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It’s more than a passing FAD — the good

Writing the next day, it’s a bit hard to put myself back in the mindset of Friday morning and remember why, by 10 am, I was chewing nails, an idiom which here means, pretty angry and gnashing teeth over it.  But I think it’s pretty important for me to air the parts of the event that did work and the parts that did not. Take it with a grain of salt and pinch of butter.

To follow the meme properly, this post starts off with a raw list of what was good personally, for the FAD, for Fedora, and for the wider communities.

The Good

  • Fonts were packaged.  Yay!  New packagers, yay!
  • User Guide was branched for F10 and we got a half-dozen chapters updated.
  • The turnout was impressive for a first time event in an area with a relatively small Fedora presence.  We had 20 chairs around a U-shaped table setup, and during the day those chairs were most often 75% full, and sometimes barely a chair was left, people still standing.  So, we had from five to twenty-five people in the room throughout the day, with the norm being a dozen.
  • A few people walked in the door without FAS accounts or any track record of contributing, and moved from interested participant to document writer and/or font packager by the end of the day.
  • Having kids along keeps my heart sane.
  • Met a couple of people face-to-face for the first time.
  • The Fedora community in California is clearly stronger than I realized.
  • Very social, many good conversations.
  • We were close to an open source healthcare symposium, so David Nalley and I went to meet some ISVs there, Clear Health and Web Reach.  We took a chance to pester Zenoss folks about getting packages in to Fedora.
  • I got to talk with Rob Tiller for a while, who is talking this evening on patents and open source after the Bilski decision.  I love lawyers with serious clue.
  • Found some bugs in the ‘python-mwlib’ package that we use to render DocBook XML from MediaWiki, and got some movement on the fix.
  • We did it!  It was conceived, planned, announced, and executed.  New people showed up, many more than signed up, and it was a success with enough failures to learn from.

When I think of more, I’ll do a redux post.  Until then, time to list out some of the bad …