

Fedora Activity Day a Milano

Come sicuramente saprete, il 27 Ottobre si tiene il Linux Day, classico evento autunnale con decine di manifestazioni in tutta Italia.

Quello che invece forse ancora non sapete è che la comunità Fedora italiana sta preparando nello stesso giorno un evento dedicato a tutti quelli che vogliono saperne di più sulla nostra distribuzione, come è costruita, come si fa partecipare e tanto altro ancora.

Quindi, se siete interessati a partecipare o semplicemente curiosi di incontrare alcuni dei membri italiani della comunità questa è la vostra occasione!

L'appuntamento è a Milano, alle ore 14 presso il Politecnico di Milano, Edificio 3 "Gino Cassinis". Le aule dovrebbero essere la S.0.2 e la S.0.5, ma quando sarete sul posto troverete senz'altro le indicazioni da seguire.

Durante il pomeriggio non mancheranno talk e sessioni pratiche; queste ultime riguarderanno la partecipazione al team di traduzione e la pacchettizzazione  di programmi in formato RPM, quindi non scordate di portare il vostro laptop!

Sul wiki Fedora troverete la pagina con tutti i dettagli dell'evento (in inglese)

Colgo l'occasione per ringraziare Marina Latini (deneb) e Gabriele Trombini (mailga) per aver preso in mano le redini organizzative, nonchè tutti quelli che hanno dato la loro disponibilità a collaborare al successo di questa iniziativa.

La locandina del Linux Day Milano

Linux Day: Fedora 13 Media shipped

I had the chance to handle the requests for Fedora Media from LUGs and other organizing committees for the upcoming Linux Day, which is an important event in Italy scattered in more than 100 cities.

The Italian ambassadors team received a dozen direct requests for support with marketing material, which is nice given (as far as I know) we did absolutely nothing to promote the availability of such material.

Even if we favoured the events where Ambassadors are going to be present, we were able to send a small sample of what we had available (32 bit KDE Live CDs, 32 and 64bit DVDs) to all the requesters. 

Next year I definitely hope to improve by covering more events with our own ambassadors and by making sure we have a solid event kit in their hands!

Lesson learned:

• We need to allocate Media and other material earlier
• We need to understand how to request and use budget locally
• We need ambassadors from souther regions (two candidates identified already!)