I can remember my feelings when getting the invitation to attend and have a talk in the first Flock. It is so excited to have that big chance to meet all Fedora buddies who have worked hard together to produce Fedora releases for years.
However, after that, the fact I have to face is a long trip from my home city (Hanoi, Vietnam) to Flock (Charleston, SC, US). Actually, it took over 30 hours to get to Flock. And I would like to have my special thanks to Stephen Gallagher picked me up at the CHS airport. It made me feelings like I was at my home.
There were a lot of interesting activities at Flock, talks, hackfests, evening parties, etc. All talks had been scheduled properly before. Days would start with a keynote. “The Highly Esteemed Fedora Project Leader’s World-Famous State of Fedora Address” keynote by FPL, Robyn, is in the first day. In the second day, the invited speaker, Aeva Palcek, from Lulzbot, delivered another interesting keynote about Lulzbot, Open Hardware and 3D Printing. And the last keynote, “Making Free Fonts Full Time” by Dave Crossland, was on Sunday.
Honestly, there were too many rooms for talks then I had to consider much between those interesting sessions. Finally, I could choose some topics to attend. I also volunteered to moderate time in some sessions including: “Putting the PaaS in Fedora” by Steven Citron-Pousty, “OpenShift, Fedora, and the future of packaged web apps” by Andy Grimm and “Fedora Project Ambassadors – Collaborate, Design, Engage” by Christos Bacharakis.
I have my own talk just after Christos’s talk, at 11:00AM in ECTR 109 about “Ambassadors Work in a Region – Annual Planning“. I went through the whole presentation and got a lot of comments and ideas. One of my main points is to build a process to evaluate quality of the events/activities.
The main idea for evaluating events/activities is:
- Events and activities should be previously planned as early and detailed as possible. In this step other people can have more comments and ideas to make it better. Organizing team will also have more time to prepare for facilities, swags, speakers, talks, etc. Of course, it’s much better if those events/activities have got rough plans and they are noted in regional annual plans from beginning of the year.
- After a good plan is made, organizer could request for funds on regional trac and get approval in regional meetings.
- Then they should be happened as is or better than what they planned. At this time, Peer-review model could be applied to have people to review and support each other. To be clearer, Peer-review program has been using in EMEA for a few years. Each EMEA ambassador often have a “peer” who work together with him/her to make better events/activities.
- It’s open to think more and should be build to a complete Events/Activities Evaluation Process.
The next talk “The Fedora Ambassadors Census” by Christoph Wickert is also interesting. I believe we can reuse that survey in other regions. It should be done annually to identify the real stages of Fedora Ambassadors in each regions and countries to have better plans for the next year.
In the last day, I joined into key signing party organized by Nick Bebout. Honestly, It’s my first time to join such a party and it’s a good experience for me to push that up in my country in the near future.
The first Flock is closing today. I would like to thank you all who make it happened, especially Tom, Ruth and others to organize one of biggest Fedora events. It is more than a good event and I hope I will have more chances to join with all of you in the next future events.
Truong Anh Tuan
From Charleston, SC, United States.