FUDCon Pune 2015

FUDCon Pune 2015 was organized from 26-28 June 2015. I was attended there as well.

Day 0:

I traveled from Cambodia with a Malaysia airline on June 24 at 11:10 am and transferred in KL International Airport for more than 6 hours. Izhar was taking the same flight from Malaysia to Mumbai International Airport. We arrived at around 10:45pm and the FUDCon Pune organizer had arranged the cab for us to travel from Mumbai to Pune. It took about 3 hours to reach there.

Day 1:

We did not have enough time for sleep, since we arrived Pune at 3am in the morning, and we had a quick breakfast at the Hotel. Indian’s curry was really nice for me to try for the first time. And after we had breakfast, Kushal took us to have a visit  RedHat office and also had lunch there. We stayed there until around 7:45pm before leave for the dinner at Kushal’s home. Some of us were there and we had a really nice dinner.

Day 2

Everyone had breakfast at the hotel and 3 school buses were arranged to pick up everyone from Hotel to the FUDCon venue at the Maharashtra Institute of Technology College of Engineering (MIT COE). FUDCon Pune 2015 started with the opening keynote of “Delivering Fedora for everything and everyone” by Dennis Gilmore.

In the afternoon after the lightning talks by various speakers around Open Sources and Fedora topics, we had a BoF session, which we discussed very specifically on the next FUDCon. It was only one bid from Phnom Penh, Cambodia for the next FUDCon APAC 2016. There were problems addressed and solved during the discussion, except the payment. Everyone agreed to have FUDCon Phnom Penh for 2016 if the payment is solved. Our organzing team is working very hard to find the solution for this issue and we will provide the solution within a month.  I ended up the day with the closing keynote from Harish Pillay on “Whats going on in a FOSS project”.

Day 3

The keynote started with Jiri Eischmanns presentation about the Fedora workstation and its present and future. I also attended the topic of “Selling Open Sources” by Izhar. It was a useful presentation for those who would like to make a business with Open Sources. Later after the presentation, I had a discussion with Sirko and Siddhesh for the Fedora event activity in Cambodia, but it did not seem to be working. Later, Danishka is happy to come to Cambodia for conducting session in October during the BarCamp Phnom Penh 2015. And the last session was conducted by Tibetan guy name Tenzin Dorkden on Achieving Goals Community with Fedora. He committed to deliver the Tibetan language available on Fedora and he announced that Fedora will be the main distribution for him after his talk. FUDPub was organized in Blue Bowling Center, so we had a lot of fun there with all the organizing team, volunteers, speakers, contributors and Fedora Ambassadors until a bit late.

 

Day 4

I had a discussion with Pravin who leads on the globalization and I agreed to help him to get botreynisa get in touch with the team since she is leading the team in Cambodia. In the afternoon, we had a BoF session to discuss how swag will be produced. We found a better solution for producing swag and Harish Pillay picked up an idea for producing the USB stick instead of DVD for Fedora media. Everyone got an assignment by doing a research on how much would it cost if we produced them in USB stick with a Fedora logo on it and we will bring it to discuss within the next FAD, which we agreed to have it organized sometime in November in Singapore. We are going forward!

We had a very nice closing ceremony with all thanks to those who have been involved to make FUDCon Pune 2015 happened.

Day 5

Prima Yogi Loviniltra, Danishka and I was leaving the hotel at 8:30am to Mumbai. I spent 2 days there for the sightseeing and Jackson was there to accompany us. Danishka was leaving at that night on June 29.

Conclusion:

It was a very fruitful trip with all the discussion and meeting on our future activities to move Fedora community and works to next step.

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Fedora 21 Release Party Phnom Penh

As you are all aware that Phnom Penh is the first country who had kicked off F21 Release Party and it was the first for us to organize it.

Fedora 21 Release Party was fun and fruitful event, which we had our Ambassadors from another 4 countries such as gnokii, Danishka, Tuanta, Izhar and Siddhesh. There were about 40+ people attended the release party and enjoyed our talks on the following topics:

1. Introduction to Fedora – Somvannda
2. Fedora.Next – Tuanta
3. Fedora Features – Botrey Nisa
4. How to contribute to Fedora – gnokii

Before giving a talk, we had blown our Fedora 21 Cake with 21 candles by all the Ambassadors.

The cake was cut and shared to all the participants.

Each Ambassador gave a talk on the topics described above. And there many questions were asked as the following:

1. How long does Fedora providing support?
2. Will Fedora be on Mobile?
3. How many release does Fedora do per year?
4. How to be in a Translation team?
5. Is there any technical skill needed to become a Fedora contributor?
6. etc…

Reflecting to these questions, each Fedora Ambassador attended there were responded well to audiences, and as Fedora Ambassadors for Cambodia, Botrey nisa and somvannda will step another step to enlarge the Fedora community and get more contributors regarding our mission is to lead the advancement of open source and freedom.

After the talks, we had a group photos with all the Ambassadors and audiences, especially, Greta Greathouse who had helped us on moral, motivation and budget support to have our party gone smooth.

Then we had a great party afterward.

RPM Packaging Workshop (Fedora)

A mainly technical workshop for beginners and intermediate knowledged people that would like to build a RPM package from their own software or from software they like and use. It also covers the basics and gives useful hints to avoid common mistakes and adds recommendations about optimized build environments for reproducible results. Additionally there will be a live RPM packaging demonstration for a small software including the possibility for participants for a practical exercise by packaging another small software as RPM.

Robert Scheck is a long-time Fedora volunteer and Open Source contributor living and working near Stuttgart in Germany.

In his free time, Robert is maintaining various software packages at Fedora, a leading Linux distribution, and promoting the Fedora Project as an ambassador at conferences and trade fairs. Furthermore he’s an official Fedora Mentor and supports different teams and individuals where ever needed.

The workshop will be conducted remotely from Germany on November 15, 2014 from 2pm to 8pm at Development Innovations. Use this link to register your name there, because there is only 20 seats available. Refreshment, coffee and soft-drinks will be provided at the venue.

Fedora 21 Release Party Phnom Penh

Currently, Fedora is serving its version of 20. Every year, Fedora releases its own version. And it comes to Fedora 21 this year. We are happy to host a Fedora 21 Release Party this November 14, 2014 from 5:00pm to 9pm. This event is free and open for everyone to attend.

By participating this event, you will explore and learn more about Fedora. There will be local and International speakers who are the Fedora Ambassadors from Germany and Vietnam. You will be able to interact with another Ambassadors from China, India and Sri Lanka.

You can find out detailed agenda below

Time	Topic	Responsible
5:00pm-5:30pm	Registration
5:30pm-6:00pm	Fedora 21 Cake
6:00pm-6:30pm	Introduction to Fedora	Somvannda Kong Fedora Ambassador
6:30pm-7:00pm	Fedora.Next	Troung Anh Tuan Member of FAmSCo & Fedora Ambassador
7:00pm-7:30pm	Fedora 21 Feature	Ban Nisa Fedora Lead Translation Team & Ambassador
7:30pm-8:00pm	How can you contribute to Fedora	Sirko Kemter Fedora Design Team & Ambassador
8:00pm-9:00pm	Party Time (networking)	Everyone

Please use this link to register your seats and join with us the Release Party. We hope to see you there!!!

Introduction to Fedora on Software Freedom Day Phnom Penh

It is the first time that Software Freedom Day will be organized in Phnom Penh on November 1st, 2014 by some folks. They planned to have 100 participants and there will be a few booth as well. In the mean time, I will take this opportunity to give a talk on “Introduction to Fedora”, but we do not have enough resources for placing a booth there, so I decided to give a talk only.

Below is the schedule of the whole event:

Opening

• 1:45pm – 1:55pm: Opening speech by Dr. Sopheap Seng, President of NIPTICT
• 1:55pm – 2:15pm: Why Freedom Matters by Frederic Muller, President of Digital Freedom Foundation

Tracks

Technical track

• 2:15pm – 2:45pm: Google (TBC)
• 2:45pm – 3:15pm: Mozilla OS for mobile by Arky (TBC)

• 3:15pm – 3:45pm: Kickstart a JavaScript project with Yeoman, Grunt & Bower (Darren Jensen, Founder of DevBootstrap.com)

• 3:45pm – 4:45pm: Rebuild servers with GNU/Linux (Leap Sok, Collaborator of OS Cambodia)
• 4:45pm – 5:15pm: tbc

Users track

• 2:15pm – 2:45pm: Moodle by NIPTICT
• 2:45pm – 3:15pm: Fedora by Somvannda Kong
• 3:15pm – 3:45pm: eCommerce Free software by Jeff Laflamme (TBC)
• 3:45pm – 4:15pm: Jack from hackerspace (TBC)
• 4:15pm – 4:45pm: CentOS by NIPTICT
• 4:45pm – 5:15pm: Migrating to Free Software by Tom Wilkins, OS Cambodia

Closing

• 5:15pm – 5:30pm: Closing speech by Rapid from NIPTICT / Fred from Digital Freedom Foundation
• 5:30pm: Group pictures (all volunteers, speakers, exhibitors and audiences)

Ambassadors T-Shirt for APAC distribute during FAD Phnom Penh

As Fedora Activity Day (FAD) will be held in Phnom Penh on 14-15 November 2014 to work on the budget plan and activities for APAC Region. During the FAD, we will have our Ambassadors from most different countries in APAC, but not all the country we could support their travel. We have been working very hard to produce the Ambassadors T-Shirt for every Ambassadors in APAC.

To have this done, we need to collect t-shirt size from all of you. So please kindly go this https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD:PhnomPenh_2014/shirts to fill out your size as soon as possible, because we need at least 10 days to produce the t-shirt before the FAD Phnom Penh.

The overall look of the t-shirt

On the chest

On the arm

I hope everyone will take your time to fill in your size as soon as possible.

Kindly regards,

Somvannda Kong

Software Freedom Day in Hanoi

To travel to Hanoi, Vietnam from Phnom Penh, Cambodia, we have to do two flights and my first flight was flying to Vientiane, Laos. I had to wait for 1 hour to transfer to Hanoi, Vietnam. Laos (WATTAY) International Airport was small, so I did not take any picture of it. Just after I landed like you see in the below picture. I departed from Phnom Penh at 5:50PM and arrived at WATTAY International Airport at 7:15PM and left there at 8:00PM and arrived Hanoi at 9:00PM.

At the International Airport, it was easy entering Vietnam, because the immigration law there did not require anything complicated even a single paper. I was only asked for my passport and no questions were asked or maybe because I am Asian. I was suggested to take Jetstar bus from airport to Quang Trung street and take a taxi meter from there to the Hotel. I did take the bus, but I did not take the taxi, I took a motor taxi instead. When I took the bus, I met a Google community contributor, who she recognized my t-shirt (Barcamp Phnom Penh). She came toward me and we had a fruitful conversation during the bus. She is a Google Developer Group (GDG Hanoi) Manager. I introduced her what Fedora do to promote and contribute to open sources community. She was delighted and she appeared with us at Software Freedom Day and I spoke to Tuan, because we hoped, she will be one of the Fedora contributors in the future.

DAY 1

The storm hit Hanoi a few days ago, before I arrived there. On September 18, 2014, it was still rain, but I got nothing to do in the morning, so I decided to travel around. I recommended to meet with Bobby Liu, the hubber at Hub.IT. The reason behind meeting with him, because Hub.IT is now a place where start-up people usually meet and use the place as the co-working and networking space. This is a good opportunity to meet him and other community people and spread the words of Fedora. I was walking to find his place, but it was so sad, that I could not find the place.

In the evening, Sarup Banskota arrived a bit late, since he was lost. At 5PM, we decided to have an egg coffee at nearby shop and at 7PM, Tuanta and Nanthang came and picked us up to have a dinner. Alick arrived almost midnight, so he did not have dinner with us, but he joined us a for drink after dinner.

DAY 2

On September 19, 2014 at 7:30AM, Nangthang picked us up from Hotel to ICT Institute, the place is also free to use. We had a whole day meeting there. There were a few people attended it remotely such as Sirko Kemter (gnokii), Kurshal, FranciscoD, and a few others.

We were discussion on a few topics as the following:

• Fedora Events and Activities in APAC in FY2015 (until Feb 2015) [done]
• Swag/media produce and distribution in APAC [done]
• APAC budget in FY2015 (until Feb 2015) [done]
• Better collaborating in APAC [done]
• Clean up Trac tickets [done]
• Preparation for APAC FAD 2014 in PP [done]
• FUDCon 2015 [later]
• Reimbursement: alternative methods
• Revise the budget plan FY2015 [done]
• Register final additional topics at SFD [done]
  

For the full discussion meeting, please read through this link.

During the discussion, I produced the wrong Polo T-shirt for Ambassadors. I will go back to the vendor to check if they could correct the mistake or not. According to the t-shirt quality, it less cotton, so the t-shirt was actually too thick for APAC Ambassadors, since the weather in APAC mostly hot. Alick will check for a better t-shirt in Beijing to see if we had a better quality t-shirt. T-shirt is one of the big issue, because we want to deliver it to APAC Ambassadors during the FAD Phnom Penh in November 2014. Doing this way, we will save a lot of shipping costs.

DAY 3

On September 20, 2014, Tuanta and Nangthang were picked us up from Hotel to Software Freedom Day (SFD Hanoi) venue, somewhere about 30 minutes by Taxi from where we stayed. We departed from hotel at 7:30AM and arrived at the venue at around 8AM. At SFD Hanoi 2014, they had a welcome dancing by volunteers. In the morning, there was only keynote session and the breakout session was in the afternoon. Fedora had its own dedicated room.

Fedora booth was placed at the venue and it was in front of the registration desk. We had placed more than 50 Live DVDs, Fedora stickers and buttons. Many people visited our booth and took our swag away with the information provided by our Ambassadors.

Tuanta was given a keynote on “How can you contribute to Fedora”. In his presentation, you can always become a Fedora contributor without coding. There are many to become a successful Fedora contributor such as designer, content writer, translator and promoter.

Fedora was also received a recognition certificate during the hand-over certificate.

Lunch time was provided by the organizer, so we did not go anywhere.

During the discussion at Meetup Hanoi, Nangthang, Sarup and Alick were responsible for being speaker and I was responsible at the Booth and Installation. So in the afternoon session, Nangthang was speaking on “Introduction to Fedora”, Alick was speaking on “Free and Open Source Software Define Radio” and Sarup Banskota was speaking on general and especially he introduced people to join Internet Relay Chat (IRC) on Freenode to interact with us for more information.

After the SFD Hanoi 2014, in the evening, they organized a social and networking party. We had a good dinner there.

DAY 4

At a very early in the morning of September 21, 2014, I had to take a taxi with Sarup Banskota to the airport, since my flight was at 10AM and the from the hotel to the airport is about 1 hour by taxi. I arrived Phnom Penh at 1PM.

I had a great time in Hanoi and I would like to express my sincere thanks to Tuanta and Nangthang for their great hospitality ever in organizing the Meetup and SFD Hanoi 2014.

Fedora Activity Day (FAD) Phnom Penh 2014

What is FAD?

There are various types of FADs that recur from time to time. A partial list is below, meant to offer an idea for the flavor of what a FAD can be.

• Ambassadors FAD — a good example is FAD EMEA 2009.
• FUDCon Planning FADs — see FUDCon to learn how these FADs fit into the FUDCon planning process.
• Technical FAD — a good example is the Fedora Development Cycle FAD.
• Sub-project FAD — a good example is the Fedora Documentation FAD held at Southest Linux Fest.

For more information, please refer our wiki page.

Fedora Activity Day (FAD) Phnom Penh 2014

FAD Phnom Penh 2014 will  take place in Phnom Penh, Cambodia from 15-16 November 2014 at Development Innovations. The idea of organizing the FAD Phnom Penh 2014 is to gather Fedora Ambassadors from ASIA-PACIFIC (APAC) Region together to work on activities below:

1. Our purpose is to complete with the following primary goals:
   • Budget planning for APAC (per country as well as the whole region) events/activities in FY2016 (March 2015 – February 2016)
   • Future events in each country and the whole APAC
2. In addition, we will attempt to complete the following secondary goals as time allows:
   • Feedback/comments from APAC Ambassadors
3. SWAG & equipment inventory
   • who has and where is equipment like rollup etc.
   • how to produce more centralized swag and distribute it

On behalf of organizer team, and with the help of our Ambassadors Ban Botrey Nisa, Sirko Kemter and Tuanta, We would like to invite and welcome people who involved to (writers or co-writers) budget planning process in APAC in the last two years. Ref: Ambassadors/APAC/Budget#References , but also we encourage people who are new but really active in their home countries to come to share and learn more experience then they can implement scheduled events/activities in their country.

Resources for remote attendance

• etherpad: will be created 2 weeks before event
• IRC: Please join IRC chan #fad-apac on freenode.net for remote participation

Detailed information about Date and Place

• Date: November 15 – 16 November 2014
• Time: 9:00am – 5:00pm (UTC+7)
• Place: Development Innovations – 296 271 Yothapol Khemarak Phoumin Blvd Phnom Penh
• Map: Development Innovations  

Note: There will be on 14th an Fedora Release Party you are welcome there!

We hope to see you there!

My First Trip of Fedora Project to FudCon Beijing, China

That was a very excited moment I could not describe enough here, when I got an email from our FudCon’s organizers that I got sponsored to join the FudCon Beijing as my first trip of Fedora Project since I become a Fedora Ambassador in mid March 2014. I have contributed and promoted Fedora since then.

My flight was on 22 May 2014 at 11:25 by Dragon Air, which depart in Phnom Penh International Airport to Hong Kong International Airport at 15:00. Connecting flight operated by Cathay Airline from Hong Kong to Beijing Terminal 3 at 17:00 and I arrived 20:25 on the same day.

 

It was a bit late and I have to take Airport Express from the Terminal 3 to Subway Line 10 from the airport to XITUCHENG. It took me around 1 hour and half, because I was taken the wrong train. Finally, I was exited in Exit B, and I was lost in Beijing for about another an hour. Only few percentages of Chinese people speak English, so it was a nightmare for me to look for Beihang University (New Main Building), but almost mid-night on the same day, I managed to reach the Beihang Training Center Hotel.

I was very tired for getting lost in Beijing, but the first person I met was Zamir Sun. Really excited to see him and my roommate was Nitesh Narayan Lal. He was a good roommate, because we shared a lot things while we were in same room and we went out together.

DAY 0

As the first day of FudCon Beijing on 23 May 2014 was nothing beside the FudPub in the evening, so we went around the city to oversee and bought some gifts back home for our colleagues and friends.

At FudPub, it was a great moment because I have made a lot of friends with other Fedora Ambassadors such as Jaroslav Reznik, Jiri Eischmann, Robert Mayr, Ankur Sinha, Aditya Patawari, Alick, Zamir and other Ambassadors from Indonesia community. We have a great dinner with TsingTao beers.

DAY 1

The conference started at 9 AM on 24 May 2014. I have attended the opening remark by Jaroslav Reznik and Jiri Eischmann, in the Main Hall Room with GNOME people. After that, we moved to conference room 08 to listen to nitesh narayan lal to talk on Fedora Video. The presentation is to let Fedora users know how to create video even more easier. After his session, Fedora website, present and future were presented by Robert Mayr. He told how can we get involved and localized the Fedora Project website in our local languages.

In the afternoon session, Zamir SUN was introduced FirewallD. I have learned FirewallD is better than iptables, because FirewallD is dynamic and iptables is static. I also attended in the presentation of Martin Bähr of the Re-rolling Fedora with Conary.

Do you know what is Conary? Below is the answer, which I took from wikipedia, because they give a better definition than I do.

Conary is a free software package management system created by rPath (now SAS) and distributed under the terms of theApache License Version 2.0.^[2] It focuses on installing packages through automated dependency resolution against distributed online repositories, and providing a concise and easy-to-use Python-based description language to specify how to build a package. It is used by Foresight Linux and rPath Linux.

That’s for the Day 1 conference and we headed a bit far from the conference place to have a dinner, of course local food is not really good to us, so we need pizza, burger and beers. After that, we back to the hotel to relax and prepare for Day 2.

DAY 2

The weather was so cold, because it rained in the early morning, so we thought that was just 6 AM in the morning, Nitesh and I slept until 8:30 AM, just to realize that was raining. We rushed to take shower and headed to the conference. That was an interesting Keynote – Computing, Freedom and Privacy by Richard Matthew Stallman, but it was also suck at the end of the session, because overall keynote is about free software and open source and how you contribute to them and he started an auction at the end for his adorable toys and book. I feel like it is so much contrast being a contributor to open source and free software, but he sold what he did instead of contribution.

We had only the keynote and lightning talks in the Main hall room. After lunch, we started to have our Fedora session again, it was with Ankur Sinha, who he guided us about the GPG Signing Key. I have signed GPG key with him, a few chinese guys and Aditya Patawari.

It was sad, that my flight was so early on the day 2. It was at 20:30, so I have to leave the FudCon very early at 3PM for packing and preparing back to Cambodia. It was sad to say a quiet early goodbye to everyone, especially our Fedora Ambassadors, contributors and users in Beijing, China.

I have signed on our FudCon with the word “ខ្ញុំស្រលាញ់ Fedora” in Khmer language, which means “I Love Fedora” in the fan

..

I hate to say goodbye, but I have to. I hope to meet you all again soon. I am excited to attend the FudCon as one of the APAC Ambassador, because it was a good opportunity for me to learn more about Fedora Project and get to know other contributors as well.

That’s for the FudCon 2014 Beijing, China. See you next FudCon everyone!

Fedora at Barcamp Angkor 2014, Siem Reap

After running our first Fedora event very successfully at Open House on March 11, 2014 with more than 400 participants and about 50 people signed up on our mailing list. We have moved one more step to spread Fedora spirit to local students at Barcamp Angkor 2014 in Siem Reap province.

Joining Barcamp Angkor 2014 was an honorable for Fedora Project, since we were giving a seat on the stage with other Open Sources project such as Wikipedia editor, Mozilla Firefox Representative, Google Business Group Manager and local community represent by Rector of Build Bright University. Fedora Project was giving a chance to introduce what is Fedora Project and how we build community to more than 40 participants.

Group discussion on the introduction and community on Fedora Project, Local community in Siem Reap, Google Business Group, Mozilla Firefox and Wikipedia

From the back

Showing Fedora Logo to the participants

Since Fedora OS is new to our Cambodian people, so it would take a little while to explain what is Fedora and Fedora Project. Our Fedora Ambassador was giving an introduction of Fedora OS, the four foundation, and the possibility of building a new local community for Cambodian people across the country.

At the end of the panel discussion, they would like to test the Fedora live, so we have delivered another 15 DVDs of Fedora 20 and more than 50 Fedora stickers, which our Fedora Ambassador was holding have been delivered as well.

Handing stickers and DVDs

Handing stickers and DVDs

Nevertheless, we have 120 brochures printed in A4 color with a different stories such as “Get Involved with Open Source: a Creative’s Guide”, “Guess Who Uses Free & Open Source Software?”, “Who Uses Fedora?” and “What Can Free & Open Source Software Do?” placed at the Registration desk. Within about 60 badges stickers of Common Creative, Linux, Fedora, Gnome and KDE, etc…

Placing Fedora brochures at the Registration Desk

This event was our second successfully event, which we have gathered more than 40 people to get to know Fedora. Again as promised, we will organize a series of training, because without a proper training, we could not build a strong community for Fedora people. With both technical and funding support from Fedora Project and the upstream Red Hat, we would not achieve this much. We would like to say thank to Gnokii and Tuanta, who have always supported us during our journey.