Preparing for FUDCon: Toronto
As we start upon this holiday week (in the US) I am pulling together my resources in preparation for the Fedora developer conference the first weekend in December.
Part of this process includes making my introduction to the Fedora group, gaining access to several mailing lists, joining IRC channels, and of course updating this blog.
So far this has been an interesting learning process.
On the technical side, I am ashamed to admit I got on IRC for the first time this week, that and I still didn’t figure out the SSH bit for adding myself to the Fedora Planet blogroll and instead had someone do a hack to get me on. I feel like my geek cred went simultaneously up and down – I suppose staying even isn’t so bad. 😉
On the personal side I’ve had two great people step up to help me out both in terms of getting connected and getting a better grasp on the different things going on right now in the Fedora community. So thank you to both Mel and Mairin for that!
For those of you on Livejournal, I’ve syndicated Planet Fedora in order to make it easier for me to keep up with, perhaps you’ll find it helpful as well!
To get more familiar with Fedora as an OS, I am working on taking my Dell Mini 9 (my fieldwork laptop) and figuring out how to install the latest Fedora release on it (it came with Ubuntu). I have yet to even begin research on this! I figure it will be my pet project starting tomorrow. If you have tips or know of any resources that may be helpful, please pass them along!
Lastly, I’m going to put together a loose list of things to discuss while at the conference with everyone interested in this research. It being an explorative study, it is open to any and all ideas the community is interested in exploring about itself.
As a part of my research I’ll be conducting interviews at the conference. If you are interested in being interviewed and you think you’ll have time at the conference for it, please let me know! This way I can start a list prior to the conference and we can be sure to make time while we are there to talk. I’ll be happy to do this individually or in groups. Just let me know your preference.
If you won’t be at the conference, or would like the participate, but don’t think you’ll have time while you are there – don’t fret! I’ll be conducting interviews through the end of January either in person (for those local to Dallas), online (email/IM), or over the phone/skype. So if you’re interested in that let me know as well!
As always, if you have any questions as to what this is all about, who I am, or why I am doing this research feel free to email me at diana [@] cyber-anthro.com.
November 23, 2009 @ 2:27 am
The part about trying Fedora on the netbook is trivial: download a F12 live image, put in on an USB stick (however, I don’t know how you do that from Ubuntu, I am familiar with doing it from either Fedora or Windows) and then boot from the stick.
Stay with it for a few days and when you feel comfortable use the “install to hard drive” icon.
November 23, 2009 @ 8:13 am
@nicu – Thanks! I’ll try that. I bet I can figure out the image to usb stick bit from my Mac or my PC. Now, figuring out how to boot from it maybe the challenging part.
November 28, 2009 @ 2:27 am
Your geek cred is way up there – and it’s in an unique area where you’ve got lots of opportunity to share things with the rest of us that we don’t know, but ought to be aware of.
Think of it this way: it would be fairly simple for me to find a couple dozen people who could package a CMS module I needed, but very difficult for me to find someone to help me build a mental framework for understanding how, say, offline interactions among members of the Marketing team affect community retention and participation.
And THAT is why I’m so excited about you coming on board – because of your willingness to teach and explain a way of thinking that may be less familiar to some of us here, you’re adding a tremendous deal to our ability to be a neurodiverse community, which lets us solve the problems that we choose to tackle far more powerfully.
Also, thanks for going through the .planet stuff – after talking with both you and Karlie Robinson, I’m starting to come to the conclusion that we may need a better “get your blog on planet” tool/process design, because it assumes a certain kind of tool/skill setup I’m not sure is fair to assume of every new Fedora contributor… but that’s a longer discussion to be had on IRC or on some mailing list somewhere, so I’ll see you online. 😉