FUDCon which also stands for Fedora User and Developer Conference was held in Kuala Lumpur from 18th of May till 20th of May 2012. I, as a Fedora user and Malaysian surely didn’t miss the chance participating and meeting up with Fedora Contributors.
It’s a long journey (4 hours+) to go all the way from my university campus in Penang to KL attending the conference. The registration session started at 830am on 18th May but I registered slightly late since I missed the bus from LRT station to the conference venue. The opening keynote presented by Christoph Wickert is about the leadership in open system and how is it different from the common company closed system. The keynote introduce a few new ideas to me like “leadership by example“, “every member in the open system is equal” and etc, which is simply impressive!
The first day of the conference doesn’t have a fix talk/workshop schedule but instead it’s running in a barcamp style. I attended a few meaningful quick talk for example LaTex, Fedora for Students, GIT, Fedora Spins and remixing and etc. The talk was quick but it open ups a beginners mind on how an open source operating system and software looks and feels like.
The second day of the conference started with a keynote from Joshua Wulf on which is about the “4 keys of contribution in open source projects” (not sure if it is the title of the keynote, but should be something like that). This keynote introduce a few terms which includes “treat your user as co-developer” and “treat your co-developer as user” and also the ramp in software designing. It’s a brilliant keynote which helps me to think a lot on the strategy and time & energy management when developing software/application in the future.
The second day of the conference has a fix schedule of talks and I did attended quite a few number of nice talk, for instance “Free Software, Open Source and Creative Commons” which talk about copyright, copyleft and licensing; “Ask Fedora” which introduce us on a stack overflow like question and answer system called Ask Fedora; and etc
The last day of the conference started without an opening keynote, instead, I was late for a few minutes for the first talk I’ve attended which is “RPM Packaging Basic” which is a talk on how to create an RPM package for beginners. I attended a great talk by Victor on the creative FLOSS applications which cover a huge range of FLOSS software ranging from graphic designing to audio industry and paper publishing.
The afternoon sessions (talks and workshops) has been re-schedule due to the low amount of attendees. I’ve attended the “Fighting Spam with Postscreen” and “Systemd Introduction” talk. The FUDConKL 2012 is wrapped up with an closing keynote.
An ordinary academic conference might be just about talk and gaining knowledge on certain field, but FUDCon is totally different in every single aspect. It enables users to meet up face-to-face with the developer, package maintainer and Fedora Ambassadors. Idea and Knowledge is shared everywhere during the conference. Users learnt how open governance and open system works which is way different than the closed system they used to ( in the Microsoft Brainwash Syndrome old days). Contributions is the main idea distributed during the conference cause without the contribution from the Ambassadors, package maintainer, developer, translator, artist and etc, Fedora (and any other open source OS and software) would not be as great as it is.
Yes, it makes up my mind to contribute more to Fedora and any other Open Source Software and OS, how about you? Are you ready to make the world a better place?
P/S: At here I would also like to thank the organizing committee and volunteers, thanks for organizing this brilliant event in such a short period and thanks again for all your helps/assists during the 3 days conference. 
. I’ve been busy working on my FYP (Final Year Project) for my Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate. FYI, my FYP title is “Electric Drive Optimization” which I would try to optimize the electric drive train of the electric vehicle which gonna participate in the upcoming SEM (Shell Eco-Marathon) Asia 2012 Urban category. SEM is a race for efficiency meaning that it’s not a race that need speed, but fuel efficient (which is less electric power, more distance in this context).
