Yesterday was the second day of FUDCon Kuala Lumpur 2012 and the first day with scheduled talks. After the first day with barcamps I was curious to see how talks work out.
We arrived at 9 and until 10, a lot more people arrived. And when I say a “lot I” mean a lot. People were coming in waves as many of them were whole classes of students. Whenever a new bus arrived, we had a long queue at the registration desk, but people waited patiently.
Joshua started the day with his talk about increasing participation in FOSS projects. It was an awesome talk and even if I am doing community building for quite a while now still learned some new things.
The day continued with talks and the attendance overall was pretty well. However topics and target audience did not always match. We had a whole lot of people who are not (that) familiar with Linux or Fedora and when they found themselves in a talk that was too technical for them, they looked a bit confused and lost. Fortunately they all knew the “Rule of Two Feet” and simply left one talk and attended another.
At 4 pm we had the usual tea break and after that, everybody gathered in the big audience for lightning talks. Again the start was a little sluggish but after I gave a quick talk about LXDE (which is amazingly popular here in Asia), people quickly continued and we had a lot of good and very funny talks.
At some point we had to make a hard stop because we were running out of time and still needed to do the lucky draw. Participants of the FOSS survey which we did in cooperation with UCTI could win some nice prices. There will be another raffle today and this time we even can give away two brand new Galaxy Tabs and I hope I will win one of them.
After that, we left for FUDPub. Again we had a shuttle bus that took us directly to the hotel where FUDPub was taking place. This FUDPub was different, it was more a FUDDinner or FoodPub as there were tons of food but no alcoholic drinks. While everything is pretty affordable here in Malaysia, alcohol is very uncommon and therefor expensive. The food was extraordinary and after we finished dinner, two amazing Fedora (TM!) cakes arrived.
People decided it was on me as Beefy Miracle (I was waring my hotdog costume again which caused a lot of fun) and in Izhar as the main event organizer to cut the cake. I gave away the first piece to Kushal as he said he wanted to feed Izhar. I should not have done this, because instead of feeding Izhar, Kushal smashed it right into Izhar’s face. This was the beginning of a huge cake fight that hardly left anybody out and pretty much messed up the room. I think they will charge us extra for cleaning but at least nobody got injured. 😉
An awesome day of FUDCon has come to an end and now I am looking forward for day three which is just about to start. I’ll have to leave this afternoon after the tea break because my plane leaves this evening. Hopefully I find the time to blog about day 3 at the airport before I take off.
They followed the Fedora logo guidelines well 🙂