Dr. Matt Lee (mattl)

Today I went to FudCon 2008, which was being held at Boston University.

What’s FudCon? Well, according to the website:

FUDCon is the Fedora Users and Developers Conference. FUDCon is
a combination of sessions, talks, and workshops, and hackfests in which
specific features or Fedora Projects are worked on. Topics include
infrastructure, feature development, community building, general
management and governance, marketing, packaging, etc.

It was a pretty awesome event, and pretty well organised. I tried to get and see most of the talks, but inevitably I missed some.

One that I took a big part in was the fedoraproject.org usability study, in which I stepped forward as a genuine guinea pig for the Fedora websites team — having never really attempted to use their website before, but knowing quite a lot about free software in general, it was an interesting experience for me. The notes from the session have been posted to the mailing list, though an attempt to make a video of my potentially stupid responses on a Playstation Portable thankfully failed.

The other interesting talk was Chris Tyler from Seneca College (in Canada) talking about their course which gets students working on real free software projects — he made a few references to wget being not a great project to work on, due to its size.. of course, wget is just one component of the GNU Operating System, which has over 330 component projects, so I invited Chris to get students working on GNU next year.