Following the week of Flock 2024, Fedora kept the late-summer conference train rolling with a community booth at this year’s DevConf US held at Boston University from August 14-16, 2024. This year’s conference was an opportunity to sponsor another key community event, spread the word about Fedora, and connect with influential community members while learning about new industry developments, paying particular attention to AI and cloud spaces.

The Conference

This year’s conference kicked off with a Fireside Chat session with Kelsey Hightower, followed by a series of talks in various tracks, highlighting recent improvements in areas like Cloud Infrastructure, AI, Automotive, Mobile, Development, Security, Compliance, Open Source Success Stories, as well as Leadership and creating Inclusive Communities.

Among this large array of talks were a few that may be of interest to different segments of the wider Fedora community. There were CentOS Automotive talks; talks adapted from presentations from FWD 2024 and Flock 2024; talks from notable community members like Dan Walsh, Neal Gompa, Davide Cavalca, and David Duncan; as well as a couple others that may be of some interest to Fedorans more generally.

The Booth

In addition to these talks, Fedora also had a community booth present at the event. This was an opportunity for members of the Fedora community to come to say “hi,” claim a Fedora Badge, and learn more about some of the more recent developments within Fedora. I’m incredibly grateful to the community members who helped run the booth, including Adam Williamson, David Duncan, Neal Gompa, Sythong Run, Matthew Miller, and everyone else who stopped by to help share the newest developments within Fedora.

Overall, the Fedora booth seemed to go pretty smoothly. One of the main attractions that drew people to the booth was the one laptop per child XO PC, a $100 laptop that ran Fedora and helped bring computer access to parts of the world without easy access to the internet. This green and white PC looked very out of place with a contrasting color scheme and two extendable antennas, especially since it was placed between far more recent models of Slimbook and ThinkPad laptops that were also on display at the booth. 

While a strange contrast in both its age and appearance, it seemed like this device still worked pretty well for drawing people to the booth and feeding that interest with some history on the XO PC and how Fedora was involved.

Having the ThinkPad and Slimbook present also created a nice transition to an introduction of the soon-to-launch Fedora Ready promotional program, complete with a nice opportunity for a casual joke about how “unfortunately the green one with the antennae is not part of the Fedora Ready program.” This program was one of the primary things I found myself talking about when people were asking about Fedora, as it’s a great, highly recent project that one of my fellow summer interns Roseline Bassey helped work on. It also serves as a great example of how Fedora is working to make Linux a more viable option for general desktop use by helping improve the discoverability of well-supported hardware as more and more vendors start supporting Linux-based operating systems.

Fedora swag was also quite popular at the booth this year. Many people were grabbing stickers, especially the new Colúr stickers that were seen at Flock. People were also occasionally taking these stickers for people they knew who couldn’t be at the conference, such as their kids. The Fedora Tumblers were especially popular. Being my first time running a conference booth, I had not quite been careful enough with the selection of swag and put a few too many out at the start of the conference. Between this minor mistake and their popularity, they ran out pretty quickly, and by the end of the conference, at least a couple people had come by specifically to ask for them.

There also seemed to be a decent number of people who stopped by the booth either with very minimal prior knowledge of Fedora or because they had been using Fedora for a long time and wanted to start contributing. Many of the more casual visitors were likely hoping to collect stamps from each booth to win a prize; however, a couple community members ended up sticking around for extended conversations and fun shenanigans. Overall, about half of the attendees at the conference were Red Hatters (likely due to the proximity to the Boston office), and many of them also stopped by the booth to learn about Fedora.

In total, we handed out roughly 12 Fedora badges to new or existing Fedora contributors who claimed them by scanning the QR code at our booth. I suspect this number may have been higher if the process of claiming a badge as a new contributor didn’t first require going through the many steps of creating an FAS account. Maybe in the future, there will be a way to help improve the Fedora contributor onboarding experience at conferences by allowing attendees to pre-claim a badge with just an email address. Then a helpful reminder to finish claiming the badge could be sent after the event, guiding people through the FAS signup process and suggesting possible next steps as a new contributor.

The Experience Overall

Given that this was my first time being in charge of a booth at a conference, I would say the experience was quite well prepared before I was even involved. I would attribute the bulk of this smoothness to both the amazing Red Hat events team (shoutout to Dorka for running around for nearly the entire event to keep things running smoothly) and to the existence of the event kit. This event kit—a Pelican case containing almost everything that was needed to run the booth, such as branded tablecloths, swag, and the laptops that were displayed on the table made the booth management process quite easy since everything was already prepared. The biggest hurdle was simply fitting everything in the pelican case after the event and keeping it organised, especially with how densely packed it was with Fedora swag.

Overall Thoughts

So, is it worth doing again?  On a personal level I was pretty tired after having attended three conferences in a little under three weeks, and ended up needing at least a week to chill out and recharge, so overall I probably would not recommend trying to do that again. Being asked to help staff the Fedora booth on relatively little notice also meant that I largely ended up choosing to stay at the booth for most of the conference, rather than exploring more of the talks, but since the talks were being recorded, I didn’t feel like this was too much of a loss.

Ultimately, though, I think the success of the event comes down to the goal that was set out for the event in the first place. Having face-to-face interaction with the community at any event is nearly always valuable to any community working in the open, but when there are limits on budget or other resources, the events you choose to attend should be geared towards your goal. If  Fedora’s goal with being at DevConf US was to grow Fedora among new audiences and external contributors, another location may have made more sense, however, I think the general goal of gaining contributors along with communicating new developments in Fedora provided something interesting for everyone who came to the booth, regardless of the color of their hat.

Overall, I think this was a great opportunity to experience my first time staffing a booth at a conference, and I think having a broad selection of new developments and things to talk about helped make it easy to provide something interesting to any current or future Fedora users who came to the booth. When the worst part of the conference is being tired halfway through the day because you decided to try and string three conferences together in three weeks, I guess that means everything went pretty well!