Road to Ghana ~ Day 1
First day is always the reconnaissance day 
The night before was a nice one. I guess if you are used to sleep with full A/C above your head you are used to sleep the Ghanaian way 
Isaac came by to pick me up and we went to the venue where IDLELO is going to happen to see the space where we gonna set up our booth. Thats always a wise move so you can prepare for things like small walls or windows and columns.
Road markets are everywhere
Next it was time for me to change some money to Ghanaian Cedis We then hit the markets searching for some local shirts and getting some nice market views…. Hopefully I will take some nicer pictures next days downtown.
Me drinking/eating a strange ice cream :S
Isaac is a huge fan of Chelsea so we managed to find a restaurant that got the FA Cup final and grab some water and food…
Hot for Fedora, Chelsea or because of weather? I guess all three...
On our way home we got a little moment.. the battery run out and so did a swap-thing (dangerous by y west standards but ok to them) and we got going.
yeah mom.. this is not tap water :P
Back to my hotel it was swag time! I exchanged gifts with Isaac and introduced him to the beautiful world of fedora Swag! We are both excited to have possibly one of the best booths on the event… at least we will try so!
My day ended with a nice meetup for lunch with Ben Konrath and Fernando Herrera of the Gnome Project who are also here for IDLELO. Ben and I are going to be on the same panel so we discussed about this and about some exciting possibilities of cross-distro bug reporting platforms in which Fernando has some nice ideas! Finally we talked about translation platforms and they where impressed by the transifex workflow in so many ways that they are going to talk about it to the guys that now maintain Damn Lies and persuade them for Transifex migration (thats gonna be excellent!)
Tomorrow is the community meetup event that will act as an informal welcome-meetup session before the *actual* conference. I am going to grab some much needed sleep
See ya!
Road to Ghana ~ Day 0
Sitting on my hotel after an exhausting day on flight! The A/C is working on full as the Ghanaian climate seems to feel rather hot these days (hot enough to surprise a greek guy )
Day started early in the morning, speeding with the car to catch the airplane Flight from Athens to London was quick enough (or it seemed quick as i was ready for the big next one).
During the flight a watched over and over again Max’s speech on FOSDEM on Fedora Governance,while taking notes and trying to visualize them Hopefully those will be helpful for my participation on the panel titled “Non-profit Administration” on IDLELO 2010. Still we (Isaac, me and the other panelists being Ben Kornath from Gnome and John “maddog” Hall) have not figured out what this “session” will be… We will sort it out possibly on the Sunday Community meetup.
Four hours in Heathrow, some Architectural siteseeing and a bsod in a checkin machine later I was on my final flight to Accra. It was a pretty crowded one and the cabin crew did an excellent job in serving us (I am sticking with BA for now on I guess.. previous choice was Swiss)
Sahara Desert on sunset from the vantage point of 36000 feet is something that all people should experience… Just magnificent… it’s a pity that my compact camera is not capable of catching that moments right.
Arriving at Accra I was pretty sure that I was in another world. Even the way people act and move around in the airport “feels” different … and I like it! Isaac and his brother were kind enough to speed me to my hotel and make sure that I got the best room i could get! (thanks Isaac!). He was so anxious about his Ambassadors’ polo shirt that he got me giving it to him today I think he is happy with it!
See ya tomorrow then.. with more news and photos!
Road to Ghana ~ Day -1
Meeting day yesterday, so I did not got much time to write an update
Everything is set for the departure day (tomorrow morning)!
DHL unfortunately did not meet our expectations and the swag didn’t make it on time… So I set in motion the back up plan and borrowed a Ambassador’s polo from Costas and got some t-shirts printed locally
Posters are printed and I just checked in! Next stop Accra and by lovely friend Isaac is gonna wait there for me.. so Ghana here I come…. GET READY for FEDORA people…
next update tomorrow night from my hotel in Accra!
UPDATE : I just broke my glasses…. Damn! I hope there are some optic shops on London Airport
Road to Ghana ~ Day -3
I guess I might be lucky with the BA strikes as it seems that my flights are going to be unaffected Let’s hope for this.
On Fedora side, Twi translations list is up and ready! Issac is on the process of being a translator and getting to know Transifex. I am in contact with the organizing committee trying to clarify that Isaac and I *both* are going to deliver the workshop on Fedora Translations in Twi and make sure that we will be given the space and time we need
DHL seems to have a problem on international deliveries at the moment so I set in motion back up plans for the swag! Local production of t-shirts and buttons is ongoing and I will borrow some Ambassador’s shirts just in case…
I updated our wiki page for the event reflecting the recent status and swag updates…
English type sockets were a pain in the ass… After many hours of searching a friend of mine gave me the ultimate solution A little block that can convert any socket to any socket. Quite handy!
China makes everything possible
I also bough a variety of pain killers. Hope that they shall remain unused though
Road to Ghana ~ Day -4
Working days are much more useful than weekends Today I managed to finish enough tasks on my crowded TODO board
I love those yellow things :)
The swag are yet to come (damn DHL!) but t-shirts will be ready tomorrow
I am reading about DEET and other mosquito repellents (Still can’t find them here in Greece though)
British Airways seems to be on strike during my way from IDLELO to Mozilla Balkans and I need to find a workaround for that 
Isaac and I try to get ready for the Twi translations (list creation, promotion etc) and I made a banner for using it during the IDLELO..
English : We bring fedora in Twi for Ghanaians :)
What do you think? We are still working on in though…
Tomorrow I have to go shopping for some last-minute things and some English type Sockets
Road to Ghana ~ Day -5
5 Days to go and so many things to get done
Fedora is going to be present in the major PanAfrican foss event IDLELO and I am lucky and proud enough to get the chance to help the incredibly helpful local Ambassador Isaac Sanni-Thomas organizing Fedora’s presence on the event.
We had a pretty rough time organizing all the details and we still have many things to do.
On Fedora’s side we need to make sure that our booth will be fully equipped and full of swag. Joerg was kind enough to help us on that and I made some local swags from Greece. More updates on this when the swag arrives
Also on fedora’s side Isaac and I thought that it would be an excellent idea to bootstrap the local l10n team during the event. So we are getting started setting up a new language in Transifex here. So Transifex is ready for translations in Twi and we need to set-up a new mailing list and make Isaac officially a translator. Updates on this will come also
On personal side, travelling to Ghana is a nice challenge I already did a yellow fever vaccination and I am trying to get used to heavy mosquito-repellents. Visa is almost ready and airtickets are booked (quite pricey… ~900 EUR) as hotel is also thanks to Isaac.
I use many post-it to organize my typical days but this time the TODO list is almost full I will try to keep this set of posts updated daily, tracking down every step Fedora is making to spread to Africa and especially Ghana.
The best are yet to come
Stay tuned…
Fosscomm 2010 recap
OK, Fosscomm 2010 is unfortunately over
It was two days full of foss presentations and meeting up with the rest Greek Foss community. Fedora Greek Team was there fully blown
Christos and me on the talk - cc by 0neiros
9 (!) Fedora Ambassadors where there to speak the word of Fedora and I think we did a great job. Christos and me gave a talk on “Fedora Fails and thats a good thing” analysing the controversial idea behind fedora’s bold changes and rapid release cycles. Also I gave a workshop on “Fedora 13 features” amazing those watched it with btrfs, boot.fedoraproject.org and color profiles management
Our new t-shirts where a total *hit* and we are thinking now on producing 30 more of them (good quality, vinyl stamps)
I also gave a workshop on Mozilla Labs that was an absolute success. I did not expect people to cram the workshop and let me talk 250% over my time I would definitely love to spread the word of Mozilla on a next event in Greece and local foss-enthusiasts cant wait to hear Mozilla news
Finally I would like to add that I missed the good community booths (like ours in Fedora) and hope to see more communities spring in Greece. FossComm 2010 (mainly thanks to Christos) set a high standard for similar events in Greece and those going to organize FossComm 2011 would be in much trouble
Fedora 13 beta with final on the way!
Fedora 13 is ready to lunch and those of us that could not stand the wait until mid-May, we have to try Fedora 13 beta !
Once again our community brought the latest foss features to the world
Btrfs, Gnome 2.30, Color Profiles and more stable kvm experience are just the tip of the Fedora 13 iceberg! I gave a try on btrfs and the end experience is just amazing. You can roll back your filesystem without reverting permanently you files. Thus you could mess with linear versions or even mesh-like versioningĀ of your files. Endless capabilities, endless freedom
I am currently on the haste to work on as many features of Fedora 13 as possible, because next week I am going to present most of them in FossComm 2010 where Fedora Greek community is going to shine again.
Stay tuned and spread the word of Fedora !
Open Fest 2010
It all started when some guys from a local technical university had the idea to celebrate the “Ļ” day (3/14/2010) with a nice festival. As those guys where interested in foss in general it quickly became a festival for the open culture
As Fedora Greek Team, we where invited to participate in this event. We had some great plans about our presence there and we thought of it as a mock-up for our presence in the upcoming FossComm 2010 (the biggest Foss event in Greece). So we set up some planning on the wiki and started to get our things ready for the event. We also were happy to have our North Greece Ambassador Christos with us
On the first day of the event we were the first community to arrive and get our booth ready.
On swag side, we had many flyers (left from Athens Digital Week), 300 CDs that were burn thanks to Thalia and Costas, nice posters made and printed by Thalia and me (using foss of course), 2 projectors and many stickers.
Anastastis, Costas, Christos and me were the 4 Ambassadors present for the event and we would also like to thank Thalia, Evelina and Pantelis for the valuable help on the booth Nice work guys and girls!
We had a nice Translation Marathon for Fedora 13 pushing in one day the translations 10%! Kostas Papadimas (a translation-guru) was there to help us. During the event we showcased (thanks to the projectors) Fedora 13 Alpha, Mobin 2.1, and even Fedora Games Spin with a multiplayer battle! Costas gave a nice talk on Fedora Project and Fedora 13 with many people on the auditorium.
On the booth some nice ideas were brought up like these (on the photo below) nice “Try me!” signs on demo-laptops and of course the fabulous Fedora Cheat Cubes that were a hit!
It was kinda disappointing not to see other community setting up a booth, but it was a nice mock-up for us and many people stopped by and asked about fedora, even for joining the project
I would like once again to thank the Fedora people for their presence and the local lug team for their hospitality!
Next stop FossComm 2010 ! See ya there!
p.s. thanks Thalia for once again covering the event with excellent photos!
FOSDEM 2010 - Final Thoughts
Fosdem 2010 is over and indeed I had the time of my life.
It was nice to be back this year and I noticed that some things changed. As a matter of fact we (as FedoraProject) were informed that this year we could not have our dedicated Dev Room but instead we were given a Distributions Room in which we should do some combined presentations with other Distros. At first we were a little puzzled. I mean, ok we need to collaborate but on what and with who?
Anastasis and me hanging around :)
Some initial thoughts came up (on combined presentations with CentOS, or SuSE etc) but soon we realized that this year gonna be a “trial and error” year for that room so we kinda improvised a little bit and go for it like the other distros did. I guess the result was pretty good, taking into account that we never had such thing before. Many people got to know how other projects worked and I think that little bit of cross distro collaboration (like the excellent round-table that we had) next year would be just great.
On the rest of the event, I got to meet the Mozilla team and I am very happy about that. That’s because I want to throw a nice presentation on Mozilla Labs on Fosscomm 2010 so I was excited to attend almost any talk on Mozilla Room.
On Fedora Booth we had everything just right. We had the right attitude, the right persons and some nice newcomers (like Andreas and Anastasis). Next year it will be my personal goal for FOSDEM to have more and diverse swag for the Fedora booth.
Some of our swag
Finally, I managed to watch Super Bowl for my very first time live! Thanks to Max, we had the final reservation on a pub showing the game live. I had some REALLY great time (Thanks Max!) and I can’t wait to see a SuperBowl again!
Overally FOSDEM was once again a great exprerience and I am starting to believe that I should attend every FOSDEM from now on…
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Pierros @ Identi.ca- 20 minutes now in #lgm2010 and I am already excited :) Nice stuff and cool place... Now on Python Extending workshop
- Ready to hit the airport! #lgm I am coming! See ya all in Brussels...
- At #Mozilla Balkans 2010 in Skopje attending a session on Mozilla community mozilla #mozbalkans10
- @ongolaboy not today I guess... tomorrow maybe streaming.. I will update this
- Leaving for #Ghana tomorrow http://ping.fm/z8BLJ :) see ya there! #idlelo ghana #fedora
- Road to #Ghana ~ Day -4 http://ping.fm/gfUX1 #idlelo #fedora !fedora ghana
- Road to #Ghana ~ Day -4 http://ping.fm/Pu5qY #idlelo #fedora !fedora ghana
- Tomorrow @ Depart. of Architecture U.Patras giving talk on Communities, Open Source and Hacking Culture
- Fosscomm is over... Had a great time :) have to report back with pics and text... stay tuned :P
- May is going to be an event-month :) #fedora #mozilla_balkans