I'd never been to South America before, so when Greg asked me if wanted to go to FISL to help represent Fedora, I said sure. Yes, I'd have to miss Lug Radio Live, but we weren't invited to that anyway. I'd never heard of FISL before, and all I knew about Brazil was that it was in South America, they like soccer, and they speak Portuguese.
When I arrived in Brazil, I quickly learned several additional facts:
1. Most Brazilians don't speak any English, only Portuguese. 2. There are noticeably more women than men in Brazil. (The Economist says that the ratio is about 95 males to 100 females, but the locals said that it was more like 60/40). 3. Brazilians are really really really excited about Linux and FOSS.
When we got to FISL on the first day, all that we saw were lines!
http://ausil.us/gallery/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=321...
We really weren't sure which line to get into, because, well, there were no signs and none of the locals spoke English, so we just got in one of the lines. It took more than an hour to get inside and get our badges, then we had to rush to the Fedora presentation (I'd made some F-9 slides the night before, and David Barzilay had translated them). We missed all of the presentation, but we got there in time for Q&A... which went well, thanks to David's quick translation skills.
FISL had over 7000 people in attendance, it was really overwhelming, but awesome! The language barrier was a pretty significant problem for me, as I really wanted to talk to people visiting the Fedora booth and folks in other booths. Eventually, I just gave up and just observed what was going on, and helped out whenever I could. I got laptops working with MPEG video to a TV output, installed Fedora 8 on someone's system, researched a sound driver for a rather obscure arm handheld device, and helped get Sugar running on top of Fedora (it is worth noting that ghbuild kills kittens).
The Ambassadors did a wonderful job with their booth, and the attendees definitely noticed. They had professional polo shirts, high quality pressed media of Fedora 8 (livecds and installs), and they were constantly talking to people. They even had a setup where people could register as they got a free DVD. They were very helpful to us Americans, and were very patient with our inability to speak to them. :) If it wasn't for them, our trip could have easily been a real waste, but they really made it worthwhile.
We ate a lot of good food, buffet style meals are extremely popular there. As reported, I am indeed a "culinary coward", because I did not partake in the eating of chicken hearts. The fact that I don't eat beef or pork made things... difficult, but if you like meat, Brazil is the place for you. We went to a churrascaria (aka, Brazilian BBQ) one evening, and that was just wild. Never ending meat, plus dancing and bolos! We also took some time to go sightseeing, hitting up some of the local museums (no English there either, but we got the jist of things), and to check out one of the large parks nearby. The park had a "mini-zoo" with monkeys and birds of paradise (real birds, not flowers).
In summary: * Brazil is a HOTBED of Free and Open Source activity. We have a lot of good Fedora talent in the region, and we're looking at ways that we can get more involved with them. * If I get the opportunity to return to FISL, I will surely learn some Portuguese first. :)
Thanks,
~spot
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On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 2:43 PM, Tom spot Callaway tcallawa@redhat.com wrote:
(I'd made some F-9 slides the night before, and David Barzilay had translated them).
I think I could use those slides tomorrow at the FLISOL here in Quito. Translating them to Spanish should be easy. Do you think I could have a copy of them?
Thanks!
Em Sex, 2008-04-25 às 15:43 -0400, Tom "spot" Callaway escreveu:
I'd never been to South America before, so when Greg asked me if wanted to go to FISL to help represent Fedora, I said sure. Yes, I'd have to miss Lug Radio Live, but we weren't invited to that anyway. I'd never heard of FISL before, and all I knew about Brazil was that it was in South America, they like soccer, and they speak Portuguese.
When I arrived in Brazil, I quickly learned several additional facts:
- Most Brazilians don't speak any English, only Portuguese.
- There are noticeably more women than men in Brazil. (The Economist
says that the ratio is about 95 males to 100 females, but the locals said that it was more like 60/40). 3. Brazilians are really really really excited about Linux and FOSS.
When we got to FISL on the first day, all that we saw were lines!
http://ausil.us/gallery/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=321...
We really weren't sure which line to get into, because, well, there were no signs and none of the locals spoke English, so we just got in one of the lines. It took more than an hour to get inside and get our badges, then we had to rush to the Fedora presentation (I'd made some F-9 slides the night before, and David Barzilay had translated them). We missed all of the presentation, but we got there in time for Q&A... which went well, thanks to David's quick translation skills.
FISL had over 7000 people in attendance, it was really overwhelming, but awesome! The language barrier was a pretty significant problem for me, as I really wanted to talk to people visiting the Fedora booth and folks in other booths. Eventually, I just gave up and just observed what was going on, and helped out whenever I could. I got laptops working with MPEG video to a TV output, installed Fedora 8 on someone's system, researched a sound driver for a rather obscure arm handheld device, and helped get Sugar running on top of Fedora (it is worth noting that ghbuild kills kittens).
The Ambassadors did a wonderful job with their booth, and the attendees definitely noticed. They had professional polo shirts, high quality pressed media of Fedora 8 (livecds and installs), and they were constantly talking to people. They even had a setup where people could register as they got a free DVD. They were very helpful to us Americans, and were very patient with our inability to speak to them. :) If it wasn't for them, our trip could have easily been a real waste, but they really made it worthwhile.
We ate a lot of good food, buffet style meals are extremely popular there. As reported, I am indeed a "culinary coward", because I did not partake in the eating of chicken hearts. The fact that I don't eat beef or pork made things... difficult, but if you like meat, Brazil is the place for you. We went to a churrascaria (aka, Brazilian BBQ) one evening, and that was just wild. Never ending meat, plus dancing and bolos! We also took some time to go sightseeing, hitting up some of the local museums (no English there either, but we got the jist of things), and to check out one of the large parks nearby. The park had a "mini-zoo" with monkeys and birds of paradise (real birds, not flowers).
In summary:
- Brazil is a HOTBED of Free and Open Source activity. We have a lot of
good Fedora talent in the region, and we're looking at ways that we can get more involved with them.
- If I get the opportunity to return to FISL, I will surely learn some
Portuguese first. :)
FISL is getting better year by year and it was really cool to have Spot, Dennis and Greg around here. Although the language was a barrier I believe we did our best to try to communicate and we had fun with it. The problem is that we are used to write and read in English, but meet a English native speaker personally is bit more rare.
We are pleased to have more people interested in our country and I hope you guys keep coming to our events, because we really need to interact more and share our experiences about open source software.
We distributed a huge amount of DVDs and LiveCDs at FISL. Everything we had was distributed. We also installed Fedora in some usb sticks, did some troubleshooting (Spot really helped us a lot), collected cases about Linux migration and answered a lot of questions at our presentation.
In addition I had a meeting with the leaders of many translation projects such GNOME, KDE, Debian and Mandriva. It was the fist official meeting of LDP-BR (Linux Documentation Project - Brazil). We are trying to create a unified infrastructure where we can get smaller projects translated. Since most people here doesn't speak english, as Spot said before, localization is crucial for the growth of free software and this initiative will benefit not just Fedora, but Free Software as a whole.
Thanks,
No, thank YOU!
Regards, Igor Pires Soares http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/IgorSoares
ambassadors@lists.fedoraproject.org