Flock 2016 Event Report

The fourth annual Flock conference for Fedora contributors took place from August 2nd-5th in Krakow, Poland, and I couldn’t miss it. Over 200 developers, contributors and Fedora enthusiasts from different continents that meet to learn, present, debate, plan, and celebrate! The type of the conference was similar to last years Flock, held in a Hotel, and not in a University Campus as we used to organize previous Flocks and FUDCons in the past.

The first day kicked off with the traditional opening keynote “The State of Fedora” from the FPL Matthew Miller. The number of contributors has reached 2000 and it’s growing, and Matthew also shared his goals for next year: modularity, Python 3, and launching Fedora Hubs. After lunch, sesivany, the logistician for EMEA had a talk about Fedora Swag, which quickly was converted into a discussion. The good news is that we will stop producing Fedora Live DVDs after the release of Fedora 25, and we will start looking into other ways of distributing Fedora Images, like bootable usb drives. Justin Flory and Jona Azizaj (both of them University Students) had an amazing talk about title “University Outreach: New task or new mindset”, in which they presented on the topic of outreach to students, university staff and faculty for the Ambassadors program. In the afternoon, we had a nice tour of the city center from experienced city guides, which was very interesting!

The Second day was also centered around presentations. Lots of interesting talks, like “Iot in Fedora”, “Taking care of spam”, referring to the wiki were we had a lot of bots posting crappy posts recently, and how Patrick and the infra team managed to “take care of it”. In the afternoon we had a short Cruise on the river with riverboats, like Flock 2014 in Prague. At the end, we returned to the hotel drinking beers in the bar with many new and old friends!

The design team did an amazing job with the badges this year!

The next two days were workshop oriented, with 2-hour workshops running all day. Some very interested workshops followed, like Meet your Famsco, where there was discussed the transition to Fosco(and hopefully we will see that rising soon), a CommOps Workshop, a Budget Workshop, and a Fedora Hubs hackfest. I’m a bit disappointed, because during the Budget workshop we could do more and address the real issues with Budgeting for the regions. The last evening event was a beer event at Browar Lubicz, an amazing local Brewery!

Transportation to Lubicz Brewery with public buses :) :)

I’m very thankful that I made it to this years Flock conference. I was very busy with my internship at Workable during the Summer, but I eventually managed to take some PTO and attend this amazing conference and meet again with old (and new) friends.

The event organizers did an effective and incredible job of planning everything, up to the last detail for the conference. Many thanks to Rafal and Bex!