[Ambassadors] Review about Free Software Conference 2009 in Budapest, Hungary

[Robert Scheck]

Good evening,

now that I'm safely back at home, I'll write a bit about the Free Software
Conference 2009 (Hungarian: Szabad Szoftver Konferencia 2009) in Budapest,
Hungary. The event itself was organized by the FSF Hungary and took place
in the building for scientific and economy of the university in Budapest.

Unfortunately, one week before the event, some health issues appeared at
Christoph Wickert, who initially wanted to attend the event. In the end,
Joerg Simon asked me to attend and that's how I made it in.

On Friday evening, I flew from Stuttgart via Frankfurt am Main to Budapest
- it was my first trip to Hungary at all and I noticed, that they are still
lacking English knowledge at signs/labels and people. Usually you can guess
the meaning of words in a foreign language - but not at Hungarian, they're
completely different. Nevertheless I managed it with a 30 minutes taxi trip
to get to my hotel (the airport is ~ 15 km away from the city center).

At early Saturday morning, I met Zoltán Hoppár in the hotel lobby. He's our
first and currently only Hungarian Fedora Ambassador the first time as far
as I know. Together we moved on to the university and prepared our booth.

At 9:00 am the event officially started, at 10:00 am our workshop "Building
RPMs made easy" started (thanks again to Christoph for providing me his
German presentation about the same topic as template for my English one),
but nobody was there! Fortunately after a few more minutes people showed up
and told us that the previous presentation was a bit too long. Zoltán was
so friendly to translate my whole workshop on-the-fly into Hungarian - that
was a lot of work, because 50 minutes are less time for something huge like
RPM packaging and I had to hurry up a bit to get all slides and a packaging
example done.

The rest of the day we mainly promoted Fedora, handed out media and swag,
answered questions around the OLPC XO and tried to encourage new Hungarian
Fedora Contributors and Ambassadors - I think we hopefully got a handful
people in total, some of them directly signed up in FAS at our booth. I've
to say "thank you" to Zoltán here as well, because most of the visitors did
not speak and understand English - so Zoltán was really a lot of the time
only translating both ways. Nevertheless, it was definately a great event!

And it was a real community event, even that some commercial sponsors have
been around. According to the FSF Hungary, it was a worse event measured by
the visitors, they've counted ~ 350 visitors for the whole day. Did I say,
that I like and appreciate how Zoltán is acting, even he's a relatively new
contributor and the past event was one of his first (or the first?) Fedora
event? :)

Of course we've made pictures, but I'm still looking for a good place to
host them, I personally dislike Flickr and similar portals. Maybe we can
setup a pictures.fedoraproject.org with a gallery and everybody in FAS can
upload pictures there? Of course we would need the events as a group or
category. Ideas? Suggestions?

In the evening, Zoltán and I went for lunch to the Soul Café & Restaurant
and I ordered some typical Hungarian food to get impressions there as well.
Of course we've twaddled about possible future events and some ideas - how
else could it be? :) Joerg and Christoph: Next time, Zoltán would like to
see us all three at an event - maybe we get it managed for FOSDEM?

On Sunday, I flew back from Budapest via Munich to Stuttgart (the last part
of the trip with a tiny prop airliner) - and unfortunately Lufthansa didn't
manage it to bring my baggage to Stuttgart. I started baggage tracking, but
right now and even hours after, they've absolutely no clue as the digital
tracking for my baggage is somehow just empty. If they are incompetent, we
have lost (beside of my clothes, shoes, washbag etc.) some Fedora plastic
banners, my Fedora Ambassador polos and the presents from Zoltán - and that
would be a real loss. Let's hope and cross fingers...

Finally, I've to say "thank you" to Zoltán, Joerg and Christoph for their
work, efforts and support around the event! Not to forget a "thank you" to
Fedora EMEA e.V. for the financial support to get me there.


Greetings,
  Robert
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