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!)

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.

Getting Singapore party started

Everyone had some pizzas, chips and drinks before the talks began. Strange thing that happened: one of the pizza delivery men got into a traffic accident and had his arm badly injured. The pizza company had to redo the pizzas and send another guy down. Hope he’s okay now. As for the talks, we had two talks lined for the party: a Fedora release talk and a Tails talk. The release talk was done by one of ambassadors in Singapore, Huiren Woo.

Interactive learning about Fedora

Our release party talk was focused on community and collaboration whilst still covering the new features and improvements in Fedora 24. At the end of the talk, we had a fun quiz to test out the knowledge of our audience and also to see if they were engaged in listening. We made use of an educational quiz tool, Kahoot, and allowed everyone to participate and win prizes. The top prize was a copy of The Open Organization with a signature from Jim Whitehurst.

These people were very smart and paid good attention to our talk! The other players also had lots of fun playing the quiz; some used nicknames such as “Bill Gates” and MSP (acronym for Microsoft Student Partner). At first, “Bill Gates” was leading the game but fortunately (and unfortunately), he lost to the tougher questions and got the 3rd prize, which was a copy of the OpenSource.com 2015 yearbook and Catalyst-In-Chief.

At the end of all the talks, most of the folks stayed behind and continued having conversations in small groups. We talked about B-tree filesystem (BTRFS), encryption, Wayland, Tor, and many more! Overall, it was quite a successful event with many engaged Fedorans. Thank you everyone for joining us for our release party!

Special thanks

Not to forget, thank you Amazon Web Services (AWS) for helping to sponsor our food at the event! PS: You can actually spin up Fedora Cloud instances and use tools on AWS EC2.