Saturday 19th, January, we have the release party at Managua, Nicaragua in a small conference room at Hotel Mansion Teodolinda that sponsor us providing local with projector and internet connection.
First of all, money. We only used $19.20 for pizza and drinks. It was announced clearly that it was sponsorship of Fedora. The peak of attendance was about 15 people, but the head count with people entering and leaving on the sign in sheet was 20.
We didn't have a proper agenda for the meeting, so it was an informal gathering. We talked about new features on Fedora 18, we were annoyed by the lack of split screen in nautilus, we were a little puzzled by the boxes application. There was some testing to install in a Fedora 18 in a laptop designed for secure boot, which was interrupted because the owner did not bring the charger. There was some demonstration of use of SSH and package installation with packagekit and yum. We use the burner to distribute media making batches of install x86_64, live x86_64, live i686. Nobody requested install i386. There were some stickers and buttons that went away too fast. Everybody liked the mini-dvd for live disks, but there were only three units.
More serious talks were about the future of Fudcon Latam, how to obtain sponsorship for travelling, who are we, who are the official contributors, who are the ambassadors and most importantly how we are going to improve the local community. On the last topic we agreed to make by-weekly meetings, one with technical stuff and another with end user focus.
Well that was about it for Launch Party on Saturday. As today we are proposing 9 and 23 of February for making a technical meeting and a meeting with daily topics for everybody. First will cover use of IRC, an introduction to terminal, SSH including RSA keys. The next meeting will focus on packagekit, keepassx and thunderbird.
I feel that this release party fueled a spark that has been pushed in the local community for some weeks of work on social networks and brainstorming by emails.
Blog post with pictures will come soon and will appear on the fedora planet.
Best regards to all.