Left to right: Henry Hutalle Jr., Orlee Pasion, Jose Mari Guevara, Heherson Pagcaliwagan, and Dona Grace.

Memo to self: Get an unlimited plan, preferably a wired connection ASAP – SmartBro Prepaid is just too expensive.

One hundred (100) Fedora 12 LiveCDs from Harish Pillay, all the way from Singapore.

It’s a good thing Mel‘s cousin got married last Sunday so we had her yesterday over dinner. While it’s been unfortunate that Nap wasn’t able to come, we now know his number and he’ll be on board for our next activities!

We initially met at Razon’s of Guagua Restaurant at the UP-Ayala TechnoHub in the University of the Philippines-Diliman campus and then afterwards moved to the Coffee Bean for coffees and tea.

On her way to UP, Mel had ample time to experience two Filipino standard fares – family and traffic congestion. I believe she enjoyed the former more

Most of our discussion revolved around Open Source Education (POSSE, Bluepoint Foundation, teachingopensource.org, HFOSS, Sahana, Philippine Universities, Geek Camp 3.0), FAD and FreeMedia (Freedom Toaster).

Everyone of us were working on Open Source Education one way or another and that made it a pretty interesting discussion. Engels and Magie happen to be the directors of Bluepoint Foundation – a non-profit Open Source Education and Development Center in the Philippines.

We’re interested in hosting our own POSSE and it’s pretty much obvious with the way Maj’s eye twinkled that we’ll be holding one in the near future. I say, it’s just a question of time

We’ll be working on a Fedora Ambassador Day on GeekCamp 3.0 next February. I think the we’re doing the CD/DVD vending machine Transformer.

We happened upon Regnard Raquedan (a fraternity brod of mine) when we transferred shops and he turned out to be helping organize the local Firefox Team and they’re also meeting that same time. All of the sudden, it’s a small world

We parted ways shortly after 9PM. We didn’t want to keep her from her family too much

Fedora Project banners high above the lobby area of the National Computer Center.

Volunteers manning the booth – Dona Grace, Herson Pagcaliwagan and Henry Pagcaliwagan.

Engels Antonio delivering his talk about FOSS.

Answering questions at the booth. Notice the word FREE using Fedora stickers.

The crowd around the booth. We gave away 550+ LiveCDs to the crowd – mostly students and teachers.

Delivering an impromptu talk introducing Fedora Project using Paul Frields’ slides.

Fedora Ambassadors and Team BLUE.

Sources:
[1] Fedora Philippines @ fedoracommunity.org
[2] Bluepoint

Earlier posts:
[1] Fedora Project @ SFD Philippines 2009
[2] It’s Difficult But It’s Doable
[3] T-Shirt Proposal for SFD 2009
[4] Banners for SFD2009

Here’s an overview of what happened before and during SFD2009:

• 4 Days. We prepared for the event in four days and it showed. We initially planned to offload a lot of things to vendors/3rd-party services but with a very tight schedule we had to do a lot of the things ourselves. Good thing we had a merry crew of men and women who created the banner and shirt designs, burned the LiveCDs, printed the stickers and prepared the LiveUSBs  – all in short notice and for extended hours too!
• Design. With a tight schedule on our hands, our local design team had a tough time conforming with the Fedora Logo Guidelines. The 12-hour difference between Boston and Quezon City really highlighted our cramped schedule – luckily for us, Mairin stayed with us till the end and we we’re able to prepare designs which conforms with the guidelines to the letter.
• Murphy’s Law.
  • Imagine buying 400 blank DVDs and you can’t burn a single working copy of F11 Install DVD.
  • Imagine having no running water for a day and a night while doing our preparations because someone forgot to pay our water bill (our apartment served as HQ). –> me
• 550+ Attendees. We prepared 550 LiveCDs and we emptied our boxes in a span of 20 minutes during lunch break. There were still a handful of inquiries afterwards but we referred them to FreeMedia and promised to help make the arrangements after the event. Majority of the attendees are students and some even came from Tarlac province which is 120+ km away from Quezon City. We also gave away Fedora stickers and 3 LiveUSBs.
• Impromptu Talk. During in-between talks early in the afternoon session, we managed to take hostage a roomful of students and gave them an overview of Fedora Project and how they can contribute Questions include “What’s the meaning of the Fedora Four Foundations logo?”, “How to upgrade from one version of Fedora to the other?”, “How fast/often Fedora releases its distribution?” and the inviting “Can you pay our school a visit and help inspire our students learn Open Source?”
• Engels on TV. Engels talked about FOSS philosophies early in the morning session and the reporters from GMA7 who were covering the event picked up his lecture. When you’re good, you’re good
• Making Friends at the Booths. We had some pretty good company in the exhibition hall and we made it a point to visit every one of them. Guys from MSI-ECS and UR Solutions (Red Hat partners), Bayanihan Linux Team,  Trend Micro, OLPC Philippines, UP Open University, IOSN and Ateneo DISCS were pretty good neighbors and we exchanged souvenirs with some of them.
• Lots of Pictures. The irony of it all is that we had a lot of picture-taking sessions but we did not have a single camera on the premises. I’m pretty sure our faces is already plastered in some blog/website somewhere but I’m waiting for the pictures to be posted by Bluepoint (by way of Maj).

To wrap it all up, the event is a success – lessons from which we hope to build upon in our future events!

Photos to follow. Promise.

SFD2009 Shirt Design

SFD2009 Banner Design

Credits:
Banner Design: Rowel Bustillo, Mark Mercado
Shirt Design: Bernard Buenaventura, Heherson Pagcaliwagan

My big problem challenge right now is how to get the design on the actual shirts. I’m almost out of time with SFD2009 coming fast this Saturday. In any case, we’ll figure something out and eventually get those shirts on the gorgeous bodies of our contributors and attendees.

The dynamic duo also offered to take care of the banners so we can minimize costs against our Fedora Event budget and ultimately generate some savings for CodeFest prizes. For that and more (they came out of nowhere to help out), I’m very very grateful!