Fedora 22 Release Party Beijing Report

It is a late release party for Fedora 22, as Fedora 23 alpha already released, but it is still a great event.

 

As I know Alick and Tonghui will go to COSCUP during the preparing period, so I started planning for the release party by the end of July, which make it much easier since I separated the offline affairs into two weeks. And by the release of Fedora 22, Grace on behalf of Red Hat Beijing called me to see if I need help for Fedora 22 venue. So we talked and finally we agreed to have the event in Red Hat Office. It is quite common for Release Parties in other areas, but this is the first time in Beijing. And Red Hat Beijing R&D really offered great help.

 

The party started by around 14:00 PM last Saturday as usual. Alick arrived just before the party start, so I asked him to be the host. Firstly I gave a short talk about the new features in Fedora 22, and also called for involvement for Fedora 23 and generally Fedoraproject. During the QA session I am asked why the party is held after Fedora 23 released. I know this is not a bad idea, but DVDs arrived by the end of July and we are all too busy for the begining of August.

Then Chao YE from the kernel team offered a talk on kdump. He introduced the mechanism of kdump and how to enable it and report bugs using it. As I talked with some of the attendee, they enjoyed the topic a lot and really learned a lot.

Following is the topic of Koji by Connor. Connor plans to introduce Koji, but as the attendee are so interested in RPM, Connor also introduces RPM and SPEC files. I really think Connor is a good speaker in this way and he answered a lot of questions and all explained clearly.

 

Then we enjoyed a teabreak. During the teabreak, I talked with Gerard and Christoper on the planning FAD and the future of local community.

 

After the teabreak, Tonghui delivered a talk on how to use XMPP with encryption.

Then Alick have some Q&A session on community growth and how to involving in Fedoraproject.

 

It was a great event, but I still find some points can be improved.

Firstly, Gerard and others thought we send out the announce a little late. So I think we still need to finish Call for Proposals earlier so we probably will have more attendee. Secondly, we should try figure out the budget plan from vendors before we submit the ticket. The badge and roll up costs us much more than we expected so that we finally have to cut other budgets.

And one good experience is, we should always try to make swags in bulks. By 220 CNY we can only make about 100 badge reels. But using 400 CNY, we made about 280 pieces of badge reel which results in a pretty low price (around CNY 1.5, which is about USD 0.25 per unit).

Photos will be uploaded as soon as I get all of them. If you are eager to see the photos as soon as possible, see it from Weibo.

We will still try to make events better in the near future.