[Ambassadors] [Event report] Fedora 12 release Party in Paris (aka Rencontres Fedora 12)

[Mathieu Bridon (bochecha)]

Hi fellow ambassadors,

This week-end, we had our Fedora 12 release party in Paris (Fedora 12
on the 12/12 :) at the Cité des Sciences, a french establishment for
promoting everything about science and technical stuff, and making it
accessible to everyone.

The event ran over 2 days, with several conferences and workshops.
Here is the agenda :

== Saturday ==

=== Conferences ===
14:00 - The Fedora Project, by Thomas Canniot (Fedora ambassador,
member of FAmSCo and treasurer of the Fedora-Fr NPO)
15:00 - Cobbler and Puppet, by William Hoffmann (Red Hat engineer and trainer)
16:00 - Sugar, by Sean Daly (marketing coordinator of the Sugar Labs)
17:00 - The Mozilla community and the web, by Grégoire Coustenoble
(Mozilla contributor)

=== Workshops ===
14:30 - Linux administration, by Michael Scherer (Mandriva contributor) and me
15:30 - Discover Fedora, by Tom Dubin (Fedora ambassador) and
Alexandre Frandemiche (Fedora-Fr contributor, leader of the french
version of Fedora package of the day)
16:30 - A bit of both the first workshops, depending on visitors questions

== Sunday ==

=== Conferences ===
14:00 - OpenMoko, by Michael Scherer (Mandriva contributor)
15:00 - Translating Fedora, by Thomas Canniot (Fedora ambassador,
member of FAmSCo and treasurer of the Fedora-Fr NPO) and Pablo
Martin-Gomez (Fedora ambassadors, leader of the fr Fedora translation
team)
  => this session lasted longer than planned because attendees had a
lot of question, so Michale Scherer decided to let it run and cancel
his next conference
16:00 - Fight Internet censorship with Tor, by Michael Scherer
(Mandriva contributor)
  => Michael decided to cancel his talk as the public was interacting
very well with Thomas about the previous session

=== Workshops ===
14:30 - Discover Fedora, by Tom Dubin (Fedora ambassador) and
Alexandre Frandemiche (Fedora-Fr contributor, leader of the french
version of Fedora package of the day)
15:30 - Linux administration, by me

Also, members of the JeuxLinux.fr team (a french LUG dedicated to
video games on Linux) was present for both days, and were doing some
kind of a permanent "come and play with us" session.

All the conferences were filmed, and we hope to be able to distribute
the videos (in french unfortunately for most of you on this list)
shortly and obviously under a free content license.

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All in all, the event ran pretty well (even if very tiring :). We had
around 100 visitors (I honestly didn't count, but that should be an
accurate estimation), and we helped several people install Fedora or
solve the problems they were having.

We distributed lots of the Fedora 12 CDs we had made, sold t-shirts
and live USBs (Fedora branded USB sticks). We also printed a
translated version of the one page release notes that visitors seemed
to appreciate pretty much.

Cédric, a member of the Fedora-Fr community that we had never heard of
before stepped up to join us and be our reporter to cover the event as
a film report with hand-held camera. He interviewed people, moved
around the event and filmed backstage. We hope to have the finished
movie pretty soon. This was a very nice surprise to us, and we hope he
will continue to participate in Fedora (at least we want to encourage
him :).

Of course, the event wouldn't have been such a success without the
participation of all the attendees that I didn't already mention
above:
- Armel Kermorvant (Fedora ambassador and president of the Fedora-Fr NPO)
- Pierre-Yves Chibon (Fedora ambassador and packager, Fedora-Fr.org
administrator and vice-president of the Fedora-Fr NPO)
- Carlos Vassalo (Fedora ambassador, vice-treasurer of the Fedora-Fr
NPO and human front-end to the LiveUSB-Creator tool :)
- Nicolas Chauvet (Fedora ambassador, rock-star packager and board
member of the Fedora-Fr NPO)
- Maxime Carron (Fedora ambassador and secretary of the Fedora-Fr NPO)
- Xavier Lamien (member of the Fedora Packaging Committee and the
Fedora Infrastructure team)
- Mohamed El Morabity (Fedora ambassador and Fedora-Fr.org ubiquitous
user support)
- Emmanuel Seyman, Paul Marques-Mota and Sabine Herbin (board members
of the Parisian LUG)
- Olivier Fraysse (board member of the Ubuntu-Fr NPO) who really
helped us rounding the edges related to the logistics with the Cité
des Sciences
- and all the others who I inevitably forgot as my memory left me
along with my mental sanity somewhere around 4:00 am on Sunday :)

We're already eagerly looking forward to organizing the next one.

Best regards,


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Mathieu Bridon (bochecha)