It turns out we have to leave early. Some people need to travel home and others have family duties – or both. Fortunately we worked hard and managed to complete our agenda.
For now, I just put all the results, todo items and open questions into the wiki. It’s still a rough draft, I will clean it up, format and elaborate it later today. Some of the most important decisions include:
We’ll make a Fedora Ambassadors Census. In previous years, we used to do this before this FAD: We ask all the local communities to report their state: How many (active) ambassadors are there, how many events did they attend and what is the overall situation for them.
We looked for new ways to bring people into the project. We have communities that are not officially part of the project, like local community websites, IRC channels or groups on social networks. We should actively try to recruit new contributors there.
Improve the new contributors experience: Once they joined Fedora, we should make sure new ambassadors can attend at least one major event to get to know other contributors. Mentors should have an eye on how people do within the first year and support them better.
Run country-wide ambassadors event: All countries should strive for an event that brings all ambassadors to a table at least once a year.
Still, the real work begins after this FAD. We need to implement what we discussed, whether this is in the wiki, in trac or on various events. But we have gotten a new boost for our community and we are very optimistic that it will have a big impact.
Thanks everybody for coming and especially to Gerold for making this event happen.
So we are sitting at Beuggen Castle and having some drinks after an awesome social event: A dinner in complete darkness at a restaurant called „Blinde Kuh“ („Blind cow“). If you have not yet had it, give it a try, it’s very interesting experience.
The first day of FAD EMEA turned out to be very productive. We managed to discuss a lot of topics, most importantly:
Event planning for 2013. We want to attend 31 events, and for most of them we already have event owners.
Budget planning for 2013. Based on the list of events, we’ll spend 11.700 EUR. Sure, this is a lot of money, but we want really to rock at a lot of places and our draft is very conservative.
Sponsoring and reimbursements: While FAmSCo has already achieved a lot, we need to do a better job in explaining contributors how to get money easily and how to effectively track all requests.
Swag shipping and event box: We think it does not make sense to ship a complete event box within Europe, instead continue shipping what we really need. But this needs improvements: Better tracking of who has what and more ‚bases‘ in different countries.
Swag production planning: We have a lot of new ideas for awesome swag and need to follow up with getting different quotes and making desisions.
I am going to add all relevant info to the wiki later, because a lot of the topic we discussed needs to be followed up. Tomorrow we’ll have some more discussions, but given that we are already more than half way through the agenda, we should have some time left to document and implement our results. This mainly is wiki gardening an improvements in our trac instance.
Stay tuned for another blog post before I fly home tomorrow.
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.
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.
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!
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.
FUDCon KL 2012 day 3 schedule (before the re-pitch)
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.
Great attendance at the 3rd day of FUDCon
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.
Abu Mansur Manaf giving his awesome closing keynote
But there was one more thing to do: The raffle for the 2 Samsung Galaxy Tabs which UCTIOSCC-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.
The FUDCon KL 2012 volunteers
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!
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.
The queue at the FUDCon registration desk
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.
Joshua giving his talk at FUDCon KL 2012
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.
FUDCon KL 2012 day 2 schedule
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.
Logo usage guidelines compliant Fedora (TM) cake
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. 😉
After the big cake fight (and some cleaning up)
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.
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.
Shuttle bus from the hotel to FUDCon venue
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.
Me giving the keynote about "Leadership in leaderless organizations"
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
Pitching the batcamp 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.
FUDCon Kuala Lumpur barcamp schedule
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!
