FLISoL 2010 at Ciudad del Saber looked good with several Linux Distributions and different open source applications. It was a small building with a lot people in transit. With three people and only two months to organize this event it was a successful achievement because our goal was accomplished: be on the eyes of governmental organizations, ONG, business, academics, students, users, professionals. Some media communications groups give some interviews. After this event we are receiving more invitations to give a talks for education and participate on some projects than ever before. Click on link below to watch the photos
Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category
Promoting Open Source Communities in Panama
May 7th, 2010 by Ricardo ChungUniversidad Interamericana de Panamá on March 25, 2010 was the scenario for an opensource and Linux party. Several Linux Distros like Ubuntu, CAELinux, Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, openSUSE and organizations like CIDETYS and business like ELCONIX did make presence and their users and members gave a Talk for students, academics, users and professionals. Those Talks were transmited simultaneously by video streaming to the Laureate Universities Network to promote opensource software contributions, trainings, certifications and community participation, job opportunities. Click on to watch photos
http://picasaweb.google.com/RICARDO.A.CHUNG/UIP_250310#
This event did open a collaboration between communities , enterprises and Universidad Interamericana de Panama to promote open source and Linux certifications and Linux diplomados.
All open source communities ambassadors will organize their groups looking to keep their members up to date with knowledge.
Some CAPATEC (Cámara Panameña de Tecnología) members, like ELCONIX, has showed higher intention to support some Open Source communities sponsoring education, certification, and some events like FLISoL and Freedom Software Day.
Mirtha Rodriguez, UIP, Systems Engineering Faculty Dean, did give us a great liaison and invited us to keep working with their students at UIP for future events.
A Blog on Sourceforge
May 6th, 2010 by Klaas FreitagA little more than two weeks ago we released Kraft version 0.40, the first version of Kraft based on KDE 4 software platform. The release went fine as far as I can tell, no terrible bugs were reported yet. Some work went into the new website since then, but in general I need a few weeks break from Kraft and spend my evenings outside enjoying spring time.
Today, Sourceforge posted a blog about Kraft after they kind of mail-interviewed me. It’s nice, it really focuses on the things also important to me. This might be another step towards a broader user base for Kraft. I say that because one could have the impression that the number of people actually really using Kraft could be larger. A high number of users is one of the fundamental criteria for a successful free software project and thus I am constantly trying to understand whats the reason for the impression or the fact.
The first idea is that the Kraft project simply does something wrong in the way a project should be driven. But there are releases, there is a so far ok website, there are communication channels with information on it and people answering questions. Of course, it always could be done better, but I hope and believe we are not doing too bad. Marketing could be more, that’s granted.
The next thing could be that nobody needs this kind of software. But there are quite some companies doing this kind of software in the commercial space. So there must be a market. Actually I think the market is huge. People are writing invoices all over the world and I bet many of them are not really satisfied with the way they do it usually which makes Kraft at least an option to try for them.
And this might lead to better path: Probably these people do not know that the option exists. They simply haven’t heard about Kraft yet and if they would there is a good chance that they would not believe that it is free etc pp. And this is probably not specific to Kraft but also applies, of course much more weaker, to larger projects like openSUSE or KDE: A lot of people from the ‘real world’ don’t know about free software communities, the ideas behind and the benefits for users of the software. That sounds strange to us, as this is our daily reality, but start with asking your parents or non computer related friends if they really understand what it is about. Imagine what people know who have no computer job nor -hobby nor know you!
What consequences can that have for us? Well, we could decide to skip this group of people. That would mean, beside some other effects, that Kraft would not make sense any more and I don’t like that. It probably should influence the way we see the ‘product management’ aspect of our projects. For me, ‘product management’ is often equivalent to “take care that the result is especially useful to non computer scientists” (which is probably not what PM really is about) and the focus on that is very important and the precondition for the next point.
We might have to take our projects even more out of the geek niche and go to places where the ‘real world’ happens. That is difficult for various reasons. First, it means that we have to start to explain again from start, and maybe also get questions where the answer is not obvious. Furthermore it might have practical issues, because for example fairs for handcrafter utilities charge seriously for software boothes which is not the case if we present projects on FOSS events.
On the other hand its easy because we all just have to spread the word even more and tell everybody about free software, our projects and free culture. And try to think as if we weren’t free software people. I know, most of us do already what they can and that’s great 🙂
FLISOL Nicaragua 2010
May 2nd, 2010 by Agustin ChavarriaMOV08028Hi!
Well as it always has been, opensuse was present in the three branches of FLISOL.
Here is the report for each one.
Managua:
For this seat, was attended for 150 (the number of that can be change)people all of there take a free promoDVD of opensuse 11.2 and 11.1, some people take the live CD of gnome
All stuffed animals were raffled among attendees, the raffled consist in win a little tournament of Frets On Fire with an special national proyect of Frets On Fire called FoF nica; this proyect is about a personalize fof with national rock musica, just as it was with T-shirts
The event was great, but we have a little problems with the AC jejeje, which greatly affects the presentation of frets on fire because the room was uninhabitable for more than a song of time and people just came to see but came out very quickly.
We decorate our stand with some t-shirts and geckos, and we has a HD TV for play FOF jejeje. The people ask a lot about the double slice dvd, we are very famous in nicaragua jejejeje
Esteli:
Well… very very very early (6am), we made the trip to the north
city called Esteli here at Nicaragua.
Prepared with all the novell and opensuse stuff, ready with our
conferences, full power and energy !!!
At 8am we were looking for the university “UNI Norte” (National
University of Engineering of the North)
It was located, like 3 miles deeper in a trail to the mountains.
When we got there, there was some kind of a protest, I we realized
that the administrative personal and teachers had the university
taken.
Despite our attempts to convince them to allow us to make the event,
we were not allowed entry to the university.
We had to improvise and, outside the buildings had to put out the
banner of free software and start talking to
students, who were near, to show them the system and give away DVDs
and information to enter the linux community
We had to use my car as a table to put the info, T-shirts,
information, records and everything we could.
At noon we gave up because the teachers thought that we were mocking them.
We went to eat a snack at a restaurant called “La Casita” and we
talked about communities and linux
And so we returned to the capital Managua to help a little bit to the
installations of this site, and to talk a little more free software’s
topics.
We left with a lot of energy for the event almost failed in Esteli,
will be back, because some computer science teachers were impressed
with the features of this system.
We lost a battle but not war!
here some picture 😛
Now the best FLISOL in nicaragua!!
Granada:
The event was stared at 9:30 AM, because some technical problems with our ISP, and that was necessary for the register system, and then we has to put a table in the middle of a principal door, because the WIFI was to low jejeje
At 9:30 AM we started the demostrations, and all the people take his promoDVD and liveCD of gnome, we has 10 installation, all installation was opensuse 11.2 =) Many people came and ask about opensuse 😛
The most important demostration was Multimedia Aplication bye Jose Angel Bonilla, because there was a person who asked about free alternative for adobe products, that’s was interesting because we have a little discussion about gimp, inkscape, blender, ardour, lmms, audacity. That’s was amazing!!!
We have a picasa album, for this event, because there was a lot of picture jejee
http://picasaweb.google.com/agusro2310/Flisol_granada
Trophy from IBM Develothon 2010
April 27th, 2010 by Jigish GohilWent to IBM Develothon here in Baroda(Vadodara) today, did a small presentation on openSUSE Edu Li-f-e during the “unconference”. This is what I brought home 🙂
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Another outlet for openSUSE TV
April 24th, 2010 by Andrew WafaaAt one of the project meetings, it was highlighted that our selected video service provider isn’t the easiest to reach from some parts of the world. So I was assigned the task of finding an alternative/complimentary service that would be acceptable.
The decision I came to, and confirmed with others that they were happy, was to use YouTube as a complimentary service to BlipTV. So yes people we now have an Official YouTube channel. I’d like to say a huge thanks to Leslie Hawthorn for enabling this for us, and the fine folks over at Google & YoutTube. There is very little content on there at the moment, but that will change shortly as I will sync the content from BlipTV across.
The rationale for keeping BlipTV as our primary provider is:
* They allow people to download the original video file without having to login etc. This is great as it means we can keep providing video in open formats for all to consume.
* It provides us with the means of centralising distribution of all the videos. We upload to BlipTV and they take care of adding it to YouTube and anywhere else we want (should we upload to Facebook too?)
* They’re a great bunch of guys & gals who are very responsive to support requests and general queries – their customer service is superb!
* Oh and last but by no means least, they’re big OpenSourcers using Linux (granted it’s Gentoo but we like the Gentoo community don’t we? 🙂 ), and a wealth of open source software (ffmpeg, gstreamer etc).
This means that the likes of tube.o.o may well be removed in the near future, as all the content will be stored online and offered to the widest possible audience, without a strain on any resources on openSUSE’s end. If anyone has any issues with either service please let me know.
oSC09 videos
April 16th, 2010 by Andrew WafaaWell it’s been almost seven months since our inaugural conference, and there were a load of videos taken. The problem was that our usual VT gurus have been unavailable to do any of the editing etc. So the raw video has languished on the servers waiting for some kind soul to help edit them.
After multiple calls for help and nudges from the marketing team, I decided to see if I could slot it in anywhere (yay me, I’m such a hero :-P) Thankfully I had some brilliant help from SankarP who refreshed my memory on how to edit video, thanks chief!
Currently only Day 1 of the conference is available, you can view online (flash) or download (ogg) the talks from the openSUSE TV channel on BlipTV. I am working on getting a channel on YouTube to enable a wider reach, as some people have bandwidth issues with Blip. You can also subscribe to the feeds in multiple formats – rss, miro, itunes.
If anyone has any openSUSE related video that they would like put on the channel, then please let me know 🙂
Announce: openSUSE Beego
April 1st, 2010 by Klaas Freitagthe openSUSE distribution is the perfect base for specialized projects focusing on a certain area of application. Today, I am happy to announce the start of the openSUSE Beego project and ask you to join in and help to bring it to a success, because we rely on your support and enthusiasm.
What is openSUSE Beego about? Beego is the perfect customized linux distribution for beekeepers who want to manage their bees on a by today never unreached level. With openSUSE Beego we focus on key features like KHive, the management software for the beeyard, the bluetooth based Weightwatch to monitor the hive weigt and of course GHoney, which takes its users to a new level of honey blending by the latest Computer Aided Honey Blending Technology (CAHBT). The latest release of Queen on Rails, a web based bee queen marking and scheduling software is preinstalled and -configured.
All that relies on a perfectly customized kernel to meet the tough requirements of beekeeping. With solid real time capabilities the Beego kernel is able to process all incoming bees at the hives gate for up to 25,000 bee colonies, which is an outstanding high volume no other system ever reached. Both nectar and pollen of each incoming bee are measured and stored into MyBeeSQL, a tuned MySQL variant. Moreover the kernel needed a huge sting proof patch to give it the needed robustness. We could convince a well known openSUSE kernel developer to work on it, discussions on the kernel lists are ongoing under the subject “Sting Proof Patch”.
This project has a bright future for both openSUSE and the world of beekeeping. Again I like to ask for your help and contribution. Please spread the word, join our mailinglists, test and use openSUSE Beego.
That will make the honey even sweeter this year 🙂
Pre FLISoL activities in Panama
March 18th, 2010 by Ricardo Chung
March 13th openSUSE Ambassador for Panama, Ricardo Chung (amonthoth), gave a talk at Universidad Interamericana de Panama (UIP is Laureate) for a small students group about openSUSE graphic installing procedures and customizations. How to add repositories, softwares applications and customize the desktop. This is the first of openSUSE talk series preparing activities for FLISoL 2010 at Ciudad del Saber. Educative scenarios as this one are the open source seeds for an open future and great development opportunities.
UIP it’s maybe the only university on this country offering Linux Diplomados looking for LPI certification. UIP has a ProMetric Certification LPI Authorized Center.
Here they are the New Generation for open source.
openSUSE & Google Summer of Code 2010
March 1st, 2010 by Andrew WafaaThe wonderful Vincent has already sent the initial call for participation, so who’s up for it then?
OK I’ll take it that there are several hands raised in the audience (I reckon I’m being overly cautious, I’m sure there are loads of hands up but as I don’t have my glasses on I can only see the first two rows). So what do we need from our lovely community to help make GSoC 2010 a success?
* We need some admins for openSUSE in GSoC 2010. This mainly involves making sure that we do everything we need to participate in GSoC; making sure students feel comfortable in the project, and push our contributors a bit to publish ideas and mentor students. Basically the GoTo contact points.
* We need people to maintain the GSoC 2010 wiki page. I have already started the GSoC 2010 page on the wiki, yes it is pretty much a copy/paste of last years but it gets the ball rolling 😉
* We need people to start thinking about ideas that students could work on. If you have a good idea, why not put it in openFATE and put it on the wiki too (with a link to the openFate entry)? That way we can utilise the voting feature of openFate and gauge how much the community would appreciate the student’s hard work.
So there’s nothing stopping you from joining in, so get to it! Oh and if you’re looking for a way to contribute to openSUSE but aren’t a coder this is a great way to get your feet wet with the community 🙂