Of more than 200 subjects discussed by more than 4,500 nerds, teachers, students and interested in new technologies, coming from various parts of Brazil, neighboring countries Argentina and Paraguay and outside countries, during three days of the 14th Latin American Congress of Free Software and Technologies (Latinoware), held last week at the Itaipu Power Plant in Foz do Iguaçu, one of the themes that most attracted public attention was how free robotics can improve education, especially in children.

Latinoware 2017 Map

Wednesday – Booth Setup

Fedora Booth

Daniel Lara and I arrived early in the morning to organize our booth at exposition space. We set up our roll up banner with 4Fs theme embedded in DNA and distributed five type of stickers for the winners of a traditional quiz. All the ambassadors present in our stand, catch from imagination a question about Fedora to ask participants, so they value the sticker and we avoid gift hunters.

Latinoware 2017 stickers

Dennis Gilmore gave a talk What can Open Source do for you and the World, at 12am in the main auditorium Brazil. Open source has been changing the way technology is developed around the world and daily thousands of people contribute to projects within a community with hundreds of countries with different languages, cultures and time zones. In this keynote he showed practical examples where Open Source has changed people’s lives and explain how it can change yours.

What can Open Source do for you and the World?

Thursday – Fudmeeting

Contributing to Upstream Free Software

Fedora Users and Developers meeting, from 10am to 5pm at room Venezuela, where a combination of sessions, conversations and workshops takes place where contributors work on specific initiatives. Topics included infrastructure, resource development, electronics, virtualization, cloud, community building, packaging, translation, governance in general, testing and quality assurance, etc.

Fedora ARM

The opening talk was a brief introduction to Ansible, its architecture and modules available. After that was the application of oVirt, Foreman, and Ansible for managing virtualization infrastructure. Third was Fedora new technologies and innovations, demonstrating our innovative side along the years, next was Fedora on ARM for fun and profit, how to install on boards like Pine64 or PI Zero and attach things like sensors and lights to explore the world around us.

Fedora QA

Then our most awaited talk Fedora Project contributing to upstream Free Software, we had an overview our project, its sub-projects and the prerequisites for becoming a contributor. Finally was in sequence three technical talks about how make a RPM packaging, Translation and QA.

The main objective with Fudmeeting of gain new contributors was achieved, three new people to review packaging, translation and websites.

Fedora Robotics in action

Close to our room, many children were playing with educational robotics and using Fedora Robotics to upload their code to their ARM board.

Friday – Packing up

Latest stickers

Once again on the last day of any event in Brazil, is the free distribution of adhesives, limited to one per person each type as we had stock. At end Fedora Project distributed 700 adhesives, 25 badge cords to old or new contributors, installed 2 notebooks and answered many questions about why and in what can use Fedora. Our swag experimentation badge cord made a good buzz at event, attracting new people to contribute and will be the working cord of old contributors, so our brand will be visible daily.
The main activity occurred at 14h with the official photo capture the event with all participants and 6pm was event final goodbye ceremony.