This past weekend I attended my first FAD event - this one was specific for the Ambassador group within Fedora, whose mission it is to spread the Fedora message, FADNA 2010.
Some quick background - I became a Fedora Ambassador after last year's Red Hat Summit after Scott McBrien urged me to get involved. Since then, I've learned tons about Fedora - the project and the people behind it. I've been using Fedora for about two or three years now. Fedora is the upstream Linux distribution that Red Hat sponsors and ultimately ends up basing RHEL releases on.
Back to the FAD. I met lots of interesting folks in real life that I've been chatting with on irc in the #rhel and #fedora-ambassador channels. This was an excellent meeting for me because I got to meet the people that have done a large part of the driving within the Ambassador group for Fedora. John Rose setup the event at the Iowa State University, which is a nice campus (Man, I miss college and campus life!)
We spent the daylight hours working on as much of agenda items as possible and continued the discussions late into the night. Very little sleep was done by anyone. The meeting definitely increased my motivation and desire to work on Fedora and some of my personal projects (bioloid robot) that will use Fedora.
Learned about the marketing group and the fantastic work they've done. The material that they've produced is something that many ambassadors and contributors don't seem to know much about. This material is extremely useful and ambassadors would do themselves a favour by looking through and learning the material. Since Fedora is a brand that describes both a community and a project, having a cohesive message when presenting or talking about Fedora makes it easier for both the presenter and the recipient of the information.
Learned about the ambassador mentoring process. Since this is a relatively new initiative in the ambassador group, from a formal perspective, the ways in which this is actually implemented is very much open to suggestion and improvements. It also turns out that becoming a mentor is as simple as asking the current mentor group.
Learned that most groups within Fedora are driven by a handful of really dedicated individuals in each group. Pareto's principle really does apply here. Kudos to those I had the good fortune and pleasure of meeting this weekend, I, and anyone else who's paying attention should also be, extremely impressed and awed.
One of the main things I learned is that a lot of tremendously talented people have already done a lot of amazing work that I had no idea existed. Ah, the internets. I am really looking forward to attending the next Fedora event.
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