Day Three Part I - Flock To Fedora 2023
While the third day of the Flock To Fedora 2023 was less busy as compared to the previous days, that did not mean that it lacked interesting events to participate in. People joined the second iteration of the Fedora Mentor Summit with other workshops, hackfests and discussions throughout the day.
The third day of Flock To Fedora 2023 - that was on the 04th of August 2023, began with me waking up as early as 0500 am Ireland Standard Time in the morning. There were fewer sessions planned that day and most of the sessions were either standalone workshops or events that were part of the satellite event, Fedora Mentor Summit 2023. We started a bit late and I decided to represent the CentOS Project that day so I put on the threads that I got back from the previously lost luggage. I headed downstairs for breakfast after getting freshened up at around 0700 am Ireland Standard Time where I met up with David and Sumantro. Once we were done with the food, we moved to the ballroom auditorium.
Fedora Mentor Summit 2023 was the second overall iteration of the event but was organized as an in-person event for the first time as a satellite event to Flock To Fedora 2023. The Tivoli hall was assigned to the event where I met up with Amita Sharma and Jona Azizaj who were already present there looking into the audio-visual equipment. I was the event moderator and was supposed to introduce people on the stage, convey questions from the audience, and manage the event timelines and media outreach. The first event for the day began at 0830 am Ireland Standard Time with Amita and Jona delivering their keynote on the importance of mentorship in a free and open-source software community.
After the informative talk, a panel discussion about "Best Practices of Mentorship in Fedora Project" started at 0900 am Ireland Standard Time. This panel was participated by folks like Adam Williamson who led the Fedora Linux Quality Engineering efforts then, Sumantro Mukherjee, Kevin Fenzi who led the Fedora Infrastructure maintenance efforts then, Jess Chitas who previously interned in the Red Hat Community Design Team and Mairin Duffy. We were also expecting Tomas Hrcka, who led the Fedora Linux Release Engineering efforts in the Red Hat Community Platform Engineering team, as a participant but he could not make it to the event and we had to start with those that we had.
To start with, Amita had a list of guiding points and soon the microphone was passed along to the discussion panel. People from the audience put forth an interesting set of questions and expressed their engrossing opinions about the best practices of mentoring. Being the moderator for the event, I participated as an additional unofficial discussion panel member because alongside conveying the thoughts of the audience, I was putting forth those from myself too. Mike Nolan, who worked in the Rochester Insititute of Technology, Gerard Ryan, who worked as a Senior Software Engineer in Red Hat and Anushka Jain, who worked as an Outreachy intern for the Fedora Project voiced interesting thoughts.
In the meanwhile, there were hackfests on "Fedora Docs", the workshop on "SPDX Licensing" and discussions around "Reproducible Builds" that were going on in other rooms. When the discussions ended at around 1030 am Ireland Standard Time, it was time for the snack break in the hallway track. I met up with Sandro there and we tried enlisting more folks for the Cork City Ghost Tour which was planned for the evening. Once we were back from the social break at around 1100 am Ireland Standard Time, it was time for an "Interactive Icebreaker" session organized by Jona Azizaj about sharing gratitude with the community, as well as sharing good practices that people follow in their daily lives.