Category: Planet

S2LQ Fedora presence report

The S2LQ is now over. We had two great days and a lot of people had come! There was more than 600 persons who sign up for the free event which make this event one of the top 3 biggest event in the computer industry in Quebec, Canada!

First, sorry for the delay of this report, there’s a lot of thing happening in my life those last weeks and unfortunately I don’t have all the time I want to invest in my community activities..

That said, here’s a picture of the booth ( and me ) at the S2LQ

Unfortunately we haven’t received the  Fedora 14 DVD and there was a bunch of F13 DVD/Live cd, so I gave those media to people and tell them to download the lastest version if they like it! I almost gave an entire box of DVD and LiveCD, I can’t tell you how many, but during those two days a lot of people come back home with Fedora media to try it :)The stickers and button were pretty popular too!

So what can I say regarding the event..

My main goal was:

  1. Position Fedora in Quebec city. Show to the people that there are people using Fedora and there’s help here in Quebec city if they have trouble!
  2. Put some visibility for the Fedora Project. This one was a success with all the media distributed and with the big Fedora vertical banner
  3. Explain to people the relationship between Redhat and the Fedora Project
  4. Create some connection between the member of other community in the Quebec area ( other distribution, project etc… )
  5. Publicize the fact that there’s two Fedora ambassadors in Quebec city, and where to look if they want to be informed of release party and other events.
  6. Explain what are the main goal of the Fedora as a Linux distribution, what are the differences with the other distributions etc..

All those objectives has been achieved! I’m really proud of this event, I’ve met a lot of people involved in very different way in Opensource and heard of project born here and we didn’t even know!

I event get a picture with Richard Stallman! Again not the best picture ever.. I don’t know what’s wrong with me an pictures ;)

Thanks for everyone who helped me for this event, I think about Larry Cafiero who sent me the vertical banner and the button, Jean-Francois Saucier who gave me the F13 media, ng who sent me Fedora t-shirt which I didn’t receive on time unfortunately :( ,Michael Lessard and Claude Reeves for all the talk during spare time between presentation! ;) Ho, and Thanks the Laurent Bounin and everyone from the APELL who make this event a success!

More photos of the event:

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=s2lq&m=tags

http://s2lq.com/photos

Videos:

http://s2lq.com/zone-vid%C3%A9o

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