Tag: FOSDEM

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The Fedora Project FOSDEM 23 Experience

A measure of growth is most apparent when scaled across a span of different times and situations. That applies to folks getting to see you after a long time, to vegetation left alone to spread and of course, to communities having their first meetup after a prolonged spell of online-bound interactions. FOSDEM 23 happened to be one of the first times after around three years that community members from across the world met in person with each other in Brussels, Belgium. With new and old faces alike, their time was well spent representing the community, exhibiting to the wider free and open-source communities the good stuff that they have been keeping themselves busy with and most importantly, bonding with their Fedora friends.

This year FOSDEM took place on 4th February ’23 and 5th February ’23 at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Campus du Solbosch, Avenue F. D. Roosevelt 50, 1050 Bruxelles, Belgium. This free event was participated by over 8000 software engineering enthusiasts from across the world, had around 36 lightning talks and around 771 talks spanning 55 designated devrooms. Contributors from our community did not restrict their participation in the event as just attendees but they also enthusiastically volunteered to be stand keepers in the Fedora Project booth, speakers for a variety of talks and lectures, organizers for a set of devrooms and even as ground staff for making FOSDEM 23 a grand success.

Representation in booth

Fedora Project had its official booth in Building H of the Université Libre de Bruxelles campus, near the booths belonging to our friends at CentOS Project and GNOME Project. The desks were set up on time with a display showing the FOSDEM 23 attendee badge QR code and an assorted set of Fedora Project swags for taking (like keycaps with the Fedora logo, USB flash drives with Fedora branding, stickers and clips with the branding of Fedora subteams/SIGs/workgroups like NeuroFedora and Workstation, webcam covers with the Fedora logo and much more). We were also thankfully provided with a jar of jelly bears to offer to our booth attendees and a set of stickers from our friends at the AlmaLinux community.

With a designated booth duty schedule planned beforehand by our community members, the booth was constantly looked after by at least three staff members at any point in time and attended to hundreds of booth visitors throughout the course of the event. The booth visitors were excited to interact with our booth staff members, shared their own fun experiences of using Fedora Linux for a purpose of their choice and asked questions about participating in the community. We also teamed up with our friends from CentOS Project to combine our efforts into managing our booths together and moving our resources to/from the FOSDEM locker room. To sum it up, we really appreciate the community’s participation in our official booth.

Speaking about innovation

Contributors participating in the Fedora Project community were eager to share what they know about what they have been working and that took place in the form of multiple talks/lectures for a variety of devrooms during FOSDEM 23. Ranging from the latest Fedora Linux remix running on Apple Silicon hardware to improving the experience of video gaming on GNU/Linux distributions, from summing up the helpful outcomes of one of the first open-source creative conferences to building a web-based installer for Fedora Linux, our members were involved in providing a great deal of quality content and were met by wide acclaim from halls filled with enthusiastic attendees.

The delivered talks/lectures were not only useful in letting others know about all the cool things we have been working on but also instrumental in garnering feedback from the wider free and open-source software communities as to how we can do better. The attendees were eager to ask their questions at the end of the respective talks and curious to know about the directions that our projects, activities and developments were headed, thereby helping the speaker establish their network and also, potentially onboarding contributors. The following is the list of talks/lectures associated with the Fedora Project, the links of which can be followed to access the recordings and shared presentation assets.

Helping with devrooms

Being a volunteer-driven conference with only a few people working around the year to make it happen, FOSDEM entirely relies on free and open-source enthusiasts to contribute their efforts to organizing and running a variety of devrooms. FOSDEM has set up internet connectivity and projectors to ensure the teams can meet, discuss, hack and publicly showcase their latest developments in the form of lightning talks, news, discussions, talks and lectures. These devrooms cover a wide range of diverse topics, giving all enthusiasts a platform to show what they have been working on, learn what is current in the field of their interest and benefit from the discussions that take place about their topic.

Ranging from language-specific devrooms to those about community governance, contributors participating in the Fedora Project community got involved in not only delivering talks/lectures in these devrooms but also volunteering to make these a grand success. From running a live microphone for attending to popping up questions to flagging flashcards to show speakers how much time they have left, from setting up the wireless microphone for every new speaker coming to the stage to cleaning up everything after the event is wrapped up – FOSDEM appreciates the community participation and we are all about it. Following is a list of devrooms that were helped by Fedora Community members.

Making FOSDEM successful

Donning the bright orange FOSDEM volunteer tees are our proud force of FOSDEM ground staff who devote their time to making sure that everything goes smoothly while organizing the conference. From introducing speakers before their talk/lecture begins to running cash registers at the counter selling official FOSDEM tee, from attending to the FOSDEM cloakroom containing booth and devroom assets to providing directions to the lost speakers rushing to their devrooms – needless to mention that FOSDEM would not have been possible without them. Here as well, one of our long-time Fedora Project contributors, Bogomil Shopov volunteered during FOSDEM 23 as their official ground staff.

Other events

Beyond FOSDEM 23, the contributors participating in the Fedora Project community participated in a bunch of meetups happening around the same time which further helped enrich the networking opportunities for our members. This not only led to our community spanning far and wide to those of others like OpenSUSE, GNOME etc. but to also learning and adapting from what the other communities do best while collaborating with them. We participated in the day-long CentOS Connect event on 3rd February ’23, Google’s FLOSS Foundations Dinner 2023 on 3rd February ’23, Google’s Mentorship Meetup and Fedora & CentOS Friends Dinner on 4th February ’23, and GitHub’s SustainOSS Meetup on 5th February ’23.

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Fedora Project at FOSDEM 2023

Fedora Project will be present at FOSDEM 2023. This article describes this gathering and a few of the events on the agenda. I assume if you are reading the Fedora Magazine, you already know what FOSDEM is, but I’ll start with a small intro anyway.

Define FOSDEM

FOSDEM is the biggest event in the known universe for free/libre and open-source developers and enthusiasts.

Many good people from around the world meet and discuss common topics and define the future of F/LOSS. The event is held in Brussels at the beginning of February. Some of us, who are coming from a bit warmer countries, are calling it FrOSDEM, because it’s usually freezing 🙂

Why attend?

If you are a contributor already or you want to start doing good with your skills for the F/LOSS universe, this event is a must. 

I know everyone has their reason for visiting, but I’ll share the most common ones:

  • You meet the people creating and supporting the products that power the Internet that you already use.
  • If you are a contributor already, you have a chance to meet with your team and people using your product.
  • You learn so much new stuff quickly.
  • You enlarge your horizons by looking at something outside your bubble. If you are a fan of Fedora, go and learn more about Security or Javascript.
  • You have a chance to talk to others with the same passion as yours and even become friends for life. A good friend is always a commodity!
  • You achieve your daily steps goal because the ULB campus is enormous, and you will have to move a lot to get to the room you would like to visit.
  • You have a chance to volunteer and help the community if this is what drives you.
  • You attend an event with a great Code of Conduct.

Fedora at FOSDEM 2023

It’s a tradition for the Fedora Project team to be there to present some of our work from the last year and to allow you to share your feedback on what we do well and how we can improve.

Meet, greet, and see our community in action

One of the most extraordinary things at FOSDEM, which I deliberately didn’t mention in the previous section, is the project booths. In almost every building, you will see people behind a branded table, ready to talk to you about their project, its values, and its mission.

People at the Fedora booth looking at something.
Image by Francesco Crippa under Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

 I have to mention the goodies here, as well. You will return home with many items from your favorite projects. Be sure to continue supporting them further.  

We at Fedora will be happy to welcome you to our booth as well. You can talk to the community members, give us constructive feedback, and see some of the things we prepared.

Our booth location is in building H, alongside the rest of the Linux Distros.

Map of the ULB campus with a mark of the building H, where the Fedora Project booth will be
Building H, ULB Campus.

Stop by and say hi in your language! We are looking forward to talking to you!

We want to share what makes our work exceptional

At each FOSDEM we have a good number of talks related to what we do at Fedora. I am listing only some of them to make it enjoyable for you to browse the agenda and discover the rest yourself.

1: Fedora CoreOS – Your Next Multiplayer Homelab Distro

Using Fedora CoreOS in a Selfhosted Homelab to setup a Multiplayer Server

Speakers

Akashdeep Dhar
 Objective Lead for Fedora Websites & Apps, Fedora Council
 Software Engineer, Red Hat Community Platform Engineering

Sumantro Mukherjee
 Elected Representative, Fedora Council
 Software Quality Engineer, Red Hat

Intro

Fedora CoreOS is an essential, monolithic, automatically updating operating system optimized for running containers. It focuses on offering the best container host for executing containerized workloads securely and at scale. We will show a case study of setting up Fedora CoreOS as a self-hosted Homelab distribution for globally accessible (using secure network tunneling) multiplayer servers for video games (namely Minecraft, Valheim, etc.).

When and Where

Saturday, Feb-4 at the Containers devroom from 11:30 to 12:00

2: Creative Freedom Summit Retrospective

Speakers

Emma Kidney

Part of Red Hat’s Community Platform Engineering team since 2021. 
Designer at Red Hat’s Community Design Team. 

Jess Chitas 

Part of Red Hat’s Community Platform Engineering team.
Creator of Fedora’s mascot – Colúr, and Fedora Brand Guidelines Booklet.

Intro

The Creative Freedom Summit is a virtual event focused on promoting Open Source tools, spreading knowledge of how to use them, and connecting creatives across the FOSS ecosystem. The summit’s accomplishments and shortcomings will be examined in light of the event’s first year and potential changes for the following years.

When and Where

Sunday, Feb-5 at the Open Source Design Dev Room from 14:30 to 14:55

Where to find more related talks?

Our wiki page is a good start, but FOSDEM’s schedule catalog is even better. One life hack: select a good 30 min slot, go through all the rooms which might get your attention, and create a personal schedule in your favorite calendar app. Make sure you have a backup plan because some rooms might be fully occupied, and you cannot enter.

I want to interest you in a challenge

If you know more than I do about FOSDEM 2023 and have already prepared your schedule, share a single paragraph comment about your FOSDEM plan and list a few of your favorite talks. You will help the community understand the greatness of the event and find more reasons to make the trip to frosty Brussels.

See you there!