So after passing out fairly early last night, i woke up far to early, and now i'm taking advantage of the quietness to get my bearings organized. Unlike most conferences, this one doesn't start presentations until sometime in the afternoon. They know their crowd here.
To give you all an idea of what's going on, let me give you an overview. Hacking at Random is the once every four year Dutch hacking camping conference and lan party. This year, there is a stronger focus towards technology and society than there has been in the past, so much so that the MPAA and Brein have shown up.
As for Fedora, we've put together a conglomerated village between various groups and individuals Alex C. and i know, made up mostly of the people we want to sit around and drink beer with. On the Fedora and CentOS side, we have Andreas Thienemann, Didi and Chris Meyer, and on the other side we have a mix of all sorts of visual artists and DJs from FreeJ/Dynebolic and a group of other people Alex knows from all over. We're also situated right across from the lake and right across from the CCC dome. We also have a few spaces staked out for a couple more people who are coming, including Dag Wieers. True to form, when Jaromil arrived, he managed to squat a tent, which someone set up, but left empty. Being the good citizen that he is, he made sure that the tent didn't stay open for junkies to come in and destroy. Now there's an active community revolving around this tent. (House squatting is legal in the Netherlands.)
We had planned to put together something marketable as a tent, but unfortunately, the Fedora banners did not arrive in time for us to use. I may try to convince someone to drive me home on Friday to check to see if they might be there by then, but until then, we are sitting relatively anonymous. Despite that, we already have a reputation as "Fedora and CentOS" here, and with these sorts of things, word of mouth marketing can be very valuable. We're still trying to get all of our things together in the tent, and at the moment, Alex, Buzz, and Zmatt are setting up lighting in the tent, so we can put on a nice light show later. I really want to publically thank Alex C and give my kudos to him. He's put quite a bit of his time in organizing this tent, and it's come out quite nicely.
I think my next task is to go around and try to market our BarCamp as much as possible. Compared to the rest of the event, our setup is quite small, but we're looking to hold a few media workshops, hackfests, and demos / presentations, and especially if you're doing it on top of a Fedora or Fedora based system. (Or even a derivative of a Fedora derivative, like Jaro is using.) Since BarCamps are the preferred format by Fedora for things, i will be giving the BarCamp presentation to the birds, and then people will go ahead and do their thing. If you're on the terrain, you should definitely come check it out on Saturday.
