The 20th edition of Free & Open Source Developers European Meetup (FOSDEM) was a palindrome because of the date that the conference occurred this yeas … 02/02/2020. Although the conference is huge and hectic, the 20th edition had significantly less people attending. The coronavirus breakout had a huge impact on that. Once again I joined the conference as part of the Fedora Project. This year the organizers grouped the booths thematically and at ‘building K’ where we usually stand were mostly OS and DE stands.

The Fedora booth on Saturday

On Saturday morning upon arrival we set up our booth with our swag. Stickers, pins, pens, booklets and of course the reusable coffee cups. Once again, we had a “shared” design with CentOS on the cups. I have to admit the “Fedora <3 Python” stickers were a huge success! Although, my favorite ones were those on the sticker sheet by the Diversity & Inclusion team. Other than our stickers, the Weblate folks passed by our booth and left us some Weblate stickers to give away to people.

The Fedora cup The Fedora swag behind the scenes

For both days we agreed to have shifts on the booth in order to make sure that everyone has the chance to enjoy the conference by attending the sessions and visiting the other infobooths. Although, we had a lot of amazing contributors that stayed at the booth for many hours answering questions which I would like to thank for their time!! The most common question was about Silverblue and NeuroFedora. It seemed that people had already used or heard about Silverblue and wanted to find out more. While questions about NeuroFedora were mostly triggered because of the stickers we had on the table.

The Fedorator was an other piece from the booth that triggered questions. The Fedorator creates bootable USB sticks with the Fedora distro with various Desktop Environments. The participants could see in real time how within 2-3 minutes they could have a live USB with the DE they had previously chosen at the home screen of the device.

FOSDEM 2020 closing session

This year’s edition was slightly different for me because other than just attending the conference as a Fedora contributor, I organized Fedora’s presence at FOSDEM. And for this, I would like to thank everyone that helped by answering my questions via email or on Telegram. And I had a loooot of questions prior the conference…. Especially, I would like to thank bex (the former FCAIC), Marie (current FCAIC) and Zacharias.

Community dinner