EFD 2015 University of Chinese Academy of Sciences report

There is an EFD event in University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the organizers just send invitation to the local community, so I decided to offer a lightening talk about Fedora there.

So the event just finished today. There is not so many guys there due to there is exams in the campus. But it is still exciting to see that there are many new faces.

The targeted audience is freshman majors in Computer Science and other IT related majors in the university. And since I have ever make a talk to freshman in my campus, it did not take me much time to prepare the lightening talk.

The event is started with a topic from Charlie,the Chairman of OpenCAS, which stands for the open source association of Chinese Academy of Sciences. His topic is “Open Source in My View” which offers the basis of Open Source in a student’s view.

Then Martin from BLUG introduced EFD with a cartoon, which is very impressive. However, since Martin speaks only English, so it is still to complicated for the freshman in the campus.

After a short tea break, Bootingman introduced EZGO, which in my opinion is a suit of open source tools and open resources specified for Education. There are some teachers among the audience and they shows great interest in the project.

Then coming the lightening talks.

WANG Yang from OpenCAS introduces his experience in learning Open Source technologies.

Tonghui introduces the Beijing GNU/Linux User Group and their activities.

Then I gave my talk with the topic Introduction to Fedoraproject. During the topic, I am asked about the wiki. Someone says that he can not find entry level wiki for newbies. I really think this is a problem, not because of there aren’t, but because it is hard to find. However, some of the local community members already started to try to make an index of the entry level pages for newbies, mainly focus on the Chinese users, but may also useful for users in other languages.

Before the topic, someone asked me if Fedora is a company. I just told him (and also introduced in my topic) that Fedora is a full community project.But I thought this should still be a issue to be solved, that is, to make Fedora heard as a community.

And after my topic, it’s the end of the talks. We had a dinner together in their dining hall of the campus. During the dinner, we talked about how to attract freshman into Free and Open Source communities, including Fedora and other local communities. But we still did not concluded into what is a good idea. We just decided to try new ways in their own communities and then share the method together. And we all agree that joint together is a good idea to make things easier in local events.

It’s a wonderful event today, not because of the talks, but the discussion about community. It make us know more existing issue and so we can think of how to solve them.