Information Security Meetup @ Red Hat Bengaluru

The Fedora Project crew stayed back a day after the GNOME Asia 2024 event was wrapped up to help Jona Azizaj representing the Crowdsec community organize an Information Security Meetup in the Red Hat office. On 09th Dec 2024, I woke up a bit late at around 0800am Indian Standard Time to catch up on some rest as the event would begin as late as 1000am Indian Standard Time. As I freshened up and headed downstairs for breakfast, I was surprised to see Justin W. Flory and Sumantro Mukherjee already present in the dining area. Once the three of us were done with breakfast, Sumantro and I decided to head to the office to help with the event organization while Justin decided to stay back at the hotel to work on the GNOME Asia 2024 retrospective documentation to organize later in the day.

We realized after making it to the Red Hat office that there had been a certain miscommunication about the organization of another event on the premises. Proper detailing had not been done to the Red Hat Global Workspace Solution folks who assumed that there were no external events lined up apart from GNOME Asia 2024. After a brief conversation with Sudhir Dharanendraiah over a phone call with me and the Red Hat Global Workspace Solution folks at the desk, we were able to sort the confusion out and I decided to take on the role of escorting the external folks within the Red Hat premises after proper authorization. Seeing that the room beside the reception area was occupied that day, Sumantro and I left our backpacks in the Varahi room and headed to the Chalukya room for organizing.

Justin, who had arrived at the Red Hat office, headed to the Varahi room where he continued working on the GNOME Asia 2024 retrospective documentation and I stayed back to work on some codebase development tasks that I had on my plate. We soon had Smera Goel, Samyak Jain and Jona join too for the event at around 0930am Indian Standard Time. With the first talk from Tapas Jena at the information security meetup wrapped up, it was the turn for Jona's presentation from the CrowdSec community. Once her presentation was over and the event was wrapped up, Samyak, Sumantro, Justin, Sudhir and I headed over to the Kadamba room after picking some snacks and beverages from the canteen for the GNOME Asia 2024 retrospective meeting at around 1130am Indian Standard Time.

We had barely around thirty minutes of dedicated time for organizing the retrospective so we had to ensure that the time was utilized efficiently. The format chosen this time was Four Ls and we took the first 7:30 minutes of the time to gather the notes on the designed Miro board to list down the things we liked, we lacked, we learned and we longed for. As Sudhir and Sumantro did not have laptops with them, Justin decided to add Sudhir's points to the board while Sumantro decided to make use of the sticky notes present there. With a rundown of all the points listed from all the folks from the Fedora Project crew helping organize GNOME Asia 2024, the retrospective activity did end up providing a closure while I did realize that some more time would have benefitted us more.

The five of us headed over to the Chalukya room next for a detailed planning of what 2025 would look like for the Fedora Project folks hailing from APAC. This discussion was joined by the likes of Amita Sharma, Jens Petersen, Jona and Smera and we went around the room with a few questions and allowed folks to provide their subjective answers to those in the form of a sticky notes exercise. Sudhir was the first one to finish with covering points like focussing on emerging technologies as he had to make a stop right at the thirty minute mark. I left the room briefly to bid farewell to him as that would have been the last time I would be seeing him in person for a while, before heading back in to listen to Sumantro's points on consistencies in local events and taking quicknotes in the meanwhile.

It was my turn after Sumantro and after handing over the quicknotes to him, I delivered points on obtaining contributors from cultivating userbase. I also doubled down on using DevConf.IN as an opportunity to represent the Fedora Project with a colocated booth at the event venue. Samyak delivered his points next on incentivizing universities and I took over the quicknotes task again for the remaining duration. Jona spoke about collaborating with other communities like that of LibreOffice for more colocated events. Amita committed support for the Fedora Project's presence during DevConf.IN along with the diversity increase Jens mentioned connecting with FOSSAsia for more colocated events as we had with the GNOME folks the previous year with GNOME Asia 2023 in Kathmandu.

We came to realize during the planning call that it was crucial to have a buy-in among the local free and open source software communities to ensure that we are able to tap into the resources available readily. At around 0330pm Indian Standard Time, we were finally done with the planning activity after almost ninety minutes and we were looking into lunch plans next. As Samyak had to leave for the airport sooner than most of us, Sumantro, Jona, Amita and I headed for the food court present within the Bagmane Constellation Business Park. After helping Jona place her order and ordering a medium-sized KFC pack meal for myself, we caught up on some conversations while Sumantro left for the Carina building to receive the order for N95 masks that he placed for Justin using the BlinkIt application.

Once the folks were done with their food, we decided to head out and order ourselves a cab to head back to the hotel. Smera joined us as well on our way out and after some struggles with finding cabs, we decided to move to the periphery of the economic zone. Sumantro had decided to stay back at the Red Hat office to work on the IPA/IDM test days for Fedora Linux so it was Smera, Amita, Jona, Justin and myself looking for cabs in a place near a cattle farm where we were increasingly troubled by mosquitoes. We decided to abandon looking for Uber XLs and instead focus on getting a couple of Uber Gos - which ended up being a smart choice as Amita and I were able to travel on the first Uber cab while Justin, Smera and Jona arrived on an Uber cab right after us at the Fairfield by Marriott hotel.

After clicking some pictures in the hotel lobby at around 0630pm Indian Standard Time, I headed back to my room where I had a conversation with Soumadeep Dhar over a call and friends on Discord before heading out at around 0815pm Indian Standard Time to meet with Amita at the lobby. While I was previously contemplating whether or not to head for the dinner, I decided to give in as I would be on my way back to Pune the next day anyway and it would be a while before I would be able to meet up with the Fedora Project APAC crew in person. Amita was able to get a reservation for us at the BLR Brewing Co restaurant for 0830pm Indian Standard Time and while the place was a bit crowded for a Monday evening, it did have some tasteful music and wondrous ambience around.

Amita and I were assigned a table on the first floor and we were soon joined by Sumantro, Justin and Nikita Tripathi. We decided to go ahead and order some light bites and fruity beverages as we had a late lunch anyway. I ordered a Peri Peri Chicken Pizza for myself and Sumantro while Amita ordered Sauteed Cheese Mushrooms. We went around with a bunch of catchup conversations and Justin showed some of his pictures from back when he was just getting started with contributing to Fedora Project. In one of these discussions, one of the points that came up was about my age and I was reminded of the fact that I had my birthday in a few days from then. I decided that it was a great opportunity to throw an impromptu advance birthday party to the folks present at that point in time.

With some photographs clicked in front of what looked like an artificially created steaming waterfall and some more conversations around the place as we headed down to the reception to collect some sweets, we waved Nikita goodbye as we walked back to the hotel. We also decided to bid each other farewell as Amita and Justin had to leave for the airport as early as 0630am Indian Standard Time on the next day as they would be attending KubeCon India in Delhi. Sumantro and I stayed back a bit longer in the first floor lobby to discuss the details of how we planned on heading back to the Kempegowda International Airport (BLR) on our back to our home cities. With the plan made, I decided to pack my luggage up for departure in advance and call it a day at around 1100pm Indian Standard Time.