{"id":479,"date":"2011-02-09T19:15:29","date_gmt":"2011-02-09T17:15:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mageia.org\/?p=479"},"modified":"2018-01-30T00:42:09","modified_gmt":"2018-01-30T00:42:09","slug":"mageia-at-fosdem-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mageia.org\/en\/2011\/02\/09\/mageia-at-fosdem-2011\/","title":{"rendered":"Mageia at Fosdem 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Fosdem<\/a>This week FOSDEM started, one of the biggest European Free Software events. As\u00a0announced\u00a0previously<\/a>,\u00a0the\u00a0Mageia team was present, gave 2 speeches, and held its first General Assembly, among other things.<\/p>\n

\ufeffFOSDEM started by an\u00a0improvised dinner in a pizzeria ( and we were quite lucky to find one that accepted a 10 person group ), followed by\u00a0an\u00a0informal meeting<\/a> in a Bruxelles pub near the Manneken\u00a0Pis<\/a>, where we discussed various technical subjects such as the different types\u00a0of beer, how to run Meego on n900 or the lack of goverenment in Belgium, among others. Then we\u00a0left\u00a0to our respective hotels\u00a0for a deserved rest before plunging in the various FOSDEM activities.<\/p>\n

First Day<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first day was the occasion to discuss and to setup our booth. \ufeffA special feature of FOSDEM is the location of the exhibition – it’s the atmosphere of subterranean hallways, a remarkable difference to the glamorous lighted fair grounds of Solutions Linux and other meeting places. Nevertheless these hallways were packed with all kinds of projects and with all kinds of interested visitors.<\/p>\n

Mageia was no exception.\u00a0Thanks to the generosity of the\u00a0GNOME\u00a0people we were able to have a booth among other free software projects, just\u00a0next\u00a0to the Fedora booth in the main corridor. Damien had brought the first boxes of Mageia T-shirts<\/a> to be sold to the visitors at the Mageia booth. We offered a selection of\u00a0black and white\u00a0T-shirts (because we believe in choice) and wrote on the price tag\u00a0“at least 10 \u20ac” for a\u00a0T-shirt. We also gave away free\u00a0stickers<\/a> to spread Mageia. The sales in the two days at FOSDEM resulted in 625 \u20ac for Mageia’s donation fund.<\/p>\n

The first day was also the time for first-time-introductions, of people who often experienced a long time of cooperating with each other but who never met in person before. There was time for face to face discussions<\/a>, questions and answers.<\/p>\n

After an\u00a0exhausting day where everybody made contact and discussed with old friends or made some new ones\u00a0we went to the\u00a0Mageia dinner organized by Anne in Bruxelles downtown.<\/p>\n

Second day<\/strong><\/p>\n

But FOSDEM is not only the occasion to have a booth and to answer questions about the project, it is also the perfect moment for giving\u00a0informational\u00a0talks\u00a0to a technical audience composed of several free software enthusiasts.<\/p>\n

We were lucky to have 2 slots for that purpose, the first one<\/a> in the cross distribution developers room on Sunday morning, and the second one<\/a> in the LibreOffice developers room on Sunday afternoon. Both talks followed the same skeleton<\/a> (the one that Romain posted on the marketing mailing list)\u00a0but we decided to have a different focus for each one.<\/p>\n

The morning\u00a0talk\u00a0was more about presenting the project, followed by the lessons learned by forking on a technical level, like the issue of having hardcoded path and name everywhere, the difficulty to rebuild everything from scratch,\u00a0and so on. The\u00a0afternoon talk\u00a0was aimed at presenting the governance model of the project and to share our work on this part. Both were well received. They\u00a0led to some interesting contacts and clarified the situation regarding the project. You can see the first one on YouTube<\/a><\/p>\n

FOSDEM was also the moment we chose for the first\u00a0General\u00a0Assembly\u00a0of Mageia.Org. Despite some last minute changes due to\u00a0a\u00a0misunderstanding caused by our habit of using UTC for everything, we managed\u00a0in time\u00a0to find a\u00a01-hour slot in a free\u00a0room for the\u00a0assembly<\/a>.<\/p>\n

First\u00a0Anne\u00a0(ennael)\u00a0presented the moral report, summarizing everything that we did in the previous months.\u00a0Then\u00a0Damien Lallement (damsweb)\u00a0followed,\u00a0presenting\u00a0the financial report, explaining the various expenditures of the association\u00a0in the\u00a0past months and\u00a0gave a\u00a0forecast. In simple figures Mageia received \ufeff8,833 \u20ac in donations and spent 3,310 \u20ac (mostly for servers and other hardware). Both documents\u00a0will also be published\u00a0on the\u00a0Mageia\u00a0website\u00a0soon.<\/p>\n

The next topic of the\u00a0assembly was\u00a0the announcement of the results of the\u00a0first board election, which\u00a0was held\u00a0among the founders via Epoll, following a decision in a previous meeting of the founders. This way\u00a0the results were published\u00a0online at the same time. The first\u00a0board\u00a0consists of\u00a06 persons:<\/p>\n