Is really cool to see how FUDCon Margarita is taking shape. I always love to see how an idea become something real and how people envolved work as a team to acomplish each goal. Fedora is the kind of place where you want to hang out if you want to be part of something :)

This week was full of tasks. We had our first meeting, which was really productive, and we delegate most of the tasks. That’s the way to work as team, however, we need to be more open and inform the rest of what we are doing, so our task don’t collide. We separate task this way: Travels – Location – Marketing.

You can find meeting logs and minutes in here: All minutes are in here… yes, in spanish: Minutes – Minutes (text) – Log

Acording to artwork, I have been working on some posters (which were awful) but thx to the help of our amazing team have started to take some shape. Like always, you can see progress on my tatica.Fedorapeople space or just ping me directly.

We are still dealing with dates and location since RHsummit is at same week we wanted to held FUDcon… but with our amazing team I’m sure we will figure this out soon.

Remember to join us next week, wednesday at 2230UTC (check your local time in here) at #fudcon-planning (and yes… everyone can attend, Fedora contributor or just an enthusiast)

Note: Now you might be asking yourself: Why is she posting this in english and not spanish? Because i need -some- of our sponsors to know what are we doing in their native language :) If you want to read this in spanish, please click here

El año pasado, el LibreBus viajó desde el 03 hasta el 16 de mayo de 2011, intercambiando experiencias alrededor del software libre, el conocimiento y la biodiversidad, la libertad de expresión y la libertad de compartir. La idea del recorrido, además de llegar a las distintas ciudades, es ir trabajando los conceptos, problematizando las propuestas, deconstruyendo esas “soluciones” que ya se tienen enquistadas en las ideas y promover así la discusión y reconstrucción colectiva de alternativas.

Si quieres ver como es el Librebus por dentro, como es la experiencia y te animas, entonces date unos 30min para que veas este clip. Creo que si tenemos tiempo de ver una serie en tv, ver las noticias o ver una peli en casa, esta es una peli que no solo nutrirá tu intelecto sino tu alma, porque las experiencias de vida se deben compartir. No olvides de visitarlos en: http://librebus.org/

Para quienes no pueden ver el embeded de youtube, el link directo es: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqUXkC7Iu9I

For a lot of years, I have followed this event online.There was always amazing projects, ideas on this event. I live on the other side of the world and is really hard for me to attend. Flights from South America to Europe are really expensive. My crazy… Crazy friend Sirko (gnokii) created a donations page, where people can make donations.

If I have helped you once, so maybe you can help me this time. :)

Those who have already made a donation, there will be a special surprise for you on retribution. So what do you say… ready to help me attend LGM and let me bring that amazing knowledge and experiences back to
Latinamerica?

Here is what Gnokii wrote on Pledgie:

“Maybe you know that girl here. You know she does a lot for FLOSS, using GIMP, Inkscape and Blender. Its not that she makes only graphics for Fedora and a lot of othere FLOSS-projects or events. She also give her knowledge always to others, giving talks and workshops on events or producing screencasts.

She always wanted to see an FLOSS event in europe, so the Libre Graphics Meeting and LinuxWochen Vienna would be the right event for her.
There is only one problem, flights from south america to europe are really expensive. From Caracas to Vienna is mostly between 1500 and 1700 $, why 2500 then. So maybe we can pay the hotel also? ;)”

Even if this wasn’t the one I was thinking on buy, was the best option. We went to so many stores that I was really driving crazy, however, worth it. I had saves for this since last year, because if you think on buy this kind of electronics in my country is completely insane (prices are +500%).

Now I can say that I have a *monster* at home where I can start to render my blender videos again and do all the crazy stuff I like to do :D. Sadly, now I have to wait a bit more to use it since where I’m living now only has enough space for me to… sleep… but at least I have weekends to play with it at my grandparents home :D

If you´re needing one… the thermaltake TR2 600w (W0388RU) is a good choice :) Here you can read all tech specifications

Learn:

There is NO WAY you can be on ANY FOSS community or group if you are not willing to learn. Life itself is a learning journey that will take you to unknown places where you might get amazed. Some people join FOSS communities thinking that know everything, but soon they realize that there is no way you can know everything, and you will always learn something new, just need to keep your mind open :)

Teach:

Be a FOSS contributor is be a student and a teacher. Open Source way teach us that what we learn must be teach because you don’t know where is that next contributor that might change the source code of your world. Teach however isn’t easy. You must be patient, perseverant and if non of those work… friendly to send them to other teacher. We never say no, there is always an answer for everything.

Help:

Help people is what we do. We get up everyday and turn on our pc (some just never go off) and try to make someone life easier, either with code, design or translations, each one of us help everyday to make Open Source better. If you’re not a *people person* you can always help doing something else. I’m sure people will apreciate.

Enjoy:

At the end.. you will make friends, will find people to chat every single day, you will be able to learn different languages and maybe travel to other countries. You will find a new image that bring a smile to your face or a code line that will make you breath. Every day FOSS makes people life easier and our goal as contributors is enjoy this process. Is everything perfect? No, but like life, every single day counts.

What are you waiting to join a FOSS community? There are a lot of places where you can make a difference… just give yourself a chance :) Now… help me to spread some love! (click on each to get a full size or multiple sizes.)

and some banners :) (right click to save banner images.)

Link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bOsE5TGeU0

I will try to make a weekly post about how is FUDcon planning going on. This will be the first time I organize an event where people from different countries and that’s pretty cool.

For those of you who don’t know what is FUDcon, is the Fedora Users and Developers Conference, a major free software event held in various regions around the world, usually annually per region. FUDCon is a combination of sessions, talks, workshops, and hackfests in which contributors work on specific initiatives. Topics include infrastructure, feature development, community building, general management and governance, marketing, testing and QA, packaging, etc. FUDCon is always free to attend for anyone in the world so if you’re near, come by :)

I can say that the first -real- planning week for me started right after I arrive to Venezuela from FUDCon Blacksburg. I had an amazing oportunity to watch closely to everything that needs to be done at FUDcons. Even if people sometimes didn’t saw me, I was usually taking notes and making weird plans at sessions, halls and even at the fireplace. Be able to see some FUDcons, and be close to the organizers gave me a different perspective, I’m really grateful for that.

Artwork, yes…

First thing I came up with was design (dohh…) since I know we need a logo that represent us as country. Our logo was created with the base FUDcon logo + 2 cliparts from openclipart.org (which I made some modifications to fit our needs). A Puerto Rican Cuatro (modify) and some Maracas, both from from Jeffryroldan. We are a tropical country and a very colorful one, so that’s why this is our logo :) – High-resolution PNG can be found here and SVG sources here.

Letters and more papers

One of the things that Organize events like FLISoL and others taught me was that, everyone needs a paper to sign or see. First, we need to have something to present the event to potential sponsors, because… things cost money. I used as base part of the letters from FLISoL and adapt them, so I don’t need to work too much on things I already have done. Is not ready, but feel free to take a look (might be in spanish right now, but I ask help to translate.team, so we can re-use it everytime we need to), is not complete since we still doesn’t know exactly what we need, and there are some items to check first, however, I’m sure is a good start.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Margarita2012/Organization/Sponsorship

Since I’m a designer, our brochure (or letters) will need covers and letterheads, so if you want to take a look click here and check them out: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Margarita2012/Organization#Artwork

Bills, payments and headaches

I think the chaos starts when you need to pay, or at that moment when you realize that you cannot buy the world. In order to know how much do we need, we must make a list to identify those items that need to be paid. In our case, the list is just starting. If you see that we are missing something, or you have an amazing idea, or just know a sponsor that can take care of this.. PLEASE let me know ASAP.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Margarita2012/Organization#Sponsorship_requests

First week, hotel, college and some potential sponsors are beign contact… work continues to bring you an amazing FUDcon full with knowledge, hard work and friends to spend an awesome weekend in Venezuela.

Note: Now you might be asking yourself: Why is she posting this in english and not spanish? Because i need -some- of our sponsors to know what are we doing in their native language :) If you want to read this in spanish, please link here

A tal fin, las diversas comunidades locales de software libre (en cada país/ciudad/localidad), organizan simultáneamente eventos en los que se instala, de manera gratuita y totalmente legal, software libre en las computadoras que llevan los asistentes. Además, en forma paralela, se ofrecen charlas, ponencias y talleres, sobre temáticas locales, nacionales y latinoamericanas en torno al Software Libre, en toda su gama de expresiones: artística, académica, empresarial y social.

En Venezuela, el FLISoL se estará celebrando el día sábado 28 de Abril al igual que en el resto de Latinoamérica. Si quieres ser parte del FLISoL bien sea como colaborador o como organizador, no olvides dar un vistazo a la wiki oficial:

http://flisol.info/FLISOL2012/Venezuela

Recuerda también que en Venezuela, los últimos 4 años hemos hecho un esfuerzo enorme en dar mayor exposición al evento, convirtiéndonos en bandera de difusión en todo el continente. Revisa eventualmente también todos los recursos que ponemos a tu disposición, y recuerda que esta servidora; quien no estará a cargo de Caracas este año, siempre estará ahí para darles una mano :)

Este año me enfocaré a nivel internacional en ayudar tanto con las tareas de diseño, publicidad, marketing y patrocinios internacionales; utilizando esa experiencia que fue llevar la batuta del FLISoL en Venezuela los últimos 4 años. Nuevamente, agradezco a todos el apoyo que siempre me han brindado :)

Fecha: 28 de Abril
Website: http://flisol.org.ve
twitter: @flisolve
Identi.ca: @flisolve
Flickr 2011: Flisol 2011

Our social live, or some part of it, happens inside a screen, and we are uses to help because we learn from someone who also took part of his/her time to show us how special Fedora community is.

But every fairy tale has his dark side… What happens when people doesn’t understand that is not a requirement to be 24/7 waiting for someone who needs help? Problem is’t them… We are!

I can only use my experience as base for this: I have been using Fedora for about 5 years now and i was one of those who spend hours reading what people had to say because “there was a big chance to learn something from them”.

Most of the time that’s what happens… But when you are near 15 hours on IRC you become the person who give answers and knows who can provide them in case you don’t know what to reply.

Slowly, we create a dependency on people and they get used to see us Always on IRC/Mail_list/Whatever and we also delay meals and other activities because “we can give a short reply and will help”.

On an ideal world we could live that way, but truth is that we cannot because we have family, jobs and some of us are seeking to have a life outside the Box.

Now that we know that is our fault we need to consider what to do. People is already used to this behavier and new contributors have learn that this is the way things work… So is not weird to see someone mad if we are not online. So, what can we do?

1) Would be nice to tell them to go to… But we cannot.
We need to stablish limits. add that kind of info on your wiki user page or run a calendar that you can share with people. Let them know that your time is partialy dedicated to Fedora.

2) interact beyond the chat: people wont understand what you do outside Fedora if you don’t let them know.
I’m not asking to twit what are you doing at the bathroom or how many drinks you had… But a couple of daily/weekly facts about your non-robotic life may work.

3) help hem to learn what you know instead link them to everything:
Isn’t nice when someone ask you “hey, which is the Fedora site URL?” … Seriously….
If you’re an troll try with www.lmgtfy.com or simply point him/her how to Google it, how to contact other contributors, how to analize their problems… Don’t create a dependency on your shoulders. Create leaders, mentors and creative people.

4) You’re a community member… use that!
If you’re a developer and think on ideas to decreasse the dependency of new users, then do something (like ask.fedora), if you’re a designer or marketing team member then create a campaign (like we will with videos.fedora) or if you have anything in your head.. please, tell us. The only way to apply is to act, doesn’t matter if you only have 10min to explain us your ideas or you have 3 days to develop it.

5) if anything works… Turn arround and help the next one.
Is as hard as it sounds. However, we are a free-to-join community and everyday people comes and goes. It hurts, but that’s how it works.

What to expect?
People may not change or react to this in a while, however, people will change at the end. If we not start changing what we believe is not ok, we might get used to what is wrong. Make people Change is almost imposible, but we can all learn to adapt.

We need to stop showing how much we know everytime we can and start pushing people to learn and teach what they can do… Teach them how to fish with their own TCP/IP cables.

This morning I work with the Insight group in order to set up all the ideas we had for the Calendar, and I must say that is gonna be an awesome project. Each one has his task asigned so, if you’re reading this and you’re a Drupal enthusiast let me know so you can join us. Is not requiered to have a huge amount of time availave, however, we do need a lot of commitment. We will take care of make you love this project.

After a quick lunch we started the board meeting, a long one but actually, as contributor and non-board member, is actually nice to see board members deal with things that don’t get to us because they sorta *protect us*.

During this I started the official wiki page for FUDCon LATAM 2012 which will be held in Venezuela from June 28 to 30. You can check it here: (english / spanish versions available):

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Margarita2012

There are some details that need to be added, and will be once I get again to Venezuela. If you want to attend, have any question, contribution or idea, feel free to contact me. My personal user info is: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Tatica

FUDcon is over – now I’m back at home and need to thank to everyone who help me and encourage me to keep on this. Ben and the battleaxe, you’re the best host and almost parents i had outside Venezuela. Jared and Caleb, thx for help me with my awful english being the “Google Translator” and give me a ride (and share some photo tips with Russell and Sparks!), ke4qqq who I finally meet after 4 years and my daily friends who I always chat with and I had the oportunity to meet, Sonar_BOTH :), markdude, herlo, lucas, Peter, Dennis, Toshio and if i keep with this list… I won’t end today.

Thank you everyone, till June!

You can see all of my pics in this link : http://www.flickr.com/photos/tatadbb/sets/72157628862938101/ or you can see the general pool in here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/fudcon_blacksburg_2012/pool/

NOTE: Yes…. I know that if I don’t post this photo you will…