This post details how we executed planned activities for Internet of Things (IoT) in Goa, India. First, thanks to Espressotive (headed by Sudhir Shetty and CIBA) for doing all the prep work from registration to our accommodation. Over a span of three days, more than 400 students from three colleges and universities attended the event.
HackMIT is the annual hackathon event organized by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. HackMIT 2016 took place on September 17th and 18th, 2016. This year, the Fedora Project partnered with Red Hat as sponsors for the hackathon. Fedora Ambassadors Charles Profitt and Justin W. Flory attended to represent the project and help mentor top students from around the country in a weekend of learning and competitive hacking. Fedora engaged with a new audience of students from various universities across America and even the globe.
On September 3rd, the French team hosted a release party for Fedora 24 in “La Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie” (Science and Industry Museum) in Paris, France. It is later than most release parties, but July and August are two months of vacation in France and we wanted to target as many people as possible (by the way, it allowed us to proudly announce the Fedora 25 Alpha!).
A two-day workshop on women in free software and Fedora Women Day were held on the 15th and 16th of July 2016 at the Netaji Subhash Engineering College in Kolkata, India. This event was jointly organized by Ubuntu Women Project, Fedora Project, and the university. It was substantially sponsored by Ubuntu Women Project. The goal of the workshop was also to get new participants interested, improve the level of participation by women, and explore new avenues of free software community development. Given the factors involved, the Workshop on Women in Free Software / Fedora Women Day 2016 (shortened to WWFS-FWD’2016) was a successful one.
As you might know, Fedora released its 24th version at the end of June! Recently, the Fedorans in Singapore had a party to celebrate the release. The release party was not only to celebrate its release, but also to commemorate Fedora’s open source journey so far. We invited people from different diverse background to join us for a night of fun and open conversations (Singapore is a cosmopolitan country!)
Some of the Fedora 24 DVDs and OpenSource.com stickers for the party
We had a RSVP of over 50 folks and expected more to join in. We set up the Fedora banners and were also ready to give out DVDs and stickers. However, on the day itself, there was a dropout rate of 60% and only around fifteen folks turned up. Most of the folks that turned up were students interested in learning more about Fedora. Nevertheless, it was a cozy and warm party that everyone felt pretty comfortable with.
If you’d like to get a bigger picture view, you can read a pre-conference interview with a few Flock speakers here or with Thomas Cameron here.
Days 3 and 4 were reserved for workshops. Also, during these 2 days, people continued to split into smaller groups to discuss matters of their own interests, and so did I. However, I caught up with some of the presenters to ask them about the outcome of their sessions and you can read that at the end of this article. But to be fair – if you want to read something about Flock, feel free to browse the blogs that emerged in the first post-Flock week, listed here:
This week, we kicked off an initiative for engaging more women contributors in Fedora. Sumantro Mukherjee helped me guide new contributors on this Hangouts call. The purpose was to bring in more woman contributors to the Fedora Project and help them be industry-ready. As buzzwords in the industry boom, these meet-ups are focused to generate awareness in the first few rounds. Then, they address fields like the Internet of Things (IoT), ML, and mobile app development, to mention a few.
Keeping in mind, these are done using the leading edge, open source, Linux-based Fedora, which is also the upstream for RHEL. In the first few minutes, we discussed about free and open source software (FOSS) and the participants’ exposure with the industry. After a bit of in-depth discussion, we figured out that little or no guidance is one of the major barriers when the participants wanted to contribute to any FOSS project. Also noted was the lack of on-boarding guides as another major barrier for not being able to contribute to FOSS projects.
In the second half of the meeting, we discussed how Fedora is released. Some common terminologies like bleeding edge, Rawhide, and branched were discussed. The meeting concluded with the suggestion of topics that the audience would like to learn. A weekly follow-up mechanism will be helpful for community growth.
Meeting details can be found in this Etherpad.
Network by Martha Ormiston from the Noun Project.
This week, some Ambassadors, CommOps, and Design Team members collaborated on improving and redefining the guidelines for how to request artwork and other art assets. As the advocates and representatives of Fedora across the globe, the Ambassadors often need many tools and resources for demonstrating Fedora. Examples of this might be fliers, banners, tablecloths, stickers, badges, and more. Until recently, the process for requesting artwork assets was not well-defined and somewhat unclear. This can cause problems when Ambassadors need something designed for an event. Sometimes it can draw out the request or end up in an accident, such as purple DVD media covers!
To help more clearly communicate the most effective way for Ambassadors to request artwork, an official set of guidelines were written and proposed based on discussion with Design Team members. The official guide walks through all the steps necessary to help make sure requests receive quick responses and all the information needed is available. This not only helps the Design Team understand a request, but it also benefits the Ambassadors by helping getting a faster turnaround on a deliverable. An announcement about the new guide appeared on the Ambassadors list.
Attendees earning badges as contributors!
Over the past few months, many of us in the Bangalore open source community have focused our efforts of writing test cases for Fedora, organizing a few sessions where one can learn about testing, and how we can do things together. All this while, it has been fun: I’ve met new people, learned things, and realized that sharing even small pieces of knowledge and experiences makes it easier for newcomers to feel welcome.
At one point when Fedora 24 was released, it was exciting as we were closely involved with Fedora release validation testing and so we wanted to put together a release party. All open source projects encourage their communities to celebrate software release and similar milestones. Ours was a simple plan! We were having a really good time learning together and we wanted to get more people to know that there is a better way to gain knowledge: by sharing and working together.
For some time now, Fedora has discussed the idea of the Fedora Outreach Steering Committee (FOSCo), a body to coordinate all our outreach efforts. Now it’s time to make it happen!
On behalf of FAmSCo and the Fedora Council, we would like to invite the Fedora community to an all-hands.
So far, the following participants have confirmed attendance.
The fact that we already have a good team of volunteers should not stop you from attending. In fact, we would like to hear more voices from all stakeholders. The more, the better! To get an idea what FAmSCo has been working on so far, please have a look at the wiki page and current status.
None of this is set in stone yet, and we feel we need your input before we go any further. We are looking forward to your comments and to meet you next Monday!
Copyright © 2024 Fedora Community Blog
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
Recent Comments