Ambassadors
In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project[1].
Contributing Writer: Larry Cafiero
Fedora at Idlelo 4 in Ghana
Isaac Sanni-Thomas reports on the recent IDLELO 4 event in Ghana and Fedora's participation in that African expo.
Issac reports:
- Idlelo reported over 100 participants from around the world. Among them was Ben Konrath from GNOME project with whom we had a joint Exhibition booth. We also had John 'Maddog' Hall with us who proudly shared Live Fedora 12 CD's. We can proudly say that our booth had the largest visitors. At a point we had to share responsibilities in order to be able to handle the crowd that our booth had.
- Since this was Fedora's first major event in Ghana/West Africa we had lots of interest as more people wanted to know what Fedora was coming to offer Ghanaians as well as what Fedora was all about. We also had some visitors from Ivory Coast who said they did not have an ambassador and hence didn't know much about Fedora.
- The general question that seem to hit us at almost every second was "What is the difference between Fedora and Ubuntu?". This was coupled with people wanting to know features we had in Fedora that Ubuntu did not have.
- We received a lot suggestions about how to make our presence felt in Africa. The most recurrent one was about Free Media. All our visitors emphasized the fact that the reason why they are used to Ubuntu and know more about Ubuntu is because of the Free CD program Ubuntu has. Ubuntu hasnt held any event in Ghana but the Free CD program alone has won the hearts of over 90 percent of Linux users in Ghana.
- We were privileged to have Ben Konrath from GNOME using Fedora mainly and people were happy to see GNOME 3 in action on his laptop.
- Fedora had a translation session which was held by Pierros teaching how people can contribute to translating Fedora to the Akan language. There was also a panel discussion led by Pierros to discuss the organizational structure of Fedora.
- We gave away lots of live CDs and helped some people to format their laptops to start using Fedora. We gave away some t-shirts and badges. The most popular swag was the badges and the Live CD's. We were so happy to see lots of people wear the badges around the Conference. It showed how involved they want to be in Fedora.
- Lots of people were interested in the OLPC as Pierros demonstrated how its run on Fedora.
- We are happy to introduce a new incoming member who was with another distro by name Kennedy Kasina. He was glad to receive some swag from us as that also motivated him a lot. He is being mentored by Pierros in translation of Fedora to Swahili for Kenya and East African countries speaking Swahili.
- Fedora was the only distro that showed up and made a lot of presence and impact during the event. A lot of thanks goes to Maddog who took sharing of the Fedora 12 media upon himself during his talks. Since the CD was coming from Maddog, a lot of people felt inspired to start using Fedora immediately.
Isaac said, "In all we had a pretty successful event. Currently we have some action points for Ghana for the next few months and especially next year when we will have expanded our user base."
Fedora 13 release party in Guatemala
Neville Cross reports on a Fedora 13 release party in Guatemala on his blog here. The Spanish version is on top and the English is below. Neville addressed around 80 attendees on Fedora's behalf and established a Fedora presence in Guatemala.
Fedora Activity Day in Pune, India
Rahul Sundaram reports on the recent Fedora Activity Day in the Red Hat office in Pune, India. It was a two day event. You might have seen the blog posts on that over this week in Planet Fedora and we have a roundup here.
Rahul reports that there was a variety of projects and tasks that was tackled during the event. Here is a quick summary:
- OLPC/Sugar: Sayamindu who works for OLPC joined hands with Kushal Das to package up a accessibility tool of interest to OLPC and a Sugar activity called Pathagar which is a book server. Sayamindu also gave a talk on life as downstream of Fedora.
- Fedora Tour: A clutter based app with whiz bang effects that aims to provide a friendly welcome screen for new users on first login. Ankur Sinha is leading this effort. Ankur has also helped out in packaging reviews and submitted a few new review requests. The latest being a dependency of Shotwell.
- Fedora Medical Spin: Susmit is a leading an effort to create a medical spin for the next release. Many of us are helping out. Harsh Varma participated in some packaging tasks and is helping with this spin as well.
- Systemd, WebM support etc: I reviewed a few packages, approved one and worked on packaging up systemd, updating webkitgtk in Fedora 12 for WebM support, fixing a E-V-R issue that broke Deluge, qbittorrent etc., for users upgrading to Fedora 13 from Fedora 12.
- Package Reviews: A number of us including Rangeen Basu, Ankur Sinha, Kushal Das and me participated in doing package reviews.
- Autootools workshop: Siddesh who works for GSS gave a introductory workshop on autotoolizing a project.
- Repository wide fixes: Rakesh Pandit working on fixing several security bugs and Imran who couldn't make it to the event due to some last minute disruption came up on IRC and filed patches that fixed all of the pending E-V-R issues between Fedora 12 and Fedora 13. Rakesh will be committing and doing the builds to resolve them today. We hope to be tackling source url issues, desktop file fixes, FTBFS and other similar issues via a online FAD sometime later.
- gFotoStat: Kishan and Meejan worked on a tool for statistics of photos for professionals. This tool can run against a set of pics and provide all sorts of interesting info based on the metadata. They fixed a number of bugs and added some new features in a new release.
- wordGroupz: Ratnadeep worked on a new project which is a vocabulary builder and he also took on some packaging tasks.
- Shreyank Gupta worked on packaging Sup, a popular gmailish mail client written in Ruby and several of the Ruby module dependencies. He has just been sponsored yesterday.
- Salim Ansari hacked on Anjuta including a symbol browser and some new search capabilities and Satya continued her work on Beacon, a web based docbook xml editor
- Runa ported the help in the new mallard format from Tomboy to Gnote for GNOME 3 readiness.
Rahul says, "At the end of the event, we had a discussion about what went well and what we could improve and about organizing a FUDCon next year in India."
Let us know about your Fedora 13 activities
Fedora 13 has now launched and Ambassadors are encouraged to hold release events. If you are planning to hold an event, let Fedora Weekly News know. Drop a line to lcafiero=at=fedoraproject-dot-org with the details and we'll get it in FWN.