Fedora Elections are ongoing. Deadline is December 9th at 23:59:59 UTC – vote now!
Last call for F19 naming proposals
This is the final reminder that the Fedora 19 naming collection ends today at 23:59 UTC. This means you have 5 hours left to propose a name. Before proposing a name, please make sure to read the guidelines.
Gesundes Selbstbewusstsein
„Ich war damals nicht so perfekt wie heute.“
Fedora Board Runoff Election
As you might know we had a tie of two candidates (Nick and Robert) in the Fedora Board election. The runoff election between the two of them has now started, please vote now! Voting is open for one week, that is until 2012-06-20 00:00:00 UTC.
Fedora elections about to end – vote NOW!
In case you did not yet cast your vote in the current Fedora elections, please do so now! The voting period closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on the 7th. Yes, that is today!
As a special bonus, you most Fedora contributors this time should be allowed to vote for FAmSCo, too – even if they are not (yet) a Fedora ambassador. I have been working hard on the new FAmSCo election guidelines and therefor I want all of you to vote! Now!
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!
FUDCon Kuala Lumpur Day 2
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.
FUDCon Kuala Lumpur Day 1
I got up a little later than planned because it turns out that I am pretty jet-lagged after traveling for more than 24 hours. Nevertheless I managed to have breakfast before we had to leave. In front of the hotel, a shuttle bus was already waiting and quickly brought us to the venue at UCTI. Everything is extremely well organized here, thanks to an outstanding job of the Malayan Fedora community.
When we arrived at the university, we quickly registered in order to get the vouchers for lunch and teatime. Because of the high number of registered participants, the vouchers are limited to 50 attendees (plus Fedora contributors and FUDCon volunteers) which are given away first come first served. While I’d love to pay just everything for everybody, it turns out that doing first come first served is very useful: Not later then 8:30 most attendees had shown up and registered, even if the official opening was not before 10:00 pm.
After a quick introduction and some announcements, I kicked of FUDCon with my keynote. I had mixed feelings because on the one hand I had to jump in for others, on the other hand I am proud to have the opportunity to speak to so many people.
I didn’t want to start with something technical, but instead do something about community. My talk was about „Leadership in leaderless organizations“. Readers of The Starfish and the Spider probably know what I am talking about: Traditional leadership is – ideally – based on authority, elections or knowledge; In a less ideal world, it is based on birth, money or even fear. But none of these concepts work in an open system like FOSS in general and Fedora in particular as they don’t encourage participation. Still we do have leaders, but these people are not leading by any kind of formal authority but by example.
- They don’t command, they guide.
- They don’t demand, they encourage.
- They don’t make rules, they help defining standards that people voluntarily subscribe to.
I finished my talk with a quote from an email Max sent me this morning:
„It may not always be pretty, and it may not always be easy, but
persistence wins.“
However the concept of open, decentralized organizations seemed completely alien to the majority of attendees. Most of them were students and only few have have worked in a FOSS project before. Nevertheless they were fascinated by the idea that something that chaotic can not only exist but be very successful. They had a lot of questions after I finished and we had a vital discussion before we started pitching the barcamp sessions
I was skeptic if it makes sense to have barcamps on the first day, but the idea was to not ‚waste‘ talks because Friday was not supposed to be the most productive day anyway. Many people were not be able to attend on Friday and we had a long break after dinner (on Friday after dinner, people here go to the mosque). I still was skeptic when we started pitching, but it seems people were just afraid or ashamed of standing in front of an audience and making a proposal. Turns out I was wrong, and in the end we had so many sessions that we decided to go for slots of only 30 minutes.
I now think that starting the barcamps on the first day right after my keynote was a big win. We not only had a very interesting and productive day, we also had the perfect showcase for an open, autonomous and decentralized system: There was no leader, nobody made rules, yet we had no problems making decisions and respond to the problem of having too many talks. The open system always wins!
AFAICS the first day of FUDCon Kuala Lumpur was a big success. I am grateful to be here and I’d like to thank everybody who helped to make this happen. Stay tuned for more awesomeness from Kuala Lumpur!
FUDCon Kuala Lumpur Day 0
After a pretty long journey to Kuala Lumpur I finally arrived and checked in at the hotel. I met Tuan and Izhar. We went to the venue at the UCTI. I was glad to see that Izhar had a lot of volunteers helping him and everybody was busy preparing stuff.
We were not able to finish as the building was being closed at 9:30 pm and we had to leave. We decided to declare the biggest room in the Hotel the „Crew room“ and continue working there. I did not join because there was not much I could help with and instead, I joined some of the volunteers for dinner. We had a good time sitting outside a nice restaurant. When I looked at my watch is was nearly midnight and I was happy that we left a little later. After the long journey I was pretty jet-lagged and I still wanted to blog and tweak the slides the slides for my keynote. I’ll let you know how it went.
LinuxTag Tickets
If anybody still needs free tickets for LinuxTag, please comment below you need to get yourself one as mine are all gone.
Falls noch jemand Gratis-Tickets für den LinuxTag braucht, bitte unten kommentieren. Selbst besorgen, denn meine sind jetzt alle weg.