Friday, October 31, 2014

FUDCon Managua: Final Report

The Latin American contributor community for the Fedora Project held FUDCon (Fedora Users and Developer Conference) for the sixth time. This time the venue was in Managua, Nicaragua. Below I will detail my thoughts of the event.




One factor that has always calls my attention is the high level of companionship and collaboration that the Fedora people have.



Some of us arrived a few days before the event to help with the final details. Valentín Basel, Rino Rondan, Luis Bazán, Eduardo Echeverría, Kiara Navarro, me and the local community of Nicaragua promote the event in different universities in the city.


 
Furthermore, Eduardo Echeverría developed the event website. The interested people could know about the event, the venue, speakers, talks and register/vote for their favorite talks and workshops.




I can't overlook the birthday of our friend Luis Bazán. We celebrate with a cake, sharing quality time. As always, there was a hint of humor and jokes in the celebration.  Most of the people ended up with cake on their faces.




 
Latin America was represented from different countries: Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia, Panama, El Salvador and Mexico. It is impressive how the guys from Mexico traveled 53 hours by bus from their country to reach the event.

Despite being an event for Latin Americapartners from other regions of the world shared with us: Robert Mayr (Italy, from the fedora-websites group), Dennis Gilmore (Australia, Release Engineer at Red Hat) and Jared Smith (United States, former Fedora Project Leader and Asterisk specialist). All of them, great friends.
 

During the days of the event we had talks and workshops of all kinds, including topics of programming, security, telecommunications, electronics, robotics, virtualization, infrastructure, documentation, among others. Actually, it was a wide range of knowledge centralized in a single event. I think the time was not enough to develop everything. The audience showed great interest.









Some positive aspects of this event that I highlight are:

  • Aura Gutiérrez, from Nicaragua, made her first patch to the fedora-websites group.
  • Yader Velásquez, from Nicaragua, migrate Icaro Project from GTK2 to GTK3.
  • Valentín Basel, from Argentina, introduce the educational robotics project Icaro in Nicaragua.
  • Luis Manuel, from Panama, developed a mobile application that shows the balance of the local TUC card (transportation system).
  • Comunidad Eva Fedora, from Mexico, will contribute directly to the Fedora Project, not independent anymore.
  • We found three (3) possible packages, two (2) possible documentators and two (2) possible ambassadors.
An event I can't ignore is the FUDPub. We celebrated it by eating tacos and playing soccer in a local sports center. We had a pleasant time, were people show up their soccer non-technical skills.



I can't end my post without thanking the Fedora Nicaragua community for all the effort, especially to Neville Cross, who was an excellent host. The event was a real success.

Here are some photos of the event: Facebook and Flickr.

 
See you at next FUDCon!
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