That FUDCon poster is catching on.

There’s a nice entry on the Red Hat press blog about some of the interesting items that went on at FUDCon Berlin 2009.

FUDCon is a great place for us to renew social bonds with our fellow Fedora contributors. But it’s also a place where, first and foremost, we try to advance upstream collaboration, present and critique new ideas, and otherwise use the bandwidth that an in-person meeting affords to move Fedora forward through a combination of planning and action. The specific examples of the wireless maintainers who met at FUDCon, and the Red Hat Security Team’s work there, are great examples of what FUDCon can provide.

The Fedora Ambassadors from the EMEA region who met at FUDCon similarly achieved some worthwhile goals, including migrating their automated systems into Fedora. They were rightfully very proud of the work they completed there, and that migration will ultimately benefit the Ambassadors program itself, enhancing transparency and maintainability of those systems. Great work, guys!

I had a nice long phone call with Max earlier today and one of the things we talked about was an upcoming North American FUDCon. So far I have a couple things in mind, such as:

1. An early-December timeframe, either December 4-6 or 11-13.
2. A location off the Eastern Seaboard. Currently the front-runners are Austin, Toronto, and Portland. The decision will be made on the basis of overall travel cost, available venues, presence of a “ground force” to help with advance planning, and possibly the extent of existing open source community that might be interested in our conference.
3. We are also considering some content format changes to make FUDCon even more inclusive and appealing to even more people. For instance, we might have targeted talks for people who are new to specific community teams and looking for places they can help. Whether we make these content changes may largely depend on how many people of that type commit to attendance once the date and venue are set.

Numerous other people are sharing ideas for how we can continue to improve FUDCon and keep it fresh for the next waves of Fedora contributors who are already showing up and looking for ways to help free software. Late next week I will be at Red Hat in Raleigh for part of the POSSE 2009 conference, and I plan to take the input I continue to receive from community members, and collate and combine that with our resources available, along with the valuable wisdom of the Red Hat Community Architecture Team, to get some of the basics decided. Stay tuned!