Fedora Activity Day China 2014 Report

Fedora Activity Day (FAD) China 2014 was successfully held at Park Plaza of Beijing Science Park, Beijing on Mar 30 (Sunday). It was organized by Fedora Zhongwen User Group with the help of CSDN. It was under the umbrella of Open Source Technology Conference (OSTC) 2014 initiated by CSDN, being one of three parallel sessions in the afternoon. There were around 600 attendees in total, and about 200 in the FAD session.

I arrived at the venue in the morning with more than 100 Live DVDs and 500 stickers. We distributed them during the Red Hat booth as well as the afternoon session. In the morning there were several keynote speeches and one panel discussion. More details can be found in the CSDN news report.

The afternoon session began at 1:30 pm. Thomas Yao and I served as the hosts of FAD. The first talk was “About Those Python Asynchronous Concurrency Frameworks” by Fantix King, CTO at FlowForge Games, Archlinux x32 committer, and Python programmer. He introduced the concept of concurrency, compared Tornado, Twisted, and Gevent, and then introduced asyncio, the newly available framework in Python 3.4.0.

Python Concurrency Frameworks by Fantix King

The second talk was “Use Linux Command Line as a Hacker” by Xiaodong Xu (Toy), the webmaster of LinuxToy. He shared a lot of command line tips to fix typos, manipulate shell history, and speed up operations. In the QA session he talked about his opinion on text editor choice and Linux distro choice.

Toy

The next talk was “Reform the Toolbox: From Open Source Software to Open Source Service” by Daobing Li, the chief architect of Qiniu, who is also a Debian developer. He talked about the achievements of open source cloud service, and shared his vision of future cloud service – cloud in computer room. He also gave suggestions on how developers treat cloud services.

Daobing Li

Following the talk was “Introduction to HackRF & GNURadio” by Scateu Wang, the creator of hackrf.net and the former leader of TUNA. He demonstrated the ease of using GNU Radio to develop software defined radio applications for DTMF decoding, FM modulation and demodulation, digital audio broadcasting, etc. He also introduced HackRF, the newly created inexpensive hardware peripheral used with GNU Radio.

Scateu Wang

The next talk was “Fedora Ambassadors & FUDCon” by myself. I introduced the four foundations of Fedora Project, gave an overview of Fedora Ambassadors project, showed what ambassadors do and how reimbursement works, and then shared the recent progress of organizing FUDCon APAC 2014 to be held in May and welcomed everyone to join.

Alick

Next Emily Chen, GNOME.Asia founder, senior software engineer in Oracle, gave the talk “Bringing More Women to Free and Open Source Software”. She introduced the Outreach Program for Women initiated by GNOME, talked about how it increases the women participation in open source projects. The annual program provides prize for women participants in similar way with GSoC, but it does not require the applicants to be students, and applicants does not need to write code in the program.

Emily Chen

The following talk was “Operation and Management of SHLUG” by Thomas Yao, leader of Shanghai Linux User Group (SHLUG), founder of GitCafe.com. Thomas gave an impressive speech without any slides. He talked about the history of SHLUG and shared the experience. He pointed out the pioneering effort of building the first open source mirror site in China, Geekbone, and the importance of keeping the community focus on technique rather than commercial activities. He also shared the interesting stories of Hacking Thursday and Rails Girls.

Thomas Yao

After that is the panel discussion on “History and Future of Open Source OS in China”. It was moderated by Thomas Yao, and the panelists are Weijia He from Redflag College of Education, Jianzhong Huang from Redflag R&D, Jack Yu from UbuntuKylin, and Yong Wang from Linux Deepin. They shared their opinions and experiences about Linux Desktop, collaboration of distros, cultivation of open source talents, and open source in education.

Panel Discussion

At last, Martin, leader of Beijing Linux User Group (BLUG) gave a lightining speech of introducing BLUG and its activities. Everyone is welcomed and should not worry about their English since there are actually many Chinese there. And it is quite easy to join the event by registering on BLUG website or joining discussion in mailing list.

At night there is the Open Source Night, a social event for free face-to-face discussions. Unfortunately I didn’t attend it. I had dinner with FUDCon and GNOME.Asia organizers and discussed current progress and following tasks.

Overall it is a very good event in my mind. If I have to point out some issues, I’d say there might be too many talks and no time for tea or coffee in between! Besides, my own talk was prepared in a bit hurry, and not practised well beforehand.

The slides links is available on CSDN news. They also provide a Chinese report for FAD. There is a great minute for the meeting by Bojie Li from USTC LUG. The videos and various other materials can be found at this link.