fucking the white bunny rabbit

After long times I finally have time to publish my impressions about FOSDEM 2010.

In advance I can say it was a beautiful experience.

I arrived on Friday afternoon and I met the other fedora ambassadors for the EMEA Ambassador meeting, let me say meeting face to face is worthy more thatn 1000 characters typed on IRC. It Was a pleasure to see a lot of  new faces and meet again all the veterans after long time. A lot of Greeks and a lot of people coming from The Netherlands.

On Saturday afternoon I gave a speech on Groovy. It was a really base introduction starting from a Java code. The room was completely full of people, and let me say the java room were only from  people really interested to, it was far from the whole event, so every person there was more interesting. At the end the talk went pretty well. I was so nervous and I made a lot of mistakes while typed my code live, I also broke it swapping missingMethodException and methodMissing().
Anyway the good news for me is that globally groovy is a technology that still gain a lot of people, considering is not anymore the hottest one (I mean the one under the reflectors, like Scala is right now).

I didn’t follow any talk, I spent all my time talking with a lot of  people in particular Fedora ambassadors, to have improve my network with them. This time my english was much better and I could contribute more with my thoughts.

I stayed almost all Sunday at Fedora booth. I left it just to have help from sspeitzer to flash it with cynogemod. We dumped it and we were close to start the flash, but I needed to backup my data before so we didn’t go further. I still trying to syncronize my calendar but seems no calendar alternative applications are available on Android (and this sucks).

The social events were really amazing, we went twice to Delirium Cafe and I can say Belgian beers are amazing! I Love them!

What it will remains impress in my mind, from this FOSDEM, it will be the friendly spirit and the coperation we had. It was impressing how we managed the booth and the organization, in particular was terrific the cooperations cross-distribution we have with other guys from Debian, Centos… I believe the decision of the FOSDEM organization to mix the distributions rooms was a good choice.

It was worthy for my coming to this event, I went home with a lot of new ideas and  motivations.

And I discovered that I love Brussels!

Other photos here.

“Step up or shut up!“, created by Jeroen Van Meewen (aka Kanarip) is THE most real opensouce motto. Every person who is going to write an email of complains/flames/request/whatever, should stop writing, read it, count until 1111 and then start thinking.

Cerea is a small town, near Verona, characterized by a really huge exposition area, called AreaExpo, which counts a long series of events and expositions every year.

Before talking about the conference, I would like to talk a bit about the story of this event. Since I had the first contact and we got introduced to the possibility to have an active participation there, I was convinced on the importance of it. As Italian ambassadors we had to consider it as a key event.

Everything was possible thanks to Emanuele, friend and university mate, involved in some NPO of the area: LUGMan, Protezione civile, ARCO, etc. During MemoByte 2009, he introduced us to this fair and propose a huge Fedora participation.
I attended the Summer edition on August with Davide to have a look at the area and a better idea of the place. I was really impressed about it. Basically, the exposition area is divided into two parts: the exposition and the conference room with spots for 250 people.

The initial proposal and idea was to fill the conference room with talks during all the fair; I could say my best wish was to have Chitlesh Goorah speaking about Fedora FEL.

Unfortunately (and sadly) the Italian community didn’t answer very well (when I proposed it I got as answer only complains about the distance, the place, this and that…and so on…), so we (me and Emanuele) decided to do something lighter, less heavy (even for who organized) and with less resources required: a booth in the exposition area.

The (dream) team was composed by 5 people: Me, Alexjan, Marina, Davide and Lorenzo. The plans was to get there on Friday evening (I arrived on Saturday morning), stay there until Sunday evening. Due the impossibility to came back every night I arranged to sleep in an hostel near Cerea.

The exposition was really good, basically full of electronic, used stuff, radio amateurs, and various mixed booths. Indeed it was full of people; the organizations estimate around 10000 ~25000 people attended the event. We got also a really nice position, we were placed near the entrance, where all the people passed by after entering in the area.
A lot of people stop by and try the computers, ask questions and talk with us; statistically speaking most of them were above 40 years old, but I saw also some young people (not so many anyway).
The most common question people asked us were: “why not Ubuntu?” and “what are the differences?”; someone asked also “What is Linux?”. Next time I’ll bring a “fedora starter kit” with the most Frequently Asked Questions.

I really like the way we handle this event. My organization was a bit confused at the beginning because 1000Km distance are not handy but the team did and excellent job. In fact I cannot to say thanks to Stefano, who didn’t join us but did a fundamental job by helping me, like my right hand.
On my side, there are a lot of stuff that have to be improved, we manage successfully to get some CDs and DVDs (thanks to fedora) but due to some problems I couldn’t print the latest 4 foundation banner, we used the old Freedom, Voice and Infinity one.
Next time I want to design and try a new gadget concept. Instead of having CDs and DVDs I want to prepare and give a transparent plastic CD cover without a CD/DVD inside, but just information about:
• what is fedora
• how download and burn it
• how to join

Why this? Because, in Italy at least, most of the people who ask for CD/DVD don’t really need it, they need only the cover and the information printed on it.

Last but not least, this, for now, will be the last even I’ll organize in Italy. I’m now busy on FAmSCo stuffs and I still have to getting in and being more productive. Moreover the distance doesn’t help me, and I would like to see if the Italian community can walk without me.

I also decided to give my Ambassador polo, which is really big for me (I’ll get a new one two size less) to Alexjan. Like Max give to me for my involvement in Fedora, I’ll give to him because he is really doing good stuff for Fedora.
I have to congratulate with him and with all of the team, for the passion, the care and the effort they put on this event: I have to give my welcome to Marina, who will join our ambassador community.

In conclusion, this event was double worthy. Looking the relation with the outside world, we spot in a prolific (linux speaking) area and will give us opportunities to have at least two/three events per year. Looking internally we enhance our team, our relations, I believe having a face-to-face speaking was 10000 better than talking only via email and fortified your relation for present and future.

You can find additional photos from the event here.

Yesterday I got the good news about fedora FAmSCo (Fedora Ambassador Sterling Committee) elections, I was running for: I got elected in the board!

I finally want to do something different for Fedora, writing less code and start getting some responsibility, in order to grow in some aspects I’ve seen before.

Many many compliments to who have been elected and also for who haven’t, I’m sure next time will go better

This year the Linux Day in Lodi was a bit unusual, because was organized in part from abroad and in a really short time.
After 5 years of Linux Days, we are pretty handy on it,  so most of the work was already done.

The agenda was a mix of techincal and divulgatives talks. We got two guests: Daniele Segato and Alessandro Palumbo that respectively spoke about “git for superheroes” and “Drupal: With a great CMS comes great possibility”. Good impression the first talks done by Leonardo about Openoffice and Raffaello about Gobby (a nice collaborative editor).

Despite the effort we put on it, we had low participation, probably we lack in communication: more spam and more conventional channels; Facebook (in Italy) remains a weak way to have more people participating to some events.

Anyway a big Thanks to anybody who came, who organized and set it up and all contributors we had. Thanks!

Photos (from Francesco Crippa) here.

Gents,
after months trying, wasted faxes to the sucker italian registry, I succesfull to register the fedoraproject.it domain.

Now finally the Italian community may have a cool website which will be the official italian place for fedora.

June is going to be a bit heavy. All weekends are taken:

• 6th: Memobyte (Mantova): Event related on electronic and embedded systems, with a lot of companies involved in. I’ll be there to support Fedora FEL with some light speeches (during all the day) and a booth with gadgets, USB station. Thanks to Gianluca, Alexjan and Stefano who agreed to come with me.
• 13th: ConfSL & LUGConf (Bologna): I’ll be in Bologna as two role: as President of LOLUG (no profit organization about Linux) and as Fedora Ambassador. This conference is really important to give a structure and exchange experiences in local user groups. Of course I’ll be there as Fedora ambassador because ConfSL has a lot of ubuntu/debian supporter, so I have to bring some fresh air
• 19th-21th: Byte-code MeetUp (Bormio): The third annual Byte-Code MeetUp, a combination of sessions, talks, workshops, and hackfests in which contributors work on specific initiatives. This year will be some international VIPs
• 26th-28th: Fedora EMEA FUDCon (Berlin): Fedora user and developer conferences will include two days of hackfests and possibly some presentations, followed by a day of BarCamp.

…and I’m too nerd

Finally, after three months Symbolic 1.3.0 has been release with new cool features and new website.

Symbolic 1.3.0 has three key features:

• Cloud computing support (virtual machines management over Cluster)
• Machines provisioning with cobbler
• XEN console connection through VNC protocol.

you can see it in action on videos published weeks ago:

As usually, any suggestion and/or proposal is welcome!

“Document Freedom Day” is an event, promoted by the Free Software Foundation, whose aim is to spread free documents formats and the Free Software culture. Last Wednesday I attended the Italian DFD 2009 in Opera (near to Milan, where in 2008 was organized “Liberamente“).

Me and Gianluca Varisco proposed a talk about the core values of the Fedora project, whose aim is to spread the meaning of the 4 foundations in general, and Fedora’s policies around codecs and firmwares in particular – thus covering a wider subject matter, not only documents.

Fedora gadgets

However, I couldn’t stay there all the time because it was a workday. I came during my lunch break and brought an OLPC (the byte-code one), some Fedora stickers and gadgets with me. Stefano Frontori, my colleague at byte-code, accompanied me and he was the official photographer (you will find some photos attached to this post). He’s a very good photographer but he has only one defect: he’s a Canonist (yep, this is a neologism “A person who uses a Canon” )

Fedora attenders

The initial plan was to do a two-people speech, but unfortunately Gianluca was unable to attend, due to last-minute-problems. I want to thank him: he took care all boring pre-event tasks: put together an abstract, contact the event owners and so on. There weren’t many people, but some interested students (better than 100 bored and inattentive people). I had only 30 minutes for my speech so I tried to do it in a more interactive way, people could interrupt me, ask questions and so on. At the end there was an important question about Fedora hardware support, about the community, and Fedora/Ubuntu comparison.

Me and my talk

I want also to point out the spirit of the FSF, in this case FSF Italy. Where the hell were they? FSF choose the most ugly day to organize this event (it was a workday, how can you expect a wide audience?), and didn’t send any FSF person.

Fedora ambassadors

Last but not least, many thanks to every voluntary people who organized this event. Special thanks to Alexjian Carraturo who allowed Fedora presence to this event.