bringing in new contributors Archives – Page 3 of 4

Tag: bringing in new contributors (page 3 of 4)

Fedora participating in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2018

Fedora participating in Google Summer of Code 2018

GSoC is a summer program aiming to bring more student developers into open source software development. It enables students to spend their summer break working with open source organizations on projects proposed by participating organizations and supported by mentors.

The Fedora Project has participated in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) as a mentoring organization for over a decade now. Once again, Fedora is participating again this year. We are happy to be accepted again as an organization this year and are looking forward to working with many bright and excited students across the world on many parts of Fedora.

Help translate the Fedora User Handbook

April 18, 2017 / eischmann / Comments Off

Two years ago, we decided to write a handbook that would help new users start with Fedora. The original handbook was written in Czech by Lukáš Kotek, but in the end it was a work of a community of people (proofreaders, typesetters, designers,…). The handbook was released in Czech only as a pilot project. If it’s successful let’s translate it to English and then to other languages and make it a global project. That was our plan.

The reason why we wrote the handbook is that we have very few giveaways at our booths that convey any information about Fedora. Yes, we have stickers, badges, case badges,… But those only convey the brand, thus are great for those who already know Fedora and want to show affiliation on the project, e.g. by placing a Fedora sticker on their laptop. We don’t really have something we can give to someone who is not familiar Fedora at all. DVDs served partly well for that case, but they’re going away as well.

That’s why we came up with a handbook with limited scope: it should get a person who is not familiar with Fedora from our booth to an installed system. It should tell why to choose Fedora, where to get it, how to install it, and how to start using it.

We had really positive feedback about the handbook in the Czech community, but sadly we haven’t found much time to internationalize the project. Until now. I picked it up again and start pushing it forward. The project has been moved to Pagure and I’m looking for people who can help me with that.

Fedora Activity Day, Bangalore 2017

March 28, 2017 / a2batic / 1 Comment

The Fedora Activity Day (FAD) is a regional event (either one-day or multi-day) that allows Fedora contributors to gather together in order to work on specific tasks related to the Fedora Project.

FAD in Bangalore

On February 25th 2017, a FAD was conducted in one of the admirable university of Bangalore: University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering (UVCE). It was not a typical “hackathon” or “DocSprint” but a series of productive and interactive sessions on different tools.

Ambassadors LATAM: Year in Review

February 7, 2017 / williamjmorenor / 3 Comments

Throughout 2016, the Fedora community in Latin America was active promoting Fedora in local events and showing the Fedora Project objectives and foundations to possible new contributors and helping them find their way into different subprojects, as part of the global Fedora community. We had a presence in all relevant events in Latin America with talks, workshops and stands promoting ours four foundations to the world.

LATAM Highlights

FUDCon Puno 2016
- FUDCon is the Fedora Users and Developers Conference, a major free software event held in APAC and LATAM, since EMEA and NA work together to organize Flock. FUDCon Puno was a combination of sessions, talks, workshops, and hackfests where contributors worked on specific initiatives. Topics included infrastructure, feature development, community building, general management and governance, marketing, QA and packaging.
Latinoware 2016
- Held since 2004, Latinoware is one of the biggest events in the world of free software. The event is held in Foz do Iguaçu, a Brazilian city in a region called the Triple Border, near Argentina and Paraguay. An estimated 4000 people, including students, professionals and specialists, attended the event.
FISL16
- FISL is the largest FOSS event in Latin America and one of the largest in the world. Many Fedora contributors start their way in the Fedora Project from FISL.
Flisol
- Flisol is the most representative event of the Latin American community of free software and every year Fedora has a prominent presence in this event.

FLISoL 2016 Attendee badge

Goals for 2017

We are actively looking for new talent to join the Fedora community. We have LATAM representatives as Ambassadors, packagers, in CommOps, internationalization, design and others. The participation in development is still minimal and this is something we want to improve in 2017.
The LATAM community is characterized as an example of friendship among its members, following one of the fundamental values of the Fedora Project. We hope to continue with this characteristic camaraderie in 2017.
Since the biggest event of the year for the Fedora Project is Flock, we consider it necessary that there be more representation of LATAM in this event. Then, attendees share the experiences locally and keep pace with the development of Fedora.

Conclusion

Although we are a couple of dozen active collaborators throughout Latin America, we are passionate about free software and we believe in the values of the Fedora Project. We have presence in various areas of the project and we hope to continue promoting Fedora in 2017 by getting more users and collaborators for the project in our region.

FOSS Wave: FOSS Camp SJCE in Mysore

February 2, 2017 / sumantrom / 2 Comments

A couple of weekends ago, Kanika Murarka and I (Sumantro Mukherjee) went down to the Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering (SJCE) in Mysore, India to give a talk on GitHub and web virtual reality (VR) on their annual open source fest, FOSS Camp.

Welcome to FOSS Camp!

Walking towards the venue

Flock 2017 bids are now being accepted (due 28 Feb 2017)

January 12, 2017 / bex / Comments Off

It is time to start the bid process for this year’s Flock. This year we are back in North America for Flock 2017. If you’d like to help host the event in your city, it’s time to start putting together a bid. To find out what you need to do, read the wiki page. Bids are due by February 28, 2017, so do not wait to start. It takes more time than you may realize to compile all the required information for a good bid.

Tips and advice for Flock 2017 planning

Keep in mind that committing to help plan a conference is a lot of work and shouldn’t be approached lightly. It’s a big time commitment, and as the local contact, you’re critical to the success of the event. Flock has been held successfully on college campuses and in hotels. We need to make sure that the space will work for both the conference and be affordable. Details are on the wiki page.

Not sure where to begin? You can view some of the previous winning bids for past years as a reference point for building your own bid. Check out some of these for examples:

Flock 2016: Kraków, Poland
Flock 2015: Rochester, New York, USA
Flock 2015 honorable mention: Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA
Flock 2014: Prague, Czech Republic

Feel free to let me know if you have any other questions or need help getting your bid together. If you’re not already subscribed to the flock-planning email list, you should also do so.

Where to point newcomers to Fedora

November 10, 2016 / ankursinha / 2 Comments

Like any FOSS community project, Fedora relies heavily on volunteers. It is, therefore, no surprise that we’re always looking to increase our contributor base. There is always so much to be done. Of course, many teams work in harmony to keep Fedora ticking. Each team tends to have its own “on-boarding process” for newcomers, which if you’ve been around recently, you’ll have noticed CommOps has been working on improving one by one.

FOSS Wave: CMR Institute of Technology in Bengaluru, India

FOSS Wave: CMR Institute of Technology, Bengaluru, India

November 2, 2016 / Vipul Siddharth / 1 Comment

On 18 October 2016, we organized a workshop at the CMR Institute of Technology in Bengaluru, India. In the workshop, we covered topics of free and open source software (FOSS), Fedora, and git. Before talking about the event, I would like to thank a few people whose presence made this event a huge success. I would like to thank

Anirban Ghosh and Arun Teja for organizing the event at CMR IT.
All the attendees who came in a huge number and made this event a grand success.
Sumantro Mukherjee for being an amazing mentor and guiding us through the event.

FOSS Wave: Indore, India

October 31, 2016 / a2batic / Comments Off

FOSS Wave arrives at another destination! On 24th September 2016, we conducted an event at the Indian Institute of Technology in Indore, India. The event was a joint effort of Mozilla Indore community and FOSS Wave.

The main agenda of our event was:

Introduction to open source
Web development
Internet of Things (IoT)
Web-powered Virtual Reality (Web VR)

FUDCon LATAM 2016 starts today!

October 13, 2016 / williamjmorenor / 1 Comment

FUDCon is the Fedora Users and Developers Conference. The Fedora community holds this event annually in the APAC and LATAM regions since 2005. They became exclusive to APAC and LATAM in 2013 when the EMEA and NA regions began organizing the annual Flock conference.

What is FUDCon?

FUDCon consists of sessions, talks, workshops, and hackfests. For Fedora contributors, it is a unique opportunity to share experiences and work together on common goals for the region. For users, it is an opportunity to come into contact with Fedora contributors in the region. It helps find ways to collaborate with contributors and integrate into the community. For FUDCon LATAM, this helps the growth of the Latin-American community. The 2016 edition of FUDCon LATAM is being held from 13-16 October 2016 at Universidad Nacional del Altiplano in Puno. Puno is in southeastern Peru, on the shore of Lake Titicaca.

See you in Puno!

The Fedora community in Peru is one on the biggest in the region. Peru was the venue for FUDCon LATAM 2013 in Cusco. In 2013, FUDCon LATAM had the biggest audience in almost 10 years of FUDCons (around of 800 people attended the event). We hope this event will help bring new partners to the Fedora Project!