Hi,
Fedora and Red Hat Open Day is already finished. I will try to brief you how the event was and if we have been successful.
First of all, the number of people who registered theirselves was really exciting. Without any doubt, it was the biggest number of people ever registered for our event. We had 173 persons who had sent us a completed form and we were really happy there was such huge interest in our event as for Polish conditions, and even if no everybody appeared, we had quite a huge attendance anyway. Although we started advertising it just about two weeks before the conference, I personally think we have been very successful in this aspect. Maybe that was even better than if we started it earlier, as that was still a hot topic and there was no time for that to be forgotten. As this is what I took care of, I hope to do the advertisement in the next year for much bigger scale and I hope we will reach the number of 200 or even more attendees :)
The first presentation, about the Fedora Project in general, what it is, what are its goals etc. started at 9:15 in the morning. I have done it by myself, I am not sure how good it was but I think my second presentation on OLPC was much better.
Next presentation was about One Laptop Per Child. And, as you know, Joerg Simon could not attend, I have done it by myself. I think that was the first speech on OLPC ever in Poland, and maybe my impression was that people were really interested in it. Except telling them on the project, I have also shown what they can do with it, and wanted people to come to the booth after I finish the speech so they could have a closer look, touch it and work for a while with OLPC. One lady did not allow me to accomplish my plan, as she asked me to give it to the people during my speech and I could not refuse... I let them have it for a while and asked to bring it to the booth after they are finished. Here we had a problem: I took the laptop with me (from Germany), but nobody remembered about the plug converter and the battery was already below 50%. I went to a local supermarket to buy the converter, but I completely forgot about voltage difference. I think the lady at shop was the one who reminded me that. And as I had still in my memory adventures of someone frying a device with the voltage difference, I have finally decided to buy a transformer (which already conained the plug converter as well). After getting back to the building the conference was held, I found out the charger for some unknown reason does not work. I had no idea why it refused cooperation. After several tries, we have finally managed to get it to work (the reason why it did not before still remains unknown - it could be a problem with the connections inside the transformer or something like that. That solved the power problem and I did not have to longer worry that people who come to the booth will have to look at disabled OLPC.
Now something about other speeches. I couldn't see all presentations, as I was walking among the conference hall, booth, and the supermarket, so I will only let you know what they were about. Here you have the full agenda:
1. Introduction to Fedora. New Fedora 9 capabilities - Pawel Sadowski 2. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 - Jerzy Baranowski 3. OLPC - Pawel Sadowski 4. KDE4 - Kamil Grzebien 5. Intregrated Archival Information System - OS in state administration - Lukasz Glowacki, Jakub Lewandowski (only Lukasz Glowacki present) 6. Xen - paravirtualization, live migration - Patryk Malina 7. SELinux - Kamil Dudek 8. RPM - Karol Trzcionka 9. yum - Michal Bentkowski 10. Party at the main marketplace ;)
That's all, excepts a dinner break somewhere in the middle and registration at the beginning ;)
We have sold some Fedora T-shirts and stickers, and given away all the F9 live CDs I had taken with me, so while coming back home one of my suitcases was a little bit lighter ;) Oh, and maybe we have sold some Fedora posters I took from LinuxTag last year, but I was not doing everything by myself and I have to confirm this yet.
After the conference had finished, we cleaned up the booth and gave away pizza we ordered and could not manage to eat everything by ourselves :D After that, we went with some conference attendees to the main marketplace in Cracow to have some dring and talk a bit on Open Source etc. To sum up, in my estimation, we can say the event was successfull and in the next few months we can start preparations for next edition :)
You can see some photos here: http://mcgiwer.wordpress.com/2008/06/04/fedora-and-red-hat-open-day-2008-fin.... I'll let you know once I have some more photos. We have also recorded all presentations excepts my first. If someone is interested, please let me know (they're all in Polish).
Regards, Pawel