FUDCon APAC 2015 was held in Pune, India from 26-28 June. This conference was a bit different for me than the ones I been to in past. The first conference that I was attending in the city and was volunteering but not speaking š . So, the process started right after Pune won the bid š . We used to have regular meetings to discuss on CFP dates, budget, sponsorship to speakers, swags, venue and a bunch of other things. Organizing an event is not an easy job, alas! I could see that very closely as people not having proper sleeps and putting in the best of their efforts to have everything in place. Every one was doing their bit to make the conference a success.
This was the first FUDCon that I was attending and moreover it was back to Pune after 4 years. People were really looking forward to the event with a lot of excitement. There were three main tracks and three dedicated tracks for Containers, Openstack and Storage.
Day 1:
The conference started with a keynote by Dennis Gilmore on “Delivering Fedora for everything and everyone”.Ā I attended the keynote and had to rush to the top floors to take care of the video graphing part as I was volunteering for the same along with few other folks. The talks in all the other tracks started right after the keynote session except the seminar hall. @hasgeek guys were taking care of the video graphing for three main tracks and rest were covered a little unprofessionally by volunteers. I had to be in the Seminar hall the entire day taking care of the video which was compelling enough for me to listen to the talks the entire day. Though it’s been months that I am writing this blog but I still remember about some of the talks, there was one by Parag Nemade on DNF, can’t remember the rest š . That was probably the conference where I happened to attend the maximum number of talks. The last for the day was a keynote by Harish Pillay. Day 1 was pretty hectic and I had a bad headache by the end of the day may be because I looked through the camera for longer during the day.
Day 2:
Day 2 started with a keynote by Jiri on ‘Present and Future of Fedora Workstation’. After the keynote I was back to the seminar hall. There was a talk by Rejy on “Be Secure with SELinux” where he nicely explained all about SELinux. Sayan spoke on Fedmsg and Nigel spoke on Contributing to Mozilla. And, it was lunch time and I decided to take a break for a while from the seminar room and went to the auditorium to see what else was happening around. Post lunch, Izhar talked about selling Open Source software and mentioned how Red Hat has been doing it so well for years. Then there was talk on Atomic Project and Docker by Aditya Patwari(@adityapatawari) and Lalatendu where Aditya attempted a bit of standup comedy on the stage as well. The talk was pretty good though and lastly there was the closing keynote for the day. Here comes the most waited part for all the volunteers and spaeakers.. FUDPub š College volunteers looked the most excited for the same. We all headed to Blu-O for the evening party, everyone was so engaged at the party.. with either food, drinks, discussions, or playing games like pool, Foosball, bowling without scores. The food and music at the party was pretty good and everyone enjoyed to their best. And there we go back home all tired.
Day 3:
Here comes the last day of conference and I was pretty late to catch the bus and so were a few to board the last one to the venue. There were no talks scheduled for the day but workshops and BoFs. I attended the first workshop for the day which was by Ryan and Sirko, all about graphics design and marked my presence at the one on Docker by Aditya, did learn a little too š . It was a great day with interactions with a lot of people. Lastly, a thanking note by Rupali and we all board the buses for a drop at Magarpatta.
This was my first time volunteering at any conference and I realized that volunteering wasn’t any easy job but required a lot of commitment to the work allotted. It was a bit tiring though but not boring. Moreover, you have contributed in a certain way to make the conference a success. There were certain areas where we could have done better as a team like, spreading the word about conference and having more attendees, regular volunteer meets for three conference days to keep a check if everything was alright and assigning duties to college volunteers. Rest, it was altogether a different experience and I got an opportunity to get introduced to a lot of awesome folks from Fedora community. #fudconin15 was great conference on home turf š
Anisha Narang 