I have been to FOSDEM today. This was a terrific moment. I first attend FOSDEM in February 2006. See the photo upwards. We were three on the booth. Today, I don’t even attend the booth to welcome people as it is very very crowded by Fedora Ambassadors. This is so great to see so many Fedora people at the same time. About my personal experience, FOSDEM is no conference day. 99% of them are much too difficult for me to understand as I am no developer at all. However, this is a great place to be to meet people and talk about how things are going inside the French Community.
So nearly as soon as I arrived, I met Frédéric Hornain, my first Belgium buddy I set up a booth with back in February 2006. Every year, I have a little chat with him. Today, I explained how my feelings were mixed inside the Fedora Project as a contributor. Actually, I feel sometimes tired about explaining the same things to people about Fedora again. I’m looking for another way to contribute inside the Project and certainly a place where I could avoid the very user base of the Project. Deeper inside translation and maybe inside some learning Project that I talk about later in this blog post.
Once I could reach the Fedora booth (wow, FOSDEM is even more crowded this year than it was last year!!) I met Dimitri Glezos and exchanged about our lives, about how good the Indifex company is. We were joined by Max Spevack and Jared Smith, who I first met today. It was a delight to see all of you at the same time. Jared, you’re right. We have to meet people to achieve a full circle of right communication. We decided to run a meeting with Pierre-Yves Chibon, vice-president of the French Fedora NPO and looked for Nicolas Chauvet to join us.
We discuss about the future of the French NPO. I’m glad to say that we are doing everything we can to be really back in business. The last two years were a bit confusing and slow pace unfortunately. I refuse to bear this again for the two upcoming years. Communication, again, is the key. Meeting Max and Jared was so good, that we dealt with all our topics in 40 minutes no more. At the end of the discussion, we talk about having Moodle inside the Fedora Project Moodle with Max and Jared and we were so excited about all this! I really want to help doing the right thing on this project. I just can’t wait for it.
We then decided it was time for lunch. We went to eat a very nice couscous in Brussels with some ambassadors, of whom two Tunisian ambassadors. I was very happy to meet them again and see they are safe after what they endured in their country few weeks ago. Guys, you really rock!!! I had a talk with Gerold Kassube which helped me understand the death of the Fedora EMEA e.V. NPO. Too bad it ended like this. During the meal, I listened to some very interesting conversation about “what does being an ambassador mean?”. Very hard question to answer, even 5 or 6 years after the creation of the first ambassador group by Alex Maier.
When we came back to the booth we tried to settle a money problem with the last CD order of the Tunisian guys. This is going to be solved very soon thanks to the good will of everybody and the French NPO. Glad it exists. Then I met up my former colleagues from Mageia, bought them a t-shirt and discussed how they are doing. I’m really looking forward testing the first ISO of this new distribution.
Finally, I had some quick talks again with Dimitris about how Transifex.net could save the Fedora Translation Project and how far we can delegate translation management in the hand of the community. These are really great stuff I’m looking forward to playing with. Just before I left, I met Pablo Martin-Gomez and we discussed about translation and again how Transifex.net seems to be the last valuable option we have to enjoy a workable translation environment that would not afraid people anymore.
I can’t wait for all these projects to get realised. I can’t wait for next year FOSDEM, to look back on what we have achieved in that friendship altogether. Thank you to all of you guys, you rock, see you next year!!
