Day Three Part II - Flock To Fedora 2023

One thing I forgot to mention in the previous part of the article was about the group photography session that took place right after the first session of the day was over. The event attendees who were available at that time marched up the hill where they assembled in a neatly assembled group for the photograph that Sandro volunteered to click. Coming back to describing the "Interactive Icebreaker & Community Social" session organized by the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts, a couple of equal-sized groups were formed and these groups not only shared their healthy lifestyle but also passed around happiness packets of gratitude to the community members that they were grateful for.

The next session that was organized as a part of the Fedora Mentor Summit 2023 was a workshop on "Unconscious Bias & Imposter Syndrome" by Jona Azizaj. People shared their anecdotes about the times when they observed certain biases in play during the interaction among community members. I found this session pretty impressive but unfortunately, the footfall was not that great since it was the third day of the event when people had already begun departing. Although I considered that to be a huge jump over the last iteration of the event which was virtually conducted as this time around, we were able to make great use of the event participants being present there in person.

It is also important to note that the workshop sessions were not recorded and live-streamed to the event attendees joining virtually from different parts of the world. This was done at the expense of the remote participation to ensure that the in-person attendees felt safe expressing their thoughts without worrying about them being mentioned without context. A bunch of these community social events required participants to honestly open themselves up to their fellow members which could not have been possible otherwise. At around 1230 pm Ireland Standard Time, the workshop ended and the folks poured into the hall adjacent to the Harbour 06 room to have lunch with the same menu.

I had some fried felafel chunks and gluten-free chicken skewers alongside sandwiches with chicken, salmon and egg fillings. There were also beverages arranged for folks who wanted to have their choice of tea or coffee - but the pickings largely remained the same as previous days. At around 0130 pm Ireland Standard Time, we came back to the Tivoli hall to attend the talk by Amy Marrich, who worked as a Principal Technical Marketing Manager in Red Hat and a CentOS Project Board member at the time of writing this article, about "Why You Should Join A Community". At the same time, there were a couple of RPM packaging-related workshops and hackfests being conducted in other rooms.

The workshops were about "Multimedia Stack Packaging" by Dominik Mierzejewski, who took care of RPM packaging of software like FFMPEG for Fedora Linux and "Package Reviewathon" by Tom Callaway who worked as a Principal Open Source Technical Strategist in Amazon Web Services at the time of writing this article. By around 0200 pm Ireland Standard Time, the events were finished and the closing talk for the Fedora Mentor Summit 2023 was delivered by Amita Sharma and Jona Azizaj. We headed upstairs to the same place where we previously had lunch to participate in the next activity called "Interactive Story Stitch" where Justin W. Flory explained the rules of the activity.