Five days to go for first ever Globalization Fedora activity day

Tokyo streets at night

I am sure most of you must be aware regarding G11N FAD happening from 1st to 3rd Nov in Tokyo Japan.

This blog is specifically to highlight present status of FAD.

•  All attendees travel and accommodation stuff done. This was most challenging part since Tokyo is very costly and managing everything in budget was difficult. Thanks to all attendees to agree for partial subsidy.
• Tickets filed for subsidy requests.
• VISA's done.
• Venue room bookings done.
• Schedule is almost done. Earlier we were planning to cover all topics in session type manner. Jens suggested covering it through hackathon will be more productive. Everyone agreed and now we have almost 50-60% time specifically for hackathon. 
• Lunch arrangement almost done.
• Social Event - Dinner place not decided yet.
• Fedora 23 release party. Had couple of issues for this but looks ok. 1st is Fedora 23 schedule slip by one week. Still we are lucky planning this exactly on 3rd Nov. :) 2nd Waiting for confirmation from Japanese Ambassador David (Dramsey). Earlier got positive response from him so expecting he will be there.

We are going to work on some cool stuff

• Glibc locales sub-packaing
• Automated testing for i18n and l10n.
• Localizing Fedora magazine articles.
• Review on recent Fedora Zanata users survey. 
• ...and much more 

I am sure we will able to complete some of these.

What should other do?
 If you have any queries or nice idea on G11N side, feel free to send email to g11n AT lists DOT fedoraproject DOT org

Remote attendees: If everything goes well, one can simply dial in and listen all the presentation. Though remote participating in hackathon will be difficult but will try to communicate through irc. We already have couple of Remote participants.

For more information stay tuned on #fedora-g11n and g11n AT lists DOT fedoraproject DOT org

Cheers !!

Fedora 23 Internationalization test day today !!

We have planned Fedora 23 i18n test day today. Most of the details are available on test day page regarding how to execute test day.

From the changes side we have 3 changes this time

• Unicode 8.0 update
• IBus1.5.11
• ibus-libzhuyin

Basic motivation behind this test day is to make sure all essentials components for languages working fine.

• Enconding's 
• Fonts
• Default selected fonts are appropriate for languages.
• IME's
• IBus
• Default input methods
• Rendering & Printing
• For complex scripts Left-to-Right etc.
• Locales
• Locale available with default installation
• Its processing
• I18n Tools
• fonts tweak tools
• dnf langpacks
• IM settings
• spell checkers 

 Above are just few top of the mind things for languages. Requesting all Fedora users and developers participate in test day and make sure your language components work fine in Fedora 23.

Fedora 22 release event at Aurangabad, India

    This is my 7th event specific on Fedora after becoming an Ambassador. Ashutosh is already doing good for promoting Fedora in Aurangabad. He earlier did Fedora 21 release party at his institute and took number of topics around Fedora.

    During FUDCon APAC we were talking about doing Fedora 22 release event at Aurangabad. Plan was to do it bit bigger with one of the major institute in Aurangabad. Thought will take some break after FUDCon and decided to do it in August. Ashutosh had initial discussions with "CHH. SHAHU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING".  Most of the details regarding Release events are available at Wiki page.

    I have been never to Aurangabad and wanted to be there but was not sure whther i can actually make it. Most of the time during discussions with Ashutosh i was like plan as per your convenience and if possible i will jump in the last moment. Decided date as a 21st August and luckily me too able to make it :)

    I think event we did happened in good time. Red Hat GLS team recently signed MOU with CSMSS for "Red Hat ACADEMY - Hands-on curriculum for academic programs". There is already excitement on Free of open source software's. We were even more lucky that Business Development Manager - Ipsita Chatterjee was there. She shown interest for supporting Fedora activities and ask to inform her whenever any support required.

Yummy Cake of Fedora 22 release

    Coming back to event, Fedora release event i have attended till date used to be small scale i.e. around 20-50. This was an exception and bit bigger in scale. Around 250+ students were there. All the things happened very formally. Introductory talks from Principle and HOD of CSMSS. Then felicitation of guests.  Before starting actual program we did release of DVD's and cut the cake.

From left: Ms. Ipsita C, Principle Dr. U. B. Shinde, Me, Mr. Ashutosh B, Pushpendra C. Hod. Dr. S. P. Abhang

    Normally i like to talk on Fedora + Globalization. But since this was first event at this college. Talking on Basics of FOSS and Fedora was important. Started with basics of foss and introduction to Fedora.

Few nice moments

    Then Ashutosh started with demonstrating installation of Fedora 22. Initially we started with netinstall iso but somehow it was not working well. Then we changed iso. in meanwhile we started asking questions to students and Red Hat GLS gave few goodies to students who gave correct answers.

    I think demonstrating installation of Fedora is very important, specifically at places new to Fedora. It gives bit more confidence and also motivate person to try Fedora. After major steps of installation, while packages were getting installed Pushpendra started his talk.

    Pushpendra Chavan travelled from Pune to Aurangabad specially for release event. He delivered talk on "Features of Fedora Workstation". During his talk he also motivated students by telling his own story about how he came to field of FOSS.

    Lastly i did closing of release event by talking on How to contribute to Fedora and how it can help to students. This talk was well taken by students. It provided ideas to students regarding what they can do in Fedora. I also mentioned about recent proposal to council regarding providing certificate to students doing contribution to Fedora.

    Unfortunately by this time it was already 1:45pm and everyone was hungry. We missed Q&A session. But still we were there for some time and answering to queries of students.

    In the morning we mate with HOD Dr. Abhang and really impressed with his interest in moving Fedora ahead. We had quick meeting with principle where we had nice discussions on Fedora and open standards. CSMSS college is just in there third year but if one see progress its excellent. Management is very supportive and very much interested in Linux. They believe in Free and open source. Libreoffice is already is use by all CSMSS staff and they have already moved couple of LABS into Fedora. Infrastructure is awesome. Most of the latest technologies already in CSMSS including digital board. (At least i saw it first time). I mentioned to management about Fedora certificate to students for completing activities.

    Special thanks to Ashutosh for taking initiative for this event, CSMSS Principle Dr. Shinde and HOD Dr. Abhang for hospitality and arrangement and Pushpendra for travelling Aurangabad for this event.

   Going forward we need to conduct couple of session to educate CSMSS students further on Fedora. Soon i will discuss with other Ambassadors, Developers and plan one.

Group photo with Fedora 22 DVD's

Fedora Localization test tomorrow (18th Aug 2015)

I always wonder how fast Fedora keeps on moving. I am going to Aurangabad, India for Fedora 22 release event coming Friday and at other end Fedora Alpha 23 released last week and we are going to execute Fedora 23 L10n test day tomorrow.

Coming back to topic on Fedora Localization test day. In last couple of months we formed Fedora G11N group and started to work in improving things.

Number of improvements has been happened for F23 L10n test day. Those are as follows.

1. Re-evaluated application list for testing. (Still i feel we can improve it further by discussing on devel list)
2. Test cases has been cleaned and improved for F23 releases. 
3. Test day app is finally in use :)

Saying that now its time to test Fedora 23 readiness for your language.

As usual start testing process with L10n test day page This page has all the details you will be required. If any problem feel free to ping peoples on #fedora-test-day.

I know people are still returning from flock-2015, so might not get time to execute L10N test day. Though we mark particular day for testing, you can still execute test steps in your free time. For L10n test day we might wait for single or couple of weeks for evaluating testing results. Good if you can complete before it :)

FUDCon APAC 2015 - my experience as an organizing team member

    I was part of FUDCon APAC 2011 but it was just as a speaker and attendee. After attending flock 2014 and talking with Tuan found that things are not very good from Ambassador perspective, not many people are active in India. Decided to become an ambassador and help to make it better. During same time more Fedora India members stepped up as an Ambassador in India and it created good active group of Ambassador in India :)

    We started with couple of meeting before placing the Bid. Later won the bid for FUDCon and then the process started.

    I volunteered myself for coordinating marketing and outreach activity. [1][2] Its 6 month long activity. We had so many meetings. Few planned, few unplanned. Tried everything that was possible from my side to make it successful. Even we had BoF at FOSSASIA 2015 as well to discuss on FUDCon stuff.

    Learning's for me
    1. Worked with lots of peoples. Its really great to see how people come ahead with passion for doing something for Fedora.
    2. Learned smaller things to make event successful from marketing perspective.
    3. Content and designing is very important to make event successful. We got good help for it. Need to involve people as early as possible for review stuff.
    4. Timing is key. !!
    5. Best thing in FOSS world is opportunities never wait for anyone. If one is unavailable someone else naturally takes lead.

    Positive points from FUDCon APAC 2015
    1. Major event of Fedora happened in India after 2011. Not any estimates yet on how many people attended the event but word has reached almost everywhere through social media, emails.
    2. Attendees understood we have good Fedora developer community in India.
    3. We covered lots of trending technologies in event.
    4. Education panel was helpful. Education dept's knows about FOSS stuff but there is no connection between FOSS community and Education department. Red Hat through Fedora community can definitely help here to build this connect.
    5. Most of the active contributors from Fedora were present and we had good meeting like one Ambassador BoF.
    6. Its good that attendees and even organizers felt that we missed "xyz" things. It actually give more motivation to make it further better next time. :)

    Going forward
    1. Momentum is already there, now need to use it for more activities.
    2. Now onward need to grow Fedora community through smaller events, mostly dedicated and targeted for specific audience.
    3. Would like to see more "do" people rather than "talk" people. 

    It was good to meet many friends from different places. Ashutosh and team from Aurangabad, CDAC guys from Mumbai (Kharghar, Andheri). Surprised to see Sneha at FUDCon. :) Few students from Nashik.  Sumit Bhardwaj who took off from Office to attend FUDCon. :)  And i know there are many who just came to learn more about Fedora, so cheers for all. 

    Thanks again to all helped to make FUDCon APAC 2015 a successful event and specifically "FUDCon APAC 2015 team" [3]

Few Photographs

Minutes of first Globalization meeting of Fedora

Today we had first ever Fedora Globalization (g11n) meeting.  Members from 4 groups Internationalization, Localization, Fedora language testing group and Zanata participated. To get background regarding this meeting see g11n proposal.

Due to less time we decided to discuss FLTG and UTRRS topics in next meeting. We are going to have our next meeting on 17th June 2015 same time @ 04:30 UTC.

Highlights

Zanata feedback survey

We are using Zanata as a official translation platform in Fedora. We need to do survey to take feedback from both translators and package maintainers. It will help us to understand need and missing feature from these different user groups. We agreed to do survey around end of august 2015. 

By the next meeting we will have further updates on how we are planning to do it.

ACTION: mkim and apeter followup with lukebrooker. 

L10N sprints based on F23

We discussed number of things under this topic. i.e. Minimum percentage of translations to declare particular language is supported or not. Discussed on language coordinator status.

ACTION: apeter to draft sprint proposal and send on mailing list for discussion.

Translation deadline around Beta

This was most debated topic. There is definitely need to look into this issue. Since after string freeze number of packages get updated. Its good to have some realistic and working deadline for Translation freeze.  We got lots of suggestions. 

ACTION: noriko to prepare draft for extending Translation deadline and send to mailing list.

G11N Infrastructure (IRC, Wiki and Ticket etc.)

We agreed to create g11n mailing list. May be we can simply add other list into g11n mailing list. Traffic on g11n mailing list will be not that high though. Also soon we will have #fedora-g11n channel.  

ACTION: pravins to create g11n mailing list.

G11N FAD - proposal

Quickly we discussed idea about Globalization FAD. Requested everyone interested in attending FAD to add there name. We need to further work on budget before pushing this to Fedora council.

Next meeting

With the lots of good discussions we dropped our earlier plan of meeting once in each month. Decided to meet in 2 weeks.
 

Click to get full meeting log and minutes

FUDCon APAC 2015 - 19th May planning meeting minutes

We had 14 members in the meeting. Following are key points:

• Started with scheduling. Most of the scheduling work done on paper. By this 22nd May we will get first draft of schedule.
• Travel side: Remaining tickets will be mostly get booked on Wed. 20th May. Work on invitation letter is going on.
• Outreach:
• We voted on two drafts and decided to choose Dark background poster. Standee need further work. We decided to use more generic FUDCon standee.
• Social media post going well. Need to keep this up. If you have any tweets in mind feel free to edit wiki.
• Soon contacting speakers and ask them put missing details in fudcon.in portal. Also asking to speakers for bogging about there topics,we can use those to spread news about FUDCon.
• Ticket for T-shirt design.
• June 1st and 2nd week we will plan F22 release party in few colleges and use this opportunity to promote FUDCon. This points also reminder regarding F22 DVD's.
• Video series: Few clips are ready now, work is going on to compile it and make short video.
• Website:
• Redesign done. Its now in production. For more info read post.
• We need some volunteer to add topics for "News & Updates" section.
• SWAG
• We reviewed few swag. Will finalize mostly in next meeting.  Most of the quotes and ideas are available in http://piratepad.net/FUDConPunePlanning
• Video recording of talks. Trying for self recording with http://bigbluebutton.org/

For more details visit piratepad page

Minutes of FUDCon APAC 2015 planning meeting

We had our weekly planning meeting today. Comparing to earlier Fudcon planning meeting with today's, we have done lots of progress. Most of the things are already in good shape including Travel, Accommodation, FUDPub, Website and Scheduling etc.

Updates are as follows:

Travel
    All sponsorship request tickets  are resolved now. Prasad (PJP) yesterday commented decisions on all the tickets. We have clear picture now how many are joining us At Pune for FUDCon :)
   Same time hoping others to whom we not able to sponsor will also join us.  Mostly we will have one more meeting for traveling coming Friday and that will be last one.

Accommodation     We still have 12 more slots remaining for stay. We are planning to talk with colleges to allot/provide few rooms in hostel for students traveling from other places. Will get update on that soon.

Scheduling
    Storage, Containers and  OpenStack track leaders are ready with schedule. It will be nice if track leaders can blog regarding highlights of there tracks, what to expect. We can use those stuff later for marketing FUDCon.
    Niranjan, PJP and Parag are working on scheduling main tracks. Will have some more update by this Friday.

Outreach/Marketing
     Going good. Planning to send invitation email by this Friday. Regarding Colleges, most of the colleges are closed and going to open on 1st or 2nd week of June. Thinking for good time to start talking with them.
    Discussed on draft of Flyers and Standee created by Yogi. Suggested to change background from Blue to White. Also there was discussion on T-shirt design, will create ticket for same soon.
    Regarding Videos series, Shrink thinking to do some hangout session and use recording as a video.
    Fedora 22 is getting released in 26th May, this is good time to increase awareness regarding Fedora and FUDCon through F22 release parties. Planning to do some during 1st or 2nd week, same time there was suggestion to do install fest rather than simple talks and cake cutting.
    Social media posts are not going very well, so requested all members start tweeting/sharing about FUDCon. We do have plan for scheduled tweets/FB Posts, those will be mostly related to speakers, there bio and sessions information.

Websites
    Devel instance available for testing [3] Do go through it and if find any issue report on fudcon-planning list or #fedora-india. Soon planning to deploy it.

SWAG   
    Discussed on quote for some swags.

    For more details regarding FUDCon planning visit piratepad page.

FUDCon APAC 2015 Thanks to community for huge response for CFP

    I was interested in writing this blog post couple of weeks back but was away for Fossasia 2015 and them some family events. I know its never late to say thanks you :)

    We started accepting CFP on 9th Feb 2015 and decided deadline for submitting papers 9th March. Earlier i was bit doubtful regarding how many submission we might get. Specifically when we don't have great numbers of Fedora users around.  At one moment even thought "Might  be, we will need to extend CFP by a week". Started marketing activities for CFP.

    Started by sending an email on Fedora mailing lists including India, Ambassadors, Devel, Announce and everywhere possible and requested to forward further to relevant mailing lists.

    Prepared FudCon-outreach-list  and listed down all the FOSS related organizations and communities, interested in Fedora and decided to sent them email. Do go through this list, it is great resource for one planning conference around FOSS.

    Its time consuming task to send email to all the communities, so decided whoever has contacts or communicated earlier with any list, just start sending CFP email. Went very well.

    During discussion we also thought its good to contact IT companies interested in FOSS. Talked with friends working with them and requested to forward CFP to there organizations.

    We were looking for flyer for CFP from the day 1 CFP open but it was pending on logo for FUDCon APAC 2015. During the time we got logo and just in time i.e. last week we got our awesome flyer for CFP ready !! Though it was in last week but it helped to spread the message. Got almost 50% submissions in last week.

Specifically wanted to thanks following supporters:

1. Helped in prepared CFP related contents and Flyers.
2. Helped in filling up missing bits in outreach and also helped in completing task. 
3. Forwarded FUDCon CFP related email to respective organizations.
4. Sharing FUDCon CFP related post through social media.  Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin.
5. Bloggers and FedoraMagazine writers AND
6. Last but not the list the one who actually submitted sessions :)

    I know most of you already know, still let me write it again. We got total 140 paper submissions. This is nice number specifically when we are having available slots only around 40-50 and was expecting around 60-70 talks.

    Many many congratulations to FUDCon APAC pune 2015 outreach and marketing group for achieving first target.

    Now lets gear up again for our next target to marketing actual event. We will have speakers list and schedule ready most probably by next week. We will have some meeting to prepare plan for event marketing. Excited to work with you all again for our next milestone. :)

My activities at FOSSASIA 2015

This blog in continuation to my earlier blog on "FOSSASIA 2015 Highlights noticed by me"

Group Photo

Talk on Glibc Unicode 7 update:

        Glibc is an important component of operating systems. Recently we upgraded Glibc Unicode support from 5.1 to 7.0. This was major update after 4-5 years. It usually remains unnoticed, i wanted to highlight. Even though i work for redhat still it took around 7-8 month to get patch finally in glibc upstream. Around 25-30 audience was there in talk and it was well taken. Slides for my talks are available at slideshare.

Fedora:

        We kept Fedora DVD's and stickers At Red Hat booth. Was at booth 2-3pm first day and distributed dvd's to attendees. Also got a chance to meet Harish, Izhar, Prima Yogi, Aditya patawari, and Kushal. I proposed Fedora badge for people attending fossasia and asked participant to add name in piratepad.  Unfortunately it got rejected due to not planned in advance :(

        Fedora Breakout session. This was planned by Praveen Kumar, we gathered there, not many attendees were there but we got a chance to interact with "Hamara Linux" representative Aarti Dwivedi and Samyak Datta, LifeNectar explained them regarding Fedora, Fedora.Next and also on widely used Fedora remixes.

FUDCon APAC 2015:

        Being one of the member of organizing committee thought its good time to discuss on FUDCon APAC 2015 with people mostly participate remotely. We planned BoF, decided to do it in lunch time since most of the time people were busy doing other stuff. Updated group on number of papers received, planning happened till date, BarCamp style track, lightening talks.

#Fedora and #FUDConin BoF today at #FOSSASIA.. Venue: Near Lunch Place, Timing: 12:30 to 1PM.
— Pravin Satpute (@prravins) March 14, 2015

Represented Red Hat Globalization team:

        Working in this domain almost 8+years and worked on almost all complex scripts including Indic, Arabic.  APAC is more characterized by non-english speaking countries and fossasia was the perfect place to interact with users for globalization needs. Interacted with couple of people for what languages they used on Fedora.

Anything related to #globalization #g11n or #internationalization #i18n, feel free to ping me at #fossasia , will be at OpenTech track
— Pravin Satpute (@prravins) March 15, 2015

I attended almost all talks in OpenTech track and provided feedback to speakers. Had a good time interacting with most of the attendees over the lunch, socializing events. We had a nice hangout of brewerkz with Anish, Kushal, Praveen Kumar, Lennart Poettering and Rémi Denis-Courmont. 

Thank you fossasia organizers Hong Phuc Dang, Mario Behling, Harish Pillay, Roland Turner, Justin Lee and Darwin Gosal looking forward to attend next year as well. :)

Lohit Devanagari 2.95.1 release

Done with 2.95.1 release. This release in continuation with 2.95.0 release, basically to resolves issues raised in it ;)

Noticed issue while Fedora 22 testing from Bhushan. While analyzing it found it is due to autohinting in Lohit fontconfig file.

We are now using ttfautohint while building ttf file and on this hinted font again using autohint. This does not working very nice as reported in bugzilla.

From bug #1203996

There was couple of more issues i noticed on Fedora 22. These all are fixed now. Soon building 2.95.1 version for Fedora 22. Will be available in Fedora 22 Beta release.

Announced in lohit-devel list
 

FOSSASIA 2015 Highlights noticed by me

This blog i am writing specifically to point out some good points i noticed during the fossasia 2015 conference. Feel free to add missing in comments section :)

1. Awesome location Singapore !! I am sure no one will object :)
2. On the first day Tweets were displayed in the hall. Fossasia is not one who started it. But this was the my first conference where i saw it. It is good thing where audience can share what going in there mind w.r.t. ongoing talk  with other audience. It was also motivating audience to tweets, so good trick to make audience active ;)
3. It was good first day with no parallel talks. I liked the approach, starting parallel tracks from day first sometime start splitting audience. Talks on first day were more generic. People also got a chance to know, how many people around and started planning hacking activity for coming days.
4. Talk from Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan, Minister of Singapore was well taken by audience. Very few such ministers around who understand technology so well.  

   Happy got a chance to listen Dr. Vivian Balkrishnan @ #fossasia Wish get more ministers in world thinking for foss.
   — Pravin Satpute (@prravins) March 13, 2015

5. All food vessels at the lunch counter got empty in some time. It proves how tasty the food was. :)
6. Second day started with 5 parallel tracks. OpenTech, Web Technologies, Python, Mozilla and DevOps. I attended almost all talks in OpenTech Track. Even though there was 5 tracks each track got sufficient audience. 
7. Before lunch we took group photo. It was fun, whenever we were thinking all are in now, one new batch of people were joining and then again trying to accommodate all frame. Thanks to Michael Cannon for photo.
   
8. One of the good points was almost all domains people were present. Even we had some talks related to Open Source in Healthcare AutistConnect, LifeNectar and OpenMRS.
9. Lightening talks generally does not get scheduled but in fossasia those were scheduled. I will say it as a good move. First it gave speakers recognition and also might have given them chance to get funding for conference. Second since it was scheduled it happened in well planned manner. Some audience missed few talks due to minor schedule change in lightening talks. Still i will say lightening talks made good impact. Specifically it worked like person introduced his topic and requested audience to join breakout session for further discussions.
10. Plenty of rooms were available for breakout sessions.
    
11. Each day was followed by some social event. Going to remember social event at Labrador park seaside Singapore BBQ definitely for some more time. Did not attended other days social event since some other plans.

    had one of the best dinner from #fossasia @ labrador seaside BBQ, hats off for organizers for an arrangement !!
    — Pravin Satpute (@prravins) March 13, 2015

12. I think due to huge success of fossasia2015 organizers decided to choose same location for next year fossasia as well.
13. Number of booths were available, Dron demonstration was also interesting. Mozilla, MySql, 3D printer, Red Hat.

I had almost dropped my plan to attend conference, thanks to Harish. He gave opportunity to attend conference the conference. I am going to write one more blog on my activities at fossasia, it will be bit bigger than this, Stay tuned :)

Tomorrow (9th March) is last day to submit papers (talk, workshop and hackfests) for FUDCon APAC 2015

    Just thought good to write this small blog as a reminder for deadline for CFP submission [1]. We opened up CFP on 9th Feb, its almost one month before closing CFP tomorrow.
    As of now we have got an excellent response from community from paper submission perspective. Still one day to go. From my personnel experience i know lots of submissions happen on last day :)  Expecting few more on last day. Just make sure to think select appropriate category for your sessions. If not sure, go ahead and submit abstract, during screening will try to suggest suitable category.

    We had around 4 weekly meeting during CFP open time and lots of things happened. Some points includes
    1. Logo finalization.
    2. CFP for flyers.
    3. Fedora 21 release party at Venue. [2]
    4. Code of Conduct for conference. [3]
    5. Lots of decision from conference arrangement perspective. Including Food, FedPub and Speakers accommodation.
    6. fudcon.in site improvements.
    7. Reached lots of organization with CFP details.
    These are only few which i remembered, for more details go through piratepad

   

1. http://fudcon.in/call-paper
2. http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2015/02/points-on-fedora-21-release-party-at.html
3. http://fudcon.in/code-of-conduct

Points on Fedora 21 release party AT MIT COE pune on 21st Feb 2015

Celebrating Fedora 21 on 21st Feb 2015, last one we did on 21st Dec 2014 :)

Fedora 21 is in itself special release due to Fedora.Next initiative, after merging Fedora core with extra this one is major step moving into future. Fedora 21 is also one special release for India, i do not remember if we had any release party for Fedora 20 in India, please correct if i missed anyone. But for Fedora 21 it is going on and on !!

This was the 3rd release party of Fedora 21 in which i took part. Thanks to Praveen Kumar for initiating this release party. Unfortunately he was away for some personnel work but Rupali came up to help with the organization.

Planned agenda for this meet in quick time with team. We were expecting major chunk of audience from MIT COE itself. Later took permission from MIT COE and decided to open up this for community and started spreading message around.

Shatadru designed nice FLYERS for this release party from the artwork available from Fedora artwork team.

MIT COE is bit far for most of the people staying around Magarpatta city, still we managed to be there in time. Mine talk was first at 10:30 reached there at sharp 10:25 :)

There was one more reason behind this release party was to do preparation for FUDCon happening in 26-28 Jun 2015. See the facility talk with professors, discuss with students educate them on Fedora and clear the doubts.

Me impressed lot with MIT COE campus and it is really live campus. On F21 release party there was already couple of events were going on, students were really busy managing and participating into it. We saw there one stall specifically for Linux quiz.

Due to these other event initially we got very few audience for release party. So we started bit late around 11pm. Later few more students joined. Overall i am happy with the audience since they were few but all were truly interested in event.

There was 3 talks were planned Mine (introduction), Anish (Workstation) and Parag (How to contribute to Fedora) and Later panel discussions.  

During my talk i asked everyone to introduce themselves and inform what they are expecting. There were interesting topics those came up.

1. Difference between Fedora and Ubuntu?
2. Why should i go for Fedora?
3. What is FUDCon?
4. How can we participate in FUDCon
5. What about Embedded systems and Fedora?

Since we were planning for Panel discussion, we thought that will be good time to answer most of the questions.

I did my talk well in time, slides of talk available At slideshare [1]

Then Anish explained about Workstation product feature and target audience for it. Anish also helped audience for better understanding of Free Software and opensource software philosophy. It was good since in F21 release party At Mumbai we found that few people were not clear behind Free software philosophy.

Then Parag talked on How to contribute into Fedora, he explained lots of area's where one can get involved.

 At the end of Parag's talk we made transition from Talk to Panel with Amit and Siddhesh took the lead and later everyone contributed including me, Niranjan, Parag, Rupali and Anish. Panel discussion was awesome and Amit and Siddhesh kept on talking for long and discussed on number of topics. Then we understood that we can keep on talking on Fedora for whole day without break ;) 

 Decided to conclude in panel discussion and start actual celebration with cake cutting. Cake arrived on time with Samosa snacks and TEA :)

We decided to do few more events like Workshop in MIT before the FUDCon 2015. Had meeting with MIT COE principle for FUDCon planning which only some of us attended.
  

Thought its already big blog,i might have missed few things and few names, so feel free to add them in comments :)    

1. http://www.slideshare.net/pravinds/introduction-to-fedora-project-and-fedoranext
2. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Release_Party_F21_Pune

Updates on Second FudCon 2015 planning meeting

If you still not aware what happened in first meeting. Do go through Praveen Kumars blogpost  [1]

Almost all members available in last meeting were present today as well. It shows there commitment for volunteering and making Fudcon 2015 successful. I am happy and appreciate that.  Few members traveling to devconf tonight still they were present and contributed lot including Amita, Anisha, Huzaifa and Siddharth. Amit was on IRC (From Bruno) and Siddhesh on IRC+Phone.

After the lots of suggestions on fedora-india mailing list [3], in this meeting we decided to have remote participation possible via phone.

I was taking minutes today and it was difficult since lots of things were getting discussed very fastly. Please excuse me if i missed some :)

Agenda was as follows: 

• Website 
• http://fudcon.in website up
• Finalize CfP text  http://piratepad.net/YaC3hNcOZ8
• Graphics status update?
• Praveen K and Siddhesh now know Drupal a bit, so will own the website
• amit can contribute in 2 weeks from now
• More volunteers/mockups welcome!
• SSL support?  Asked Saleem about it    

• Accommodation 
• We negotiated good rates with Cocoon (INR 3000 + taxes)
• Double-occupancy, Free wifi, breakfast

• Travel updates? 
• Marketing 
• Fedora magazine
• LinkedIn group
• https://www.linkedin.com/groups/FUDCon-India-2015-8240994
• Make a list of MLs to post the CfP to
• also reach out to ambassadors in apac for confirmation / planning
• Post CfP link to social media
• Video update?
• appear.in is good for sharing between a few people
• fudcon.fedoraproject.org
• will need some trac ticket?

• Budget 
• Make and maintain a publicly visible sheet to track expenses?
• I think we should have a wiki where we export the sheet in use.  ethercalc lets anyone edit, which is not exactly ideal for a budget-tracking sheet.  For people interested in handling budget, just contact the owner for budget acc. to the wiki
• publicly visible, not editable :) So wiki would be fine

Minutes are as follows: (Bit long)

• http://fudcon.in/ up now !!  (praveenk)
• Presently using 2011 logo
• Siddhesh was working on LOGO with suchakra.  https://fedorahosted.org/design-team/ticket/352
• If logo taking time we will go for CFP without LOGO
• (amit) +1 let's not wait for logo for cfp, cfp is more important for travel and budget reasons
• Graphics requirement 
• LOGO (may take one week)
• BADGE (i am going to fudcon)
• Image for slogan ("F for Freedom")
• current one is F for Free, doesn't look right nor good.
• Flyers for CFP (It should have QR-Code)
• We need to create ticket for same. https://fedorahosted.org/design-team/ticket/353 (Shatadru) 
• Once CFP is up we can use it for marketing. (Tweet, Facebook, Linkedin, google+)
• Rough CFP draft @ http://piratepad.net/YaC3hNcOZ8 
• It has two version one for email (bit smaller) and bit broader for web page.
• Email version does not required guidelines.
• We need to have different forms based on session (Talks, Workshop, Hackfest)
• Can take this text for web for now.
• Suggestion: We can have two drop-down (proficiency level and topics categories)
• Prerequisite for attendees. (It can be optional). 
• We have option to upload slide also. Or one can provide link as well.
• Deadline for talk submission 1 month from announcement.
• Marketing 
• Speakers
• Professionals
• Fedora users
• System Administrator
• We can discuss with Kushal, Siddhesh
• Amit's Fedora magazine post is still in pending stage
• We need to list out all location where our CFP should go. 
• Colleges (Shrink, Amita)
• Organizations 
• Opensource organization.
• Please add org list here http://piratepad.net/FudCon-outreach-list  
• For speakers we might be not need to go colleges. Mailing list will be sufficient.
• Social media
• Colleges list
• CFP text to send on respective mailing list. All should have consistent text.
• Volunteers 
• One can add his name on https://www.piratepad.ca/p/FUDConPunePlanning-27-Jan-2015
• Also good if he can ask on #fedora-india (Freenode) or  fedora-india mailing list.
• Hotels 
• Discussion with Cocoon hotel. (3000/night with Breakfast)
• We can have BUS for speakers from Hotel to Venue
• COEP has reached out to us and volunteered to help in whichever way they can.
• FudPub 
• 100  number of participants
• Still looking for location. Should be mostly openspace.
• Please update if any option for FudPub
• Lunch 
• Speakers, volunteers and faculty
• It will be in college. College only support VEG
• Lunch looking for around 150 people.
• Once we will get speaker list and how many we need to pay.
• Outreach: Reach colleges and use flyers. 
• Mobile application 
• lets get v0.1 of the app first with the features described. we can add to it then.
• open source  way
• Should be used in future as well
• good to have it integrated with drupal (COD)
• social wall, for live feeds
• Feedback form (link it to every talk)
• Budget 
• At least presently not looking for any sponsor.
• Will have better picture one we get speakers travel requirement.
• Fedora 21 release party At FudCon venue (MIT) 
• Date is not confirmed yet, but around 3-4 week of Feb
• Interested people do join.

Ohh, that is really lot :) Above information is copied from piratepad for minutes [4] Formating from pad to blog was really pain :(

Let me end blog here. Please note most of the piratepad links are there. Feel free to update it with suggestions or one can always send suggestion on fedora-india mailing list or IRC #fedora-india.

Most of the people from organizing committee are traveling to Brno, Czech Republic for Devconf, so we will not have meeting next week. Hoping we will have CFP ready by this weekend.


1. http://kumar-pravin.blogspot.in/2015/01/first-fudcon-india-planning-meeting.html
2. http://www.devconf.cz/
3. https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/india/2015-January/005708.html
4. http://piratepad.net/fudcon-pune-planning-20150203

Lohit Odia 2.91.0 ready for testing under Lohit 2 project

   Started working on this in last month with Shilpa. When initial started working on this script, found it bit difficult. But Odia script is very similar with Devanagari and over the time found comfort with it.

   Shilpa did most of the work and i did verification and fixed few issues. One thing again i noticed during release is using of AFDKO. It is good and we should use AFDKO fully in Lohit project for better quality. Will see if we can do it in long term.

  For now regarding 2.91.0 release. Following are important points:

• Followed Unicode specifications.
  
• Re-writing all GSUB rules.
• Open type rules are available in .fea file for easy re-usability.
• Feature file compiled with AFDKO.
• Supports 'orya' and 'ory2' opentype specifications tag.
  
• Developer friendly glyphs names with AGL syntax format.
• Corrected glyph class for all glyphs. 
• Improved shape of ka-viramasignodia-taodia.
• Added Glyph positioning rules for below based matras.
• Test file available with release tarball.
• Auto testing support with harfbuzz hb-shape.Tested with Harfbuzz and Uniscribe (W8 and XP)

   Update Lohit project page for information regarding download. During release i found few issues which are noted in TODO file. Will fix them before next release. If you find any issue do report on github. Also note TTF file available on my fedorapeople page.

   I remember in FUEL conference i got some improvement suggestions. Couple of them were related to adding Latin to Odia fonts. Presently dont have resource for same but looking forward to solve it in future.

  

Get ready for FudCon 2015, its going to happen in Pune, India.

    Yes, its confirmed now. [1] Took long time though :)

    Excited for this. Recently we organized Fedora release party At Mumbai [3] and i found truly Fedora lover there. One word i said them most probably FudCon will happen in Pune this time and looking forward to see you all there. Its actually going to happen now and time for gathering together. With the power of collaboration and Free and open source technologies making Fedora better and better.

     I have attended FudCon 2011 but only as a speaker and attendee. This time i am one of the member of organizing team. I am sure things will go smother since number of members have experience of FudCon 2011 organization. [2]

    If you are interested in getting involved in FudCon 2015 activities do join fedora-Iindia mailing list and ask on #fedora-india @Freenode if any further queries.

  Cheers !!


1. https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/famsco/2015-January/001666.html
2. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Bid_for_Pune_2015
3. http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2014/12/few-points-of-fedora-21-release-party.html

Typoday 2014 At Pune

    This blog was pending on me from long time.  I got a chance to attend typoday.in 2014 conference At Symbiosis International University, Viman Nagar, Pune  in February. This was the my second conference specifically on typography domain after National workshop on calligraphy and typography in 2007.

    It was great to meet typography domain experts and also students with excellent research on different topics.

    I got a chance to meet Kishor Patil (GIST, CDAC), Achyut Palav, Dave Crossland, Girish Dalvi (IITB),  Adam Twardoch (Fontlab), Sarag Kulkarni, Prof.  Santosh Kshirsagar (Sir J. J. Institute of Applied Art, Mumbai) and Prof. Manohar Desai (Head, Communication Design, Symbiosis Institute of Design).

    We had a good discussion on Devanagari script standardization with Girish Dalvi, Dave and Kishor Patil. There was few improvements suggested in Lohit but as a system default font we cant do certain changes without proper references. Girish pointed out there is already discussion happening At Maharashtra state government and soon something will happen.

    Also Dave shared number of things on his plans for commissioning Devanagari typefaces in coming years. It excited number of typographer around.

    We had expert from Adobe, Fontlab there. There was workshop from Fontlab after the conference specifically for students, i did not attended it due to some other work.

    We also had discussion on Google Noto fonts and Lohit2 project. Overall it was good experience of attending typoday conference.

    There were number of interesting topics but few i noted were "Sensory Experiences in Typography", Matilda A Typeface for Children's with Low Vision. There was number of interesting posters available.

    Looking forward for attending typoday 2015 and learn new things.

Few points of Fedora 21 release party @ TIFR, HBCSE, Mumbai

    Fedora 21 release party was planned in quick time, we can say in one week. Attendees were around 25. Few points regarding the event.

• We got number of people from different organization Red Hat, CDAC, TIFR, IIT, Gnowtantra and couple more.
• As far as i know first Fedora release party AT Mumbai 
• Anish nicely explained myths about Gnome.
• Praveen Kumar rather than giving presentation, actually demonstrated Docker, which created further interest in audience. 
• Rahul Bhalerao very nicely explained "How to contribute in Fedora". One can participate even when he is not software programmer.
• We got nice explanation from Dr. Nagarjuna G on Free software Vs Open source software. 
• During discussion with audience we found there is need for further events regarding Fedora AT Mumbai. Specifically one should be install-fest.
• We got excellent answer for question regarding running MS-Office with wine. Wine is developed to run Free software's available on Windows, so is it not good to spoil its intention by running non-free software with it. Libreoffice is good enough and already used by number of people.
• At the end of conference i am happy that we found Fedora enthusiast group At Mumbai and definitely we can do more events for Fedora in Mumbai in future.
• Other blog related to event
• http://kumar-pravin.blogspot.com/2014/12/fedora-21-release-party.html
• http://krazyabouttechnology.blogspot.in/2014/12/fedora-21-release-party-in-mumbai.html
• http://fossevangelist.blogspot.in/2014/12/fedora-21-release-party-homi-bhabha.html
• http://anish-patil.blogspot.in/2014/12/fedora-21-release-party.html
• http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2014/12/planning-experience-for-fedora-21.html

Planning experience for Fedora 21 release party At TIFR, HBCSE, Mumbai

    It was good experience to organize Fedora 21 release party At TIFR. Started this idea November last week by initial discussion with Rahul Bhalerao. Long time we did not had any Fedora release party in India. Fedora 21 Final release declared on 9th Dec 2014. Rahul agreed to be co-organizer for same. Second we started thinking for Venue. First place name came to our mind was TIFR, HBCSE. This is the place where we started our open source contribution in 2004 under the guidance of Dr. Nagarjuna G.

    We started initial email conversion with Dr. Nagarjuna G. we got go ahead response for same but finalizing date was tricky due to ICFOSS, Swatantra (http://icfoss.org/fs2014/) was happening during our planned date (20 Dec). We decided date 21st Dec (Idea was Celebrating Fedora 21 on 21st ☺).

    Got $100 budget from Fedora and also some travel budget for Pune-Mumbai from Red Hat.

    Second things was looking for qualified speakers. Fedora community is really nice. I discussed this with Ambassadors in Pune and Praveen kumar quickly jumped in for help with talk on cloud. Due to some reason Parag was not available during same time. Anish volunteered for Talk on Workstation. Me and Rahul took care for Fedora intro and How to contribute in Fedora. I wrote one blog earlier for speakers introduction.

    We had meeting on 15th Dec At TIFR for planning remaining activities. Created event page on Eventbrite  . This was my first event as an organizer and i was wondering on Sunday relaxing afternoon how many people can actually make it. Surprising 38 ticket got booked on eventbrite, it was really motivating.

    We got Fedora 21 DVD's just in time. Hats off to Siddhesh for helping for it and Rahul for collecting it from Siddhesh. We somehow managed it and made it available on 21st. Got few Fedora stickers from Rupali At Red Hat Pune.

    I placed order At http://monginis.net/. Online interface has less option. But once one place the order online, we can talk with there customer care with reference number. They delivered order on time.

    I would like to thanks Dr. Nagarjuna for allowing us to host release party At TIFR. It almost solved 50% of part. Next to Rahul Bhalerao for doing all things to make it successful release party. Praveen Kumar and Anish for volunteering as a speaker and also all attendees for making this successful