Day One Part II - Flock To Fedora 2023

For the social break, an assortment of snacks and beverages were arranged just outside the auditorium hall in the hallway by the hotel staff members. We had different types of bread available in snacks and the choice of tea and coffee in beverages for consumption. At around 10:30 am Ireland Standard Time, the attendees poured out of the hall where the first three keynote talks took place to socialize with their community friends, a bunch of whom were either meeting each other in person for the first time in a long while or for the first time in their lives after having collaborated online since years. Hallway tracks are a great addition to conferences like these as they allow people to connect with others.

Not only people got in touch with those that they already worked with and were acquainted with, but hallway tracks also allowed people to connect with those from other communities and extend their professional network at the same time. Folks could use these to communicate with others not only as the designers, engineers or managers that they were but also on the personal and professional levels. Once I was done with meeting with folks, I quickly headed back to the auditorium room again to inquire Justin about which hall was called Tivoli as my first talk, which was to happen right after the social break, was to happen there. Funnily enough, it was the same hall that I was in for the first three talks.

Since I had some more time to spend before my talk began, I met with Mairin Duffy, who worked as a Senior Principal Interactions Designer in the Community Design Team at the time of writing this article. It was great to finally get to meet her after a long time after having collaborated for years in the Fedora Websites and Apps team. She mentioned that she was on the moderation duty during my first talk and Emma Kidney, who worked as an Associate Software Engineer in the Red Hat Community Platform Engineering team at the time of writing this article, was on camera duty. We had a small chat - then I headed to the room to get my slide deck opened on my device and connected to the projector.

The staff member helping out with the audio-video equipment asked me to use the same laptop that was already connected for the presentation and that way, they could avoid possible delays due to the time spent on setting up each laptop device. At around 1100 am Ireland Standard Time, my talk titled "Fedora Websites and Apps Revamp Community Initiative Retrospective" began with Mairin introducing me to the audience. While the numbers were thin in the beginning, half the hall was soon occupied when people started returning back from the hallway track. Other folks went to specific rooms for CentOS Connect, Rocky Linux and Red Hat upstairs in rooms Harbour 8, Harbour 7 and Harbour 6.

For the most part, my talk went well - although I do think that I could have done a better job at managing the time in distributing them among the slides that I had available. The last set of slides which were very important as they had crucial achievements and necessary learnings from the Fedora Council community initiative had to be run through quickly because I did not have much time left to cover those. Once I was able to wrap the slides up, it was time for questions and I had somewhere around three questions asked around topics like engagement with other subcommunities, the languages of choice picked for writing the titles and ongoing opportunities for collaboration with the team.