[Ambassadors] Fedora and Red Hat Open Day 2008 - report

[Pawel Sadowski]

Hi,

Fedora and Red Hat Open Day is already finished. I will try to brief you
how the event was and if we have been successful.

First of all, the number of people who registered theirselves was really
exciting. Without any doubt, it was the biggest number of people ever
registered for our event. We had 173 persons who had sent us a completed
form and we were really happy there was such huge interest in our event
as for Polish conditions, and even if no everybody appeared, we had
quite a huge attendance anyway. Although we started advertising it just
about two weeks before the conference, I personally think we have been
very successful in this aspect. Maybe that was even better than if we
started it earlier, as that was still a hot topic and there was no time
for that to be forgotten. As this is what I took care of, I hope to do
the advertisement in the next year for much bigger scale and I hope we
will reach the number of 200 or even more attendees :)

The first presentation, about the Fedora Project in general, what it is,
what are its goals etc. started at 9:15 in the morning. I have done it
by myself, I am not sure how good it was but I think my second
presentation on OLPC was much better.

Next presentation was about One Laptop Per Child. And, as you know,
Joerg Simon could not attend, I have done it by myself. I think that was
the first speech on OLPC ever in Poland, and maybe my impression was
that people were really interested in it. Except telling them on the
project, I have also shown what they can do with it, and wanted people
to come to the booth after I finish the speech so they could have a
closer look, touch it and work for a while with OLPC. One lady did not
allow me to accomplish my plan, as she asked me to give it to the people
during my speech and I could not refuse... I let them have it for a
while and asked to bring it to the booth after they are finished. Here
we had a problem: I took the laptop with me (from Germany), but nobody
remembered about the plug converter and the battery was already below
50%. I went to a local supermarket to buy the converter, but I
completely forgot about voltage difference. I think the lady at shop was
the one who reminded me that. And as I had still in my memory adventures
of someone frying a device with the voltage difference, I have finally
decided to buy a transformer (which already conained the plug converter
as well). After getting back to the building the conference was held, I
found out the charger for some unknown reason does not work. I had no
idea why it refused cooperation. After several tries, we have finally
managed to get it to work (the reason why it did not before still
remains unknown - it could be a problem with the connections inside the
transformer or something like that. That solved the power problem and I
did not have to longer worry that people who come to the booth will have
to look at disabled OLPC.

Now something about other speeches. I couldn't see all presentations, as
I was walking among the conference hall, booth, and the supermarket, so
I will only let you know what they were about. Here you have the full
agenda:

1. Introduction to Fedora. New Fedora 9 capabilities - Pawel Sadowski
2. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 - Jerzy Baranowski
3. OLPC - Pawel Sadowski
4. KDE4 - Kamil Grzebien
5. Intregrated Archival Information System - OS in state administration
- Lukasz Glowacki, Jakub Lewandowski (only Lukasz Glowacki present)
6. Xen - paravirtualization, live migration - Patryk Malina
7. SELinux - Kamil Dudek
8. RPM - Karol Trzcionka
9. yum - Michal Bentkowski
10. Party at the main marketplace ;)

That's all, excepts a dinner break somewhere in the middle and
registration at the beginning ;)

We have sold some Fedora T-shirts and stickers, and given away all the
F9 live CDs I had taken with me, so while coming back home one of my
suitcases was a little bit lighter ;) Oh, and maybe we have sold some
Fedora posters I took from LinuxTag last year, but I was not doing
everything by myself and I have to confirm this yet.

After the conference had finished, we cleaned up the booth and gave away
pizza we ordered and could not manage to eat everything by ourselves :D
After that, we went with some conference attendees to the main
marketplace in Cracow to have some dring and talk a bit on Open Source
etc. To sum up, in my estimation, we can say the event was successfull
and in the next few months we can start preparations for next edition :)

You can see some photos here:
http://mcgiwer.wordpress.com/2008/06/04/fedora-and-red-hat-open-day-2008-finished/. I'll let you know once I have some more photos. We have also recorded all presentations excepts my first. If someone is interested, please let me know (they're all in Polish).

Regards,
Pawel