Although I was thinking about a release party for quite some time, but lack of a proper venue was acting as a deterrent. Thanks to Dependra Shekhawat and his colleague Saket for giving the idea about FSMK office as a possible venue. Within no time I contacted Vikram Vincent and Naveen Mudunuru and fixed up everything. Invitation mails were sent to the various mailing lists and the preparations were on.
Ankur and me decided to share the job of burning media. We together burnt around 15 F-13 Desktop Live CDs. The attendees were also requested to bring their flash drives along with them. We were expecting not more than 10 attendees and were keeping our fingers crossed. I was hoping to meet some new people and also understand what FSMK does. I also planned to distribute some stickers and buttons I got from Pune and others that I had from previous events.
It was a little difficult at first to find the place and Hiemanshu called up a person who knew the place to find out the exact location. Google map was wrong this time. Without much ado we reached the place where two people were already waiting. It was a small apartment although sufficient for our purpose. we waited for some more people to come before starting. Deependra had brought his colleague along (who is from Jadavpur University and off-course a Bengali). My friend Vignesh, who is actively involved with FSMK was also there along with his colleague from On Mobile. One of my colleague also joined us. To all our surprise, a very aged person, who had seen the invitation on one of the mailing list, also joined us. I was overwhelmed. He wanted Linux to be spread to to the SMEs and also gave us some ideas. More on that later. After a few more people joined in, we started the event beginning with a very interesting discussion FLOSS scenario in Bangalore and Karnataka in general. Naveen gave us some really interesting facts. They are trying really hard to take Linux and FOSS to the grass root level and have been successful to a large extent. They have also done some community computer center projects similar to the Bijra Project.
By the time we started our Release party agenda, there were around 15 people in the room and eager to learn about the new Fedora. One guy arrived a little late. Everyone was given the one page release note and a Live CD. Some also Live USBs to be made and we obliged. Ankur was the designated candidate for elucidating more on the chic Fedora 13 features. He did a really good job. When I was busy taking snaps, Deependra talked about the functioning of the Fedora project. I also added my own experiences. Some guys who had brought their laptops started trying the live CDs. At this point Naveen tabled the proposal that they can arrange some workshops in the various engineering colleges once the hols are over. Deependra was very excited at this and to help out. We decided to have atleast a couple of such workshops at different colleges sometime during August. A few people also got interested to join the efforts. At the end the people were told about the various resources, and ways to contribute. Naveen said that he can do some documentation and translations to Telegu and Kannada if required. I promised to get back to him regarding this.
All said and all done the pizzas were getting cold and without much delay we started treating ourselves. With this and a few closing notes we closed the release party. The head count was around 15. Overall it was a small yet productive release party with lots of discussions and sharing of experiences. Hope to see more such events in the future.
