Day One Part I - FOSDEM 2024
On the first day of FOSDEM 2024, we headed to the event with the Foreman team and CERN collective where we set up the CentOS Project and Fedora Project booths while mingling with friends of other communities, collecting some interesting swags and promoting distributions across multiple booths.
The first day of FOSDEM 2024 began for me with waking up as early as 0500 am Central European Standard Time as we had a plan to head for the event venue on foot. As I met up with Fabian Arrotin and Tomas Hrcka for breakfast after getting freshened up, I got to know that the plan might not come to fruition. Tomas Hrcka decided to rest some more before attempting to come to FOSDEM during the afternoon hours as he was feeling under the weather. Fabian Arrotin and I had to reach the ULB Solbosch Campus early to prepare the CentOS Project and Fedora Project booths respectively. With Aurelien Bompard and Julia Bley joining us, Fabian Arrotin and I headed for the Rogier station.
Folks from CERN joined us who were coincidentally residing in the same hotel as us at around 0830 am Central European Standard Time. It was interesting to note that they had secured a booth for the first time at FOSDEM and they were looking forward to participating there for the first time. Boarding at the Rogier station with some card taps, we saw our tram vehicle gradually get more and more occupied as we travelled close to the ULB station. After all, this was the time of the year when Brussels was occupied to the brim with enthusiastic nerds hailing from across the globe. Our conversations kept us so occupied that we did not even realize when we reached our destination stop.
Just like that, we saw the entire tram vehicle getting emptied like a flipped bottle of water and our group started walking to the AW building where the CentOS Project and Fedora Project booths were located. While Julia Bley took a stop in between to purchase some waffles, Fabian Arrotin, Aurelien Bompard and I came across Vipul Siddharth, a previous teammate from the Red Hat Community Platform Engineering team and a dear friend of ours. After catching up on the conversations, we rushed indoors as staying outdoors in the gradually increasing downpour made no sense. Most of the booth setup was taken care of by our friends, Robert Wright, Nikita Tripathi and Jona Azizaj.
It was great catching up with them after meeting them during Flock To Fedora 2023. I began helping out with the cross-promotion of distributions by bringing swags from the booth of our fellow downstream friends at CentOS Project, AlmaLinux Foundation and Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation and sharing our swags with them. I met up with David Cantrell as well and we hit off a great conversation where he shared his harrowing experience at the Frankfurt airport when departing from the previous year's Fedora Council Hackfest. I also met up with Sumantro Mukherjee and Brian Exelbierd who were visiting our booth and Christian Glombek who was attending the CentOS Project booth.
One funny incident that I got reminded of is Christian Glombek telling me "You will have to take the L here" with a veiled unintentional unoffensive double entendre when he could not find a medium-sized CentOS Project tee for me. Fabian Arrotin, Christian Glombek and I had a great laugh on that before I moved to other booths to purchase some swags. Not only did I collect swags for myself with donations wherever possible but I also decided to interact with their attendants to understand the current affairs in their community. Weirdly enough, most of the GNU/Linux distribution booths were located remotely at a dimly lit AW building - quite far from the more occupied K building.
While the AW building felt a lot more spacious as compared to our previous assignment at the H building during FOSDEM 2023, it felt very isolated at the same time which further reinforced the importance of the cross-promotion efforts. I had a great conversation with Jonathan Wright from the AlmaLinux Foundation and Neil Hanlon, Sherif Nagy and Krista Burdine from the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation at their respective booths. Michal Konecny and Noemi Halbichová soon joined the Fedora Booth where we were visited by Tommi from the Free Software Foundation Europe who showed us that he uses Fedora Linux as his operating system on his Framework laptop.
Tommi not only appreciated the efforts we put into making Fedora Linux but he also went as far as to put a Fedora Project sticker on his laptop there to exhibit his support. An endearing gesture that more than powers the community to keep up the good work - we decided to record the same and upload it on our social media presences. With a bunch of interactions with the booth attendees spanning the day, we had folks coming around asking about NeuroFedora, SilverBlue and Kinoite, Badges and other subprojects in the Fedora Project universe. We were soon visited by a masked person, the Bengali accent of whom I was able to grasp and that led me to introduce myself to him.
To my pleasant surprise, the person was one of the oldest contributors to the Fedora Project community, Kushal Das and he mentioned that my introduction was needless as he already knew about me. He was accompanied by his daughter who was having fun interacting with Julia Bley at the booth. As I was nearing the end of my official booth duty assignment, I provided Justin W. Flory with my lunch preferences and left with Michal Konecny to visit the FOSDEM premises to check out other booths present across the ULB Solbosch Campus. Before leaving, I met up with Aoife Moloney with whom I caught up with conversations after meeting the last time during Flock To Fedora 2023.
Aoife Moloney helped me with the review of the Red Hat Community Platform Engineering Collaboration Development Programme proposal that I had been working on for quite some time now. On her suggestion, I also had a concise conversation with Matthew Miller on the same topic to ensure that the community interests are accounted for. On our way out of the AW building, we had a chat with Michael Scherer, another longtime contributor to the Fedora Project and a very good friend of mine. Our conversation with him was unfortunately cut short due to the downpour picking up the pace and we departed from there after directing him to where Jona Azizaj was located.
Michal Konecny and I headed into the occupied H building to visit a booth belonging to the Google Summer Of Code organizers where I discussed the current efforts taken by the Fedora Project to onboard budding contributors to the community. At the Kodi booth, I inquired the booth attendants about their favourite distribution and hardware devices for running the project. It was interesting to note that they elected to use LibreELEC on a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 and the same was coincidentally our choice too. At the GNOME stand, I met up with Rosanna Yuen with whom I caught up on the conversations after meeting her the last time during the GNOME Asia 2023 event.