The Fedora Ambassadors gathered statistical feedback from attendees and distributed swag items during SCaLE’s four-day expo.
Ambassadors Report for Southeast Linux Fest -Ben and Cathy Williams, Andrew and Julie Ward, Rosnel Echervarria, and Nick Bebout
Julie and Ben just after setup
The annual event reached its historical 10 year mark this year. Southeast Linux Fest has been one of the most successful and long running events when it comes to Linux and only is topped by Scale and Linux Fest Northwest. Southeast Linux Fest (SELF) an event that is held at the Sheraton Airport Hotel Charlotte North Carolina. This event was centralized to accommodate attendance (easy access from Airport) from many of the surrounding states. We saw many individuals from the Tennessee, Georgia (Atlanta/Macon area), South Carolina, and Florida, as well as the local attendees from the Charlotte area and the state of North Carolina.
Discussing the primary goal of this event with the Coordinator (of Southeast Linux Fest), the target was to draw from the surrounding southern states. The secondary goal was opening the event to everyone interested in learning about free and open source software. Later in this report we will discuss some of the feedback given to the Coordinator about Southeast Linux Fest.
Ohio Linux Festival, Hyatt Regency Columbus, Ohio 29-30 September 2017
Event Report:
Andrew Ward (award3535), Julie Ward (jward78), Ben Williams (kk4ewt), Cathy Williams (cwilla)
The Fedora community has been a steadfast supporter of this event for the past 6 years. Ohio Linux Festival is the only major Linux community event that is located in the Northern Midwest region, with no Texas Linux Festival this year it is the only major event in the Midwest. The event attendance in the previous few years has gone down due to venue changes and event staff changes, but in light of 2017 the event brought just under a thousand registered enthusiasts as the OLF event president Beth Lynn Eicher (also a Fedora Ambassador) informed us the morning of 30 September while we were getting set up, which this did not count the walk-ins that showed up the morning of the EXPO opening. So the attendance was most impressive as compared to the previous year’s events and could be soundly stated that there was upwards of 1100 at the event.
Every year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) hosts an annual hackathon, HackMIT, for students around the world. Students gathered again for HackMIT 2017 on the weekend of September 16-17, 2017. During the weekend, students form teams with other students and work on projects to compete in various categories. Participants often release their projects under open source licenses at the end of the hackathon.
The Fedora Project participated as a sponsor for the second year in a row. Justin W. Flory and Mike DePaulo attended as Fedora Ambassadors to represent the project and the community.
LISA is the annual vendor-neutral meeting place for the wider system administration community. The LISA17 program will address the overlap and differences between traditional and modern IT operations and engineering, and offers a highly curated program around three topics: architecture, culture, and engineering.
Our main booth staff were Nick Bebout (nb), Ricky Elrod (codeblock), and Beth Lynn Eicher (bethlynn). Karsten Wade (quaid) was also at the event, representing both CentOS and Fedora.
Southeast Linux Festival – Charlotte North Carolina
June 9 – 11, 2017
event website: http://www.southeastlinuxfest.org/
Ben and Kathy Williams (kk4ewt/cewillia) (Fedora event coordinators)
Andrew and Julie Ward (award3535/jward78) (Event report author)
Nick Bebout (nb)
Dan Mossor (danofsatx)
Rosnel Echevarria (reher)
Fedora has been involved in this particular event since its first festival in 2009 and has continued to be a vital part of the event through 2017. The event is the only large scale Linux and open source festival for the South Eastern United States. Even though there is a large number of Linux Users Groups throughout the south this is the only event that draws various communities together in celebration of Linux and Open Source Software. There was a similar event in Orlando Florida in 2015 called FOSSETCON, but the event coordinator announced that the event would occur every two years vice annually. Hopefully the event did not come apart for the fall this year as it normally is scheduled. Most of the Ambassadors arrived on Thursday 8 June the night prior to the event commencement.
Fedora represented the theme of this year’s LinuxFest NorthWest, The Mechanics of Freedom, with the Fedora Security Lab and diceware passphrases. LinuxFest NorthWest is an annual Open Source event in Bellingham, Washington. There is something for everyone from novices to professionals featuring presentations and exhibits on F/OSS topics, Linux distributions and applications.
Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things are becoming even more integrated in our lives. With these changes comes concern over the trade-offs between convenience and privacy such as; privacy in the age of relentless online tracking; how bots can help you onboard new community members; training driverless vehicles; and how the Internet of Things took down DNS.
Fedora featured the Fedora Security Lab for the Mechanics of Freedom, a safe test environment for security auditing, forensics, system rescue and teaching security testing methodologies. The Fedora Security Lab spin is maintained by a community of security testers and developers. It’s customized menu provides all the tools needed for security testing, rescuing a broken system, and teaching the Open Source Security Testing Methodology Manual.
Fedora offered LinuxFest NorthWest attendees a Mechanics of Freedom experience by rolling a diceware passphrase. Our guests rolled four dice, five times (or five dice, four times). Then they used the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) word lists to lookup the random passphrase words. Continue reading
The Fedora Ambassadors distributed DVDs and swag items during SCaLE’s four-day expo and held a Fedora Day activity consisting of two presentations and a general meet up. Furthermore, we held a mini-memorial in honor of our Fedora Ambassador Matthew Williams.
The past year has proven to be both challenging and demanding for our Ambassadors. During the past year there have been a lot of new ideas proposed and more events that are being sought out attempting to expand our base. Many of the ventures have been with hack-a-thons in several states. This has been a relatively new venture in those areas. Since our involvement in these types of events, we quickly discovered that Fedora and the associated spins were a new tool for most of these individuals attending and participating. That was a surprising fact within the community that the young and impressionable individuals seemed to be using Windows more than any other operating system available. Since those few we (Fedora) attended, there has been an increase in the open source software utilization across the board at these types of events, a total and undeniable success.
Matthew Williams (left) interviews Ryan Jarvinen (right)
One of the things about working in open source software communities is that you are always moving forward. It’s hard not to get a sense of momentum and progress when it seems you are constantly striving to improve and build on the work you and others have done before.
But sometimes you have to pause to reflect, because sometimes there is loss.
It is with heavy hearts that the Fedora Project community learned yesterday of the passing of one of its prominent members, Matthew Williams, who lost his three-year battle with cancer Wednesday morning. Matthew, also known as “Lord Drachenblut,” was an Indiana native and a passionate member of the Fedora community.
Matthew’s passion to constantly improve the software and hardware with which he worked created a tireless advocate for the Fedora Project, and his presence was felt at conferences across the nation: SCaLE, Ohio LinuxFest, and the former Indiana LinuxFest, an Indianapolis-based event that he helped found.
Matthew also devoted time to interviewing and archiving notable figures in the free and open source software communities to learn what drove people to work on their projects. He was also very driven to share what he knew, launching the Open FOSS training site in 2015 to help new Linux users with getting involved with any Linux distribution. While he was active in the Fedora community, Matthew was also very involved with Ubuntu as well.
A great deal of what Matthew did for Fedora centered on getting more people involved and knowledgeable about the project. To that end, he was the owner of the Fedora G+ page, a responsibility he took very seriously. Under his management, the page has over 25,000 members and is one of the Fedora Project’s strongest outreach channels.
All of this work and achievement does not really portray what Matthew was like as a person: a kind and thoughtful soul with an unwavering dedication to the things in which he believed. For those who worked with and knew Lord Drachenblut, it is your personal thoughts we invite you to reflect upon today. For the rest, know that the Fedora Project and the open source software community at large is a little more poorer today with the passing of our colleague.
The building will continue, but we will miss our friend Matthew.
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