FUDCon Kuala Lumpur Day 3

This morning I arrived back in Berlin and directly went from the airport to the office. Now I am home and about to summarize the last day of FUDCon Kuala Lumpur 2012.

Just like the other days we started at 10 am, but this time not as many people were around as on Friday or Saturday. And the people who were present seemed a little tired – I guess that was because of FUDPub the night before.

In the big auditorium Praveen presented his “RPM Packaging basics” talk and Ankur gave some additional background. After that it was my turn with the “Advanced RPM packaging” workshop, but again I had the feeling that many people in the audience still needed more basics before we could move on. So I did a live demo and packaged a simple package (Beaver) from scratch. Within 20 minutes we created a fully Fedora packaging guidelines compliant package to prove that packaging really is not rocket science. I then used the remaining 40 minutes for advanced topics and showed some of my spec files that contain cool tricks and evil hacks, so even long time contributors could still get some inspirations.

But something was wrong. I mean, there was nothing really wrong, but people seemed a little lethargic. The lecture rooms were pretty empty and instead attendees hung out on the hallways. Therefor we decided to make a hard cut and knock the schedule on the head. After the lunch break we gathered in the auditorium and pitched all talks again. But not only that: We took barcamp to the next level: After pitching the already prepared sessions we asked what people actually wanted to hear about. You want SELinux? You want systemd? You want video and image editing on Fedora? If somebody volunteered for a session, we added these sessions, too. The result was a much better schedule than before. The number of talks and workshops was still the same – in fact it was even slightly higher – but suddenly people showed up in the right talk instead of wondering around or handing out. The pitch had given everybody a new boost.

At 4 pm we met for the closing ceremony. Eric’s Abu Mansur Manaf’s closing keynote turned out to be a real highlight. Without any notes or slides and in just 15 minutes he summarized many ideas of FOSS in a way that surely made a permanent impression on many people. Just the right thing before people leave again for their local communities in Asia and around the world.

But there was one more thing to do: The raffle for the 2 Samsung Galaxy Tabs which UCTI  OSCC-MAMPU generously donated. I was the lucky one to do the lucky draw and I was even more lucky when I draw the first price: One of the lucky winners (or even both?) was one of the volunteers. They have done an amazing job with this FUDCon and I think they all deserved to win a prize, even if we didn’t have so many giveaways.

I am glad and grateful I have gone to Kuala Lumpur. I met old friends again, met many people I wanted to meet in person for a long time and last but not least became acquainted to many new and true friends. Their geniality and hospitality is outstanding and I learned a lot from them. The most important lessen I have learned: Even if the APAC community may be small compared to NA or EMEA, it’s alive and kicking. I am sure we will hear more from them in the near future and I am looking forward to FUDCon APAC 2013. No matter where it is, count me in!