FOSDEM’18

About FOSDEM

Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather in Brussels to attend FOSDEM. This year FOSDEM took place on 3-4 February, in the beautiful city of Brussels (Belgium).

FOSDEM is a two-day event organized by volunteers to promote the widespread use of free and open source software and is widely recognized as the best such conference in Europe.

Why attend?

FOSDEM is a free and non-commercial event organized by the community for the community. The goal is to provide free and open source software developers and communities a place to meet to:

  • get in touch with other developers and projects;
  • be informed about the latest developments in the free software world;
  • be informed about the latest developments in the open source world;
  • attend interesting talks and presentations on various topics by project leaders and committers;
  • to promote the development and benefits of free software and open source solutions.

Fedora presence

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This year we had even more Fedora contributors attending FOSDEM that helped at the booth. I’m very glad that we had a mix of contributors – old and new ones, different backgrounds, from different Fedora subprojects: CommOps, QA, Ambassadors, Diversity etc. We had a lot of stickers to give away to people coming to visit our booth, Fedora users, people asking questions or just coming to say “Hi” to us. This year we produced some nice Fedora and CentOS bags. In this way, we could easily spot people that visited our booth at FOSDEM. 😉

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On the second day, apart from staying at the booth, we helped Brian at the Distributions DevRoom. I stayed in the room only for one of the talks because for the other one the room was pretty full and Brian and I had to stay outside to not let other people go inside. A lot of people asked about Fedora Modularity too! 🙂

Notes:

  • Fedorator and USB ++ they were a very nice asset at our booth, people were interested to try them out and see how it works
  • A diverse group of contributors ++ we had contributors from different areas of expertise: Fedora legal team, packagers, QA, CommOps, Marketing, D&I, L10n etc
  • Fedora User Guide ++ this year we had some booklets, aimed at beginners, with detailed instructions about how to get started with Fedora
  • Fedora and CentOS bags ++ people loved them!
  • Measuring – we need to find a better way how to measure people that come to visit our booth
  • More swag – especially during the first day we give away a lot of swag and on the second day we run out of swag very fast

Other communities:

During FOSDEM I had the opportunity to meet other open source communities that I’m part as well. It was great to catch up with Nextcloud crew and talk about the upcoming Rails Girls Summer of Code Scholarships and other things, LibreOffice community to talk especially about LibOCon’18 that will be in Tirana, Albania this year, FSFE, Mozilla, GSoC, Collabora, etc. And a lot of members of Open Labs were in Brussels as well. 🙂

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