Open Source Summit North America (OSSNA) 2017 Event Report

Fedora Ambassador Brian Monroe chooses freedom.

At a Glance: What is Open Source Summit North America?

  • What: A convention that combines LinuxCon, ContainerCon, CloudOpen, and a debuting Open Community Conference under one roof in Los Angeles, California
  • Where: JW Marriott LA Live
  • When: 11 – 14 September 2017

The Fedora ambassadors distributed swag items during OSSNA’s four-day expo.

Fedora 26 and its stability proved to be positively popular with guests.

Peak visitor days were Monday and Tuesday.

We collected highly detailed feedback for our various Fedora teams. Roll-up found below.

Overview slides found here: http://bit.ly/2wRSwHY

Our Ambassadors in the Field

This report is for the following Ambassadors:

  1. Perry Rivera (FAS: lajuggler)
  2. Brian Monroe (FAS: ParadoxGuitarist)

What is OSSNA?

OSSNA is an exciting four-day convention focusing on a myriad of topics: Community, Cloud, Containers, and Linux.

The OSSNA conference gave guests highly immersive experiences to a wide-range of innovative ideas. The Senior Event Planner, Ms. Courtenay Pope, facilitated our team’s registration process and coordinated an extremely well-organized, data-rich, and enjoyable event.

Day 1: 11 September

We arrived in Los Angeles Monday morning to deliver supplies for the Expo portion of the conference.

After registration, we located our exhibit booth, number 601, and dropped off: a banner and swag.

Brian and I set up our laptops running various presentations about Fedora and how it enriches the community.

Throughout the conference, Perry and Brian underscored Fedora 26 dependability, features, and strengths and met with hundreds of people that were glad to see Fedora’s presence at this conference.

We distributed stickers and referred guests to our booth or to an online version of our informational slides if there were any questions.

Fedora Ambassador Perry Rivera and Linux Academy’s Kim Hawton.

We observed how conveniently our booth was adjacent to the high-traffic areas near the water cooler, and the FSF table, which in turn brought much excited ancillary traffic.

We listened to the Fedora needs of passersby and tried to help guests find answers, people, and resources.

Open-ended questions inspired guests into sharing and active discussion.

Such questions included:

Have you heard about Boltron?
What distribution or operating system do you use and why?
So tell me what brings you here today?
How do you use Fedora?
Do you have any suggestions or comments for us to pass back upstream to Fedora?

Since we had a finite amount of swag, we placed a few items here and there to mitigate “swag” vacuuming, and handed premium swag out to 1) really great questions and detailed feedback and 2) people who had Fedora natively running on their notebook systems/tablets.

Engaging conversations flowed throughout OSSNA

James Trimbee and Fedora Ambassador Perry Rivera

We estimated 150-200 visitors to our booth.

We bumped into Fedora Ambassador Remy Decausemaker (FAS: decause). So excited to hear how he is doing!

Day 2: 12 September

We estimated 250-300 booth attendees on our second busiest day.

As in the previous day, we fielded questions from attendees.

Fedora Ambassador Brian Monroe discusses the state of Fedora with fellow community

Fedora Ambassador Rivera and Red Hat’s Jennifer Madriaga. Their team kept our booth well-stocked and with swag throughout the conference.

Day 3: 13 September

We estimated 150-200 booth attendees.

As in the previous day, we fielded questions from attendees.

Fedora Ambassador Perry Rivera and Free Software Foundation’s James Pannacciulli

Lessons Learned

  1. Have a Fedora based Raspberry Pi handy as a conversation opener.
  2. Ask for placement again near a water cooler. Definitely the spot to be.

Ambassador Requests / Ideas

    • Have a Fedora Day, if feasible.
    • Recommend situating our table near Red Hat and Linux Academy and Free Software Foundation. We work well near these folks.
    • Newer distros on USB thumb drives
    • Resources for a Fedorator
    • Stickers: More! Guests love having them. Perhaps additional Fedora designs might garner increasing popularity.

Community Feedback: All Days

At our booth, we provided a sign-in sheet for visitors to leave feedback, suggestions, and comments about Fedora.

The following summarizes this feedback.

There were 28 respondents.

    • 3 use F25.
    • 9 use F26.
    • 2 use CentOS (Various Releases).
    • 1 uses Manjaro Rolling
    • 5 use Ubuntu (Various Releases).
    • 1 uses Ubuntu Raspbian
    • 3 use Red Hat Enterprise Linux
    • 1 uses Elementary
    • 1 uses BSD
    • 1 uses Debian

Feedback Categories:

      1. All: Various respondents had positive feedback, ranging from “Keep it up!,” “I love Fedora exactly as it is.” “Keep up the good work,” “Great OS,” “Fedora looks great!”, “Thank You”, “Fun,” “Good job,” and “Have a good time all the time.”
      2. Reasons People Use Linux varied: “Freedom” (6), “It works!”, “Great software!” “Easy,” “Kernel development tools,” “Work” (8), “Home” (6), “School,” “KDE,” “Shell,” “Privacy.”
      3. Gaming: 1 respondent requested for easier to set-up STEAM support. 1 respondent asked for NVIDIA Drivers for STEAM.
      4. Community: 1 respondent requested a membership e-mail list to keep up to date on Fedora news and events
      5. Documentation: 1 respondent would like easy to find documentation for the keyboard shortcuts to size/move windws on XFCE.
      6. Wayland: 1 respondent requested support for Wayland on KDE.
      7. Rolling: 2 respondents would like rolling releases.

Final Thoughts

We gave attendees great impressions of Fedora when we shared that we enjoyed volunteering our time to give back to assist others in learning about Fedora.

Epic work all!

That’s all from the Fedora Ambassador team and OSSNA. Hope to see you next year!