English version

For the third time in three years, I went to the FOSDEM this year. I have to recognize that it has been a really nice week end for me. There were a lot of people, some that I knew and had really a lot of pleasure to see again, some (ok, ok, most) that I did not know and that I met with a lot of pleasure to.

I am happy about this week end for several reasons. I met lot of nice people, I have had really nice talks, especially a great talk concerning the french speaking community and the roadmap of the association for the coming two years (what we are willing to do, what we want to achieve, where we want to be...). The talk made by Thomas has been really nice for that. The people in the room have been really interested and I think the questions have been answered by the best way possible: all together (Thomas, Armel, Nicolas and I were there and we all participated to answer the question brough by the audience).

In addition to participate to this talk from Thomas, I have had a great pleasure to assist to some other talks. The presentation from the OpenSUSE community architect was really nice. We were able to see that they are willing to build their community in the same base than Fedora has done. They want to be open, they want to increase the implication of their community to the development of their distro/product. This gave me the feeling that we have been doing good the last years and that Fedora is once again the bleeding edge for FOS development (software or community).

I am sorry to have missed the talk that Thomas and Armel had with Max, but the three of us also had a really nice talk with Yaakov. Yaakov and us want to increase the communication between the community in Europe. It is one of the main target of the Fedora-Fr association for the coming two years to increase/enhance the communication with the Fedora EMEA communities. We want to build a network through Europe to centralize the production of goodies over Europe, to be able to reach the lowest prices possible, to be able to bring together all the people that want to work together !

At the FOSDEM we have also met some French people leading other distro community. The point has been made and we will have to work on that: we want to bring all these communities closer. The French Ubuntu association is burning 4000 CDs for each release while we are only burning 500CDs. And what ? We might be able to get a lower price if we burn the 4500CDs together ! And we can ask the mandriva guys, or the SUSE guys.

Something I realize at the FOSDEM this year is that we are a lot of communities in Europe, we are already a lot of communities within a single country, but that we come from a distro or another we can work together. This is probably one of the best way to increase the influence and the audience of FOS spirit !

I am going to conclude with few words about the FOSDEM itself. We were next to the CentOS booth this year again and it was nice. Our dev room was not in front of the booth this year (unlike last year) but I though that it was actually a good idea. We were around 30 guys from Fedora. If the dev room was in front of the booth everybody would have stand in front of the dev room and the booth and the public would not have been able to come to the booth.

So yeah, we had to move to go to the dev room, but I liked it. I think we can say a great "Thanks" to Frederic one of our belgium ambassador, but the one who organised most of the FOSDEM for Fedora. Congrats Fred, this year again it was great !!