Saturday, March 9, 2013

Fedora 18 Release Party Naples


This is a "guest" post from Ambassador candidate Francesco Daria who organized a nice release Party in Naples. Well done, and I hope he will be accepted in the Ambassadors group very soon.
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On March 5th, 2013, the NaLUG in collaboration with the Italian Fedora Community hosted the Fedora 18 Release Party; location of the event was the Faculty of Engineering "Federico II" of Naples.

To promote and discuss the new version of Fedora "Spherical Cow" the day was split in two phases:

-The first was held in the atrium of the faculty, a strategic position able to catch the attention of all the people and promote the events of the day; we delivered the program and invited the curious to try and install Fedora distributing the DVD.

About 3,000 students every day come to the University and we were able to attract, through this space, the focus of about 1/3 of these, which curiously asked information about topics ranging from "What is Fedora?" to more specific technical problems.
To entice newcomers to try Fedora, we gave them the MultiDesktop DVD with the possibility of a "help desk" support.

-The second was held at the home university classroom where we carried out the following activities:

-Fedora contest, which consisted in fixing errors in a simple bash script (you can find it at http://www.nalug.net/contest/FRPcontest), the winners were awarded with the new Fedora branded baseball caps and cups.

- A Talk by Giuseppe Del Vecchio (aka Virus on the Italian comunity of Fedoraonline.it), who with his great know-how and communication skills was able to engage participants on the following themes:

- What is Fedora?
- The history of Fedora releases
- The Fedora Project
- The Italian comunity fedoraonline.it
- Install / upgrade to Fedora 18
- Introduction to SELinux and systemd

At the end of the talk, which lasted about an hour and a half, we gave the attendees the opportunity for discussion, further clarifications and details. This choice led to a pleasant and interesting discussion.

- Coffee break: to make the day more "appetizing" and to stimulate thoughts, we offered all attendees free croissants and drinks.

-Install party: after the presentation we obviously gave support to all those who wanted to install Fedora 18 or upgrade their system from Fedora 17.

It was a great day, many people learned about Fedora, others were able to deepen their knowledge of the Project and the community, so I can say, not without a touch of pride, that our goal has been fully achieved. I take this opportunity to thank again Giuseppe Del Vecchio and the NaLUG's team for the possibility to introduce people to Fedora.

I hope this was the first of a long collaboration.

Francesco Daria

Photos of the event