FOSS for Life

Sunday, March 2nd, 2014:

Every incredible time would end, anyway. This was that last day of FOSSASIA 2014 and all activities were moved from Norton University to Open Institute. Fedora had registered a workshop to instruct people how to join into Fedora Project and have some very first contributions.

There were about ten attendees to our workshop. It was not a big group, however, most of them were quite interested in joining and contributing to Fedora.

Sirko, Kushal, Thang and me lead the workshop. After some basic introduction about Fedora Project, our four foundations, our missions, etc. by Sirko to help people know more about Fedora, we tried to support them do some first tasks to join into Fedora Project. People registered their FAS accounts, signed Fedora CLA and created their own wiki pages.

They got all done fine. The new wiki pages introduce a bit about themselves: Dang Hong Phuc from Vietnam, Somvannda Kong from Cambodia, Nisa Botrey Ban from Cambodia, Anwesha Das from India, Praveen Patil from India, Sarup Banskota from India (he had already joined into Fedora Design team before).

We introduced them more about some parts of Fedora Project and helped them choose their interested teams. People were really interested in join to Ambassadors team. I myself took mentoring Nisa and Somvannda from Cambodia. When being approved, they would be two first Fedora ambassadors in Cambodia. I hoped they could start promote Fedora in Cambodia soon. Beside that, I took mentoring Phuc and Anwesha too. I told all of them to explore Fedora Project first and suggested them to join to some other teams (beside Ambassadors) which would help them a lot in speaking Fedora Project out loud. Two others were mentored by Kushal. He is the only available mentor in India now while he needs to take over some pending shakthimann’s tickets so he would have a lot of work.

After that, Kushal introduced about Public SSH key and GPG keys and we helped people to generate their owned keys. Then, a small key signing party was organized on site. Kushal instructed people to understand “the Web of Trust” concepts and how to sign other people’s keys. People needed to show their ID cards, of course. And finally, we trusted each others 🙂

The workshop was successful. We “recruited” six additional Fedora contributors. Beside Sarup who had already joined into Design team, others were suggested to L10n team and we were really happy to have two first Cambodia committed to start Fedora Khmer translation team.

FOSSASIA 2014 was ended successfully, at least, with Fedora team. It’s time to take a short rest and explore the new mythical land, Angkor, Siem Reap and Cambodia 😉

See more: series of photos.

Saturday, March 1st, 2014:

We had an interesting time on the previous day so we hoped we can get more attention from participants this day.

In our Fedora dedicated room, the day started with an Inkscape workshop by Sirko Kemter. There were about 50 attendees. Some of them use Linux and others use Windows and MacOS. We tried to help people to install Inkspace. It was not a big deal for Linux users, but somewhat difficult for Windows and MacOS ones, especially, in that bad network conditions. Fedora users, of course, got more helps from us ;). They were also happier because they could get your laptop prepared sooner then focus more time to the workshop.

After that, the topic changed to an invited talk about Linux and FOSS users group in Cambodia. It was not a quite big group but they had organized some events and activities. I thought to get in touch with them for further collaborating for Fedora activities in the future, as up to this time, we had not got any Fedora activities in Cambodia (however, this fact was changed completely in the next day – the last day in FOSSASIA 2014 – see my next report about the last day).

In this day, there were some other talks from Feodra guys, including: HA with Fedora by Nguyen Nang Thang and PaaS with Fedora by Uditha Bandara Wijerathna which sent participants a stronger message that they can do a lot with Fedora, mostly everything!

We would hope that people would pay more attention to Fedora, adopt to it, join to contribute to, etc. and lets see what happen in the next day.

In the evening, we got a nice dinner again in a nice local restaurant with Cambodian foods and a lot of beer 🙂

FOSSASIA 2014 organizing team was awesome so I would hope I can have more chance to attend to next year(s). It is even very nice if we can organize an APAC FUDCons together with FOSSASIA. It would be a good idea to get more people to attend, both Fedora contributors and our (potential) users while keeping the total budget managed (you know, there is a limit of budget for each FUDCon). Why not, I believe that we can try it.

See more: series of photos.

Friday, February 28th, 2014:

Then FOSSASIA 2014 started with Welcome speech from organizers and the event host.

During Opening ceremony, I got a keynote representative for Fedora about “The Future of Fedora Project”. In 5+ minutes, I tried to speak out the overview of Fedora and Fedora.next to give people some most important information attract more people come to Fedora dedicated sessions in the afternoon.

In the afternoon, I presented “Fedora.next – The Future of Fedora” in more details.: where we are, what we would like to do in the future, why and how we do that, etc. People paid special attention on Server and Cloud products with a lot of questions about what we do in Cloud area.

My Fedora.next slides: https://speakerdeck.com/tuanta/fedora-dot-next-an-introduction (thanks to Matthew’s slides)

There is a dedicated room for Fedora in FOSSASIA 2014. Following my presentation, Sirko Kemter presented some basic terms in Fedora with Fedora A-Z Guide. It is really exciting presentation with a lot of nice graphics.

In the afternoon, Sirko had another interesting talk about Seven ways to contribute to Fedora (without programming). People seems more interested in contribution to Fedora since they have got more choices to join and contribute to Fedora and Open source.

The day ended with an exciting joined dinner for all speakers. We did go along the Lonle Sap river by boat, drank beer, made friends, chatted and so on 🙂

See more: series of photos.

Thursday, February 27th, 2014:

It was excited since my flight took off in time and in fact, I got two travel mates: Nang Thang and Arky (I usually travel to FOSS events alone 🙁 ). It was also my first time of first class lounge usage (thanks to the new golden GLP card 🙂 ).

It was great to meet old friends again in Phnom Penh, Kushal, Sirko and many others. There was a nice pre-meetup in the evening. I took this chance to chat with old friends as well as new ones, share some initial ideas and tasted Angkor beer 🙂

Thanks to Mario, Phuc and all organizing team to make it.

See more: series of photos.