Fosscomm 2017 - Event report

Last weekend I went to Athens,Greece in order to attend Free and Open Source Software Communities Meeting (Fosscomm 2017). Fosscomm is a Greek conference aiming at free-software and open-source enthusiasts, developers, and communities. It has been hosted in various cities around Greece and its goal is to promote the use of FOSS in Greece and to bring FOSS enthusiasts together. The conference was held during 03-04/November/2017 in Harokopio University in Athens, and gathered a lot of people interested in free & open source technologies.

Of course, the Fedora Project could not be missing from such an event. As every year at this confernce we had a good presence. I was together with Dimitris Glaros, a Fedora Ambassador, and Pantelis Sarantos, and we organized the booth for this year.

Although the organizing committee was a bit “unorganized”, we had to wait about one hour to get a table for our booth. But eventually we got one and set our booth close to the entrance. The new thing on our booth was the Fedorator, and it attracted a lot of users! The Fedorator is the next big cool must-have-in-a-booth thing. It’s a 3D printed box with a Raspberry PI, a touchscreen and two USB ports exposed on the front side of the device. The basic use case is the user inserting a flash drive. The screen then provides a menu where the user may select a Fedora release, including the Workstation or Spins and Labs. Upon selection a bootable image is written onto the flash drive.

Many people showed interest on the device, and it was the main reason they came to talk to us. It was also a good way to start a fruitful conversation about the project.