Fedora at Agora's Open Source / Free Software conference

I asked if, as disgruntled as I am, I still go and talk about Fedora at a local FOSS conference and the feedback convinced me to go. As the local Fedora community is extremely weak these days, I wasn't able to summon a team (we were on hostile grounds, with Microsoft as the main sponsor of the event), so I joined Ceata.

I delivered my talk (slides available), which was about the local Fedora community, maybe a bit more optimistic than it should have been and, as I couldn't resist other way, a small sting at the conference's main sponsor (not included in the slides).

Overall, it was a nice experience: strengthening the team (Ceata), fun time, making contacts and delivering a message. A good day.


PS: I recorded on video my presentation, but being dumb enough I lost it... have no idea on which hard drive was saved :(

The kite is flying high and free

Is about a year since we launched Fii Liber, a magazine about freedom in arts and technology. For this we gathered as much of the contributors were available (unfortunately some missed) and a couple of contributors-to-be:

Since the project uses a kite as its logo, we got hold of a couple of kites, rainbow colored, to be as close to the logo as possible and got them fly. It was a fortunate window of good weather and a small blue sky, in an otherwise rainy and gloomy day, just enough for us to make a stand and have some fun.

Then we continued inside with some pizza, beer, pie and cake, Also, all the contributors present received a diploma from Alina, our project leader (and Alina got hers too from Tibi, Ceata's leader).

Doesn't this sound like a fun project to be part of it? If you care about Free software, Free arts and freedom in general, why won't you join us?


PS: yeah, there was also a downside, despite my efforts to de-emphasize that, the team noticed my anniversary being on the same day so made a big fuss of it, letting it somehow eclipse the main event. Thank you guys and girls!

The story of a poster or the making of Fii Liber Land

The task was forgotten, sitting untouched for months, when I was reminded about it (and perhaps assigned in the tracker): make a poster design for the Fii Liber project, to be put at Ceata's headquarters.

I got the "Fii Liber Land" concept right away in my head, but it was too complicated (so I thought) and I was not in the mood for drawing it, so postponed it for a while, over a week, during which I kept working on demotivational posters (more on that in a couple of weeks, the project is not ready to be announced), while trying to simplify the idea and do something easy, which I would be able to do in the blink of an eye and no effort.

Time passed and I was unable to come with a simplified form, so build my courage and went for the whole shebang: I could get away with the simple kite (the Fii Liber logo) on a blue sky and the clouds from the current website header along with a text like "Fii Liber. Noi suntem liberi! Tu?" ("Bee Free. We are free! You?") but that was less than optimal: the kite and the clouds do not match in their visual style (I made the kite logo on my usual style but when it came to the clouds I was "busy" and skipped the task) and... I wanted to make a point and I am not the person to step back from a controversy.

Fii Liber is queued for an infrastructure upgrade, will be migrated to Drupal 7, and with this it will receive a new theme, which I find boring, corporate-like and bad for our "normal users" audience (obviously, some people in the team disagree, so they want the change). The poster is supposed to show the friendly and informal image I envision for the project.

But I talked already too much, time for some pretty pictures! Here is the poster design I came with:

As you can see, it represents a happy land with hallmarks of life, technology and culture (as Ceata is an organisation promoting Free arts and technology) with a kite (the logo) flying freely over it. Of course, there are some stereotypes included, like Dracula's castle, a Modavian painted church or the Endless Column (do I need to also talk about sheep?)

Now the work is not done :) From my point of view it may be, but since the design is Free and a group has different visions, modifications may happen: the Ceata logo, which is not loved any more may get axed (in what I see as a mistake for growing the identity) and some text may get added at the bottom, where I intentionally didn't allow the space for.

As said, done, time to go forward, staying a bit more in the poster land... a bit of work is planned today on the demotivational side :)

...and we celebrated Ceata

It happened yesterday: Ceata celebrated its second anniversary holding an event at the The Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies, so here is a short report: we had a few presentations - general introduction about who is Ceata and what we want (Tibi), a definition about Linux (me), an introduction to OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice (Răzvan), a few words about CreativeCommons licenses (me again), all of those linked together by our wonderful host (Irina) and supported technically by Andrei. It ended with a short Free movie from the Blender Foundation.

We managed to gather a number of students in the audience, with some of them completely unfamiliar with the world of Free and Open Source Software:

It, of course, ended with socialisation, beers and good time at a nearby pub:

As a honest evaluation, I don't call the event a success, we didn't have the audience which I setted for myself as a threshold for calling it so, but won't call it a failure either, we had a presence in a new place, an event organized by a new contributor, nothing really bad happened...let say it was OK and conforming with my expectations.

Let me try to end this in a funny way, showing how two of our colleagues (Irina and Eugen) saw the party after in a drawing (myself, I still can't draw):