Fedora 13 Release party – Québec

Yesterday it was my first release party as an organizer. I was a little bit nervous, because I had to burn few live cd by hand because our official Fedora 13 media are stuck at the custom by UPS. I’ve made a quick presentation assisted by Jean-Francois with the new features of Fedora 13 and videos was playing during people was talking to each other.

Jean-Francois and me arrived at 16h to install the setup and wait for people to come. Around 17h people start to show up and everyone was naturally talking together. I would like to thanks RedHat folks, Michael Lessard and Claude Reeves, for taking time to come and talk with people, Michael come often to other LUG or release party it’s a little bit easier for him, he’s from Québec city.. But Claude is from Montreal so it was really great to see both of them at our event! Thanks again to both of you for your presence!

I think the event was a success, there was around 12-13 persons at the peak, it’s a little bit less than Ubuntu release get here in Québec city, but they are doing release party since few years, so they already have their “returning people”. This is what Jean-Francois and me will focus on the next year, trying to bring more new peoples and new faces to release party and other events!

Here are few pictures I took:

This it the “chat” room! Oops empty pitcher… Need refill!

I’ve installed my laptop with a projector, playing different videos from RedHat YouTube channel I’ve downloaded using youtube-dl. Fedora 13 Launch as you can see Paul Frields on the screen, the famous Truth Happens, How code makes it into RHEL, RedHat MRG demo and a remix of truth happens was playing in a loop on the screen. It was the first time we tried this approach and I think people liked it, the video was playing when people was talking, not too loud so people who want to listen was able to and other people around are able to talk with each other without problem. So this is definitely a “Will do it again”. Plus as you can see on the picture we had a “live usb station” which enabled us to create bootable usb stick for people. This wasn’t a really popular approach, but it’s not really a big setup, so I think we will provide it anyways in the next events.

I was trying to find a new way to provide url to people after a presentation or if they ask us on how to get involved in Fedora project or anything else. I bought a Motorola Milestone few months ago which led me to test few software available on the Android market, and I discovered few bar code reader apps after that I started to read about bar code and “how it worked”. I’ve discovered the possibility of new generation of 2D bar code, so I created few QR Code pointing to Fedora 13 Release notes, How to get involved in Fedora project etc… Plus a QR Code for my contact information. To be honest, this way to share url have made a lot of hand to rise, people was asking how it works etc… It was the first time we used this, so I explained to a lot of person how it worked and how they can probably get a barcode reader for their phone, for yesterday this wasn’t a lot helpful and people didn’t really used it. But I’m pretty sure the next time a lot of people will have downloaded the software needed to read those and they will probably start to use it! I think this is a really good way to make a presentation “Interactive” or to share our contact information, a new kind of business card… And a new way to give people “readable stuff” after the presentation!

Here’s another goodies, the Cheat Cube. Not so helpful for long-time Linux user, but new comer tend to like this one really bad! I wasn’t able to translate the whole thing in french, it’s almost always longer to write something in french… But I’ll try to finish this at least for the next release because people really like this, even if they don’t really use it, they build it and let it on their desk, so it make people talk about Fedora and Linux overall, which is not a bad thing at all! ;)

So this is it for my report of our Fedora 13 Release party. I’m pleased to see that people liked it and we really had good feedback regarding the organisation, we will certainly continue in this way for the next release!

@++

René Jr Purcell