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