Photo by Kiko Alario, some rights reserved.
Fedora Community Talk at BarCamp Valencia
Yesterday I gave my talk at the first edition of BarCamp Valencia (you can check the slides, in Spanish, and there’s a pool of photos in Flickr).
The event was a great success: we had 68 attendees, not bad for Valencia (seems that it’s hard to gather people for this kind of events). I was a member of the organization, and we had one room dedicated exclusively to Open Source talks (the other one was bigger, and just for web 2.0 and social media stuff) .
My talk was oriented to making a lightweight introduction to what’s a Linux distribution and hence what’s Fedora, followed by a brief description of how Fedora community is organized and how easy is to join a sub-project or group to start collaborating.
I described the different user roles and skills, what is mentoring, and the main tools (FAS, wiki, mailing list, and the brand new community website).
When I finished my talk, in the subsequent questions/debate, I realized that most of the attendees where quite amazed by how well organized is the Fedora community. They had a previous picture of Fedora being the toy of Red Hat, and I think they were sort of reluctant about Fedora because of it.
I’m not sure if I know where this picture comes from, but despite this, I awaken their curiosity about our distribution (well, unless the Debian guy in the room, but I can live with that).
And then the question popped up: How Fedora differs from Ubuntu?
You know I’m the kind of guy that thinks any software it’s OK as long as it is free software, and I don’t like the useless discussions about branding in open source projects (Fedora vs Ubuntu, Gnome vs KDE, and the like).
So my answer was easy. You know, both are distributors and, to some extent, they’re distributing the same software.
In fact I updated my Fedora right there, and the attendees agreed that the GUI program it’s almost the same that Ubuntu’s. You know that’s not 100% accurate, but I think they got the message about what’s a distribution.
So far, so good. I liked the experience. That was my first event as Fedora ambassador, and I survived! Yay!
Update: if you want, you can download the ODP of the talk.
