Sorry about the delay in sending you this report. I forgot (several times!) to
send this to the list.
I manned a booth at the Paris Open Source Summit (which has always had a NPO
area) back in December promoting Fedora (and Open Source in general).
The transport strike in the Paris region that was going on at the time had a
heavy influence on POSS 2019's attendance. The main problem was that some
organisations were absent but visitors could still meet a good 20 or so,
two of them linked to distributions other than Fedora.
Borsalinux-Fr representatives also paid a price: one of us had more than
two hours of transport (cable car, bus, cable car then a lot of walking) to
arrive at the Docks while carrying the belongings of two
organisations, a good hour of walking
for the other.
The first day was very painful. As a joke, we said that there were more
exhibitors than visitors but I suspect that this was actually true. Some
people came to the booth but, in the end, it was very calm. Given the lack
of visitors, we decided to chat with people from Debian-France, the Mongers
of Perl and OpenFoodFacts. We came across some foreign users including someone
from India and an Italian. Two people also came to see us and the discussion
turned to LemonLDAP-NG and its availability for RHEL and CentOS 8.x.
It prompted Emmanuel to go to the Worteks stand where he found Clément Oudot,
the main developer of LemonLDAP-NG. The discussion centered on the various
Perl modules used by the application.
The next day saw more visitors than the first, even if the difficulties in
going from point A to point B in Paris were still huge and the number of
associations was the same as for the first day. The public seemed younger
to us than what we expected but that didn't stop them from asking very
interesting questions.
At the end of the day, Emmanuel went to the Red Hat stand where the stand
organizers were kind enough to give him the Grail: the last red Red Hat
hat they had left: D
Emmanuel
