Thursday evening I had the pleasure of chatting with students at Seneca College in Toronto about Fedora and getting involved with open source. The students are in a program called LUX, a graduate certificate curriculum that is more about system administration and integration than programming per se. These students’ interest in distribution efforts is driven by the many moving parts that make up the platform — code integration, quality assurance, release engineering, and so forth. It was a lot of fun to (maybe) mold fresh minds, but even more fun to hear what was on them. Thanks to Chris Tyler for setting that up!
Because we’re having a Software Freedom Day celebration in my town next Saturday, I thought it would be good to drum up some press for it. A friend of mine got me in touch with a writer for our regional newspaper, and as a result there was a nice article in the paper and on their web site. The headline is a little sensationalistic since I never mentioned the M-word in my interview, and it greatly overestimates me and my importance, but in terms of publicity I do think it will boost attendance at our little event.
I spent a good amount of time this past week trying (with some success) to get calls and emails returned from various educational and hospitality institutions for FUDCon. I know there are folks out there who need substantial advance notice to make travel plans, so don’t think that it’s not on my mind too! Next week I’ll be in Raleigh to renew my RHCE, but despite wanting to do well in the class, I’ll still be working on getting these details nailed down.
Keen eyes will have already seen that I’ve removed the exact dates from the wiki page for FUDCon F11 Boston, since it’s looking more like we’ll be moving to (at the earliest) the December 12-14 weekend. After that, given the holiday season, the next logical time to hold it would be January 9-11 — almost a whole month later! As I’ve said before, I think having FUDCon earlier in the development cycle is a good idea; and, having heard no tremendous outcry to the contrary, that’s the way I’m proceeding.
With our North American Ambassadors on an accelerating trajectory upward, the community architecture team and I will be trying to make it possible for them to plan future FUDCons here. These informal conferences haven’t historically been nearly as demanding as some of the community events I’m seeing these days. But who knows, getting our community more involved in the planning could bring them to a whole new level! Of course, it’s our intention that Red Hat continue to fund these events. The community architecture team and I consider them one of the gifts Red Hat can and should give back to the community. I expect 2009 will see a couple very good North American FUDCon events.
Since I’m not going to see them for a week, I’ve spent most of my time this weekend thus far with my family, so I may not get a lot of work done before I leave for Raleigh. In the meantime, I hope everyone is having a spectacular weekend, and I’ll try to blog more next week about some of the other things I’m working on.
I definitely see what you’re going for with having FUDCon earlier in the development cycle. I do want to mention that this could possibly creates conflicts for students who are juggling finals around that time. I have no idea how this will affect student attendance, but it’d be interesting to compare rosters with previous FUDCons and see what difference (if any) it made.
(Side note: January 9-11 would probably be guaranteed possible for many college students/myself. If Fedora developers are so busy around the holiday season, then perhaps the date of FUDCon around the season is less important than we might think.)
@Ricky: Yes, that’s a good point. I’m assuming December 5-7 wouldn’t have been any better for purposes of exams. Maybe we should consider December 19-21, but I worry that’s too far into the holidays for a lot of people who are scheduling vacations or visits home.
The problem I also see with January is the schedule for F11. Note the Alpha freeze is listed as January 13! Now, to be fair, that schedule hasn’t been adjusted for our F10 release date of November 18th, but realistically, everyone I have heard speak about it wants to “suck it up” and absorb the F10 schedule slip into F11. That upholds our fairly strict time-based release policy.
I found out about the article in the FLS from Scott’s brother Mark, who mentioned his parents (in NM, no less) had seen it. What a small and interconnected world!
Press is great and the story is great as well.
In related news, I sent the text of the interview I did with you earlier in the summer to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. I am very please to report that they are ready to bequeath an inordinate sum to the Fedora Project.
Who would have thought?
BTW, seeing those letters… FLS… took me back to the early 80s, listening to WFLS on winter mornings, hoping that they’d announce Stafford County schools as closed.
Do you remember that wacky hillbilly song they’d play at 6am, saying good morning to all the counties?