Mageia at FOSDEM 2012

This FOSDEM thing could turn into a habit! Mageia was at FOSDEM 2012 in Brussels – and this year, we had quite a noticeable presence.

The stand
We were given a full stand of our own, in the new exhibition building “K” at the ULB.

When we arrived we were bit worried about the distance between the main conference building and building K; maybe it would keep people from coming to the stands – but we were pleasantly surprised by the big crowd of people there, and there was a pretty constant stream of visitors to our stand.

Lots of Mageia people – users, contributors, team leaders – were there on both days, coming from at least eight different countries. So for the most part, we could talk to visitors in their preferred language.

Across the two days, we gave out almost 300 Mageia 1 Live CDs and Mageia stickers, sold 33 t-shirts, and received some donations; the total amount we collected, including t-shirt sales and donations was over 300€! \o/

The conference
Like last year, Mageia took part in the conference. Michael Scherer (aka misc) gave a talk about our ldap setup, and how we’re using it as the central authentication for all Mageia systems; misc also took part in a round table discussion of distro sysadmins, exchanging their experiences.

Oliver Burger (aka obgr_seneca) took part in a round table discussion about local communities. He will make a follow-up blog post about setting up the Mageia local communities team and the ideas Mageia has in that regard.

Videos of all three sessions can be found at http://video.fosdem.org/2012/crossdistro/

The General assembly
As last year, the General Assembly of the Mageia.Org association took place at FOSDEM. Anne Nicolas as president of the Association did a nice report there with informations about all parts of the project.
The moral and financial reports of the Association will be posted here as soon as they are approved by the board.

The social program
The main part of the social program (at least from Mageia’s point of view) was the dinner on Saturday evening. Almost 30 people, connected to the Mageia project in some way, met for dinner in the center of Brussels. We did that last year, and we found that it’s a nice opportunity to talk about all kinds of things with people you normally know only via irc or the mailing lists. (Of course, one dinner is not enough to meet everyone as much as many of us wanted. But there will be other FOSS Meetings 🙂 )

Small groups of Mageians who were prepared to brave the cold (-10°C) also used the chance to enjoy the famous Belgian beer; after dinner they were to be found in some of Brussels’ pubs, which resulted in rather a short night.

Conclusion
FOSDEM really is worth travelling through half of Europe to get to, even when it’s really cold (-10°C) and snowy! Coming by train or car was maybe not the best idea to have – among the only people who didn’t have interesting travel experiences were those who came the greatest distance, from Finland and Scotland – by plane!