Fedora 26 Release Party at Open Labs Hackerspace

A lot of people like Fedora for its bleeding edge features which is due its rapid 6 month release cycle. Some others might not. But I definitely like it as we have a reason to celebrate a new Fedora release twice a year! With a little bit of delay, Fedora 26 was released beginning of July and as the tradition goes, the Albania community was eager to be part of the global celebrations.

As much as I love cake though, the more I despise the heat in Albania. While I don’t want to go into the global warming debate, I think there are some lessons to learn out of this for the future editions of release parties, as the needs of the community might change while the time passes, so we might want to adapt the format of the Fedora Release Parties.

After having organized dozens of events in the past years, one could think you can plan ahead and estimate the outcome. Sorry to break it for you, but that’s often not the case. We had a great meetup to talk about the latest Fedora news, however we only had 2 newcomers attend the Release Party, while in the Winter release parties we had a great number of new faces joining us in the hackerspace.

This makes me think, maybe we cannot plan the Summer Release Party in the same way we plan the Winter release party. Temperatures in Tirana reach 40’C in Summer, so not many people are going out before night time (if they are not lying on the beach getting tanned already). Maybe we should move the new release party to a more accessible location and keep it more social oriented rather than technical oriented.

Having said that, the event provided me with a lot of context and made me think about what to improve next time. I wouldn’t want to describe everything we do as a great success when there are points in time where we actually have to stop and rethink if we can actually improve and learn something.

This was the case for me. Needless to say I have a clear vision in my head of how to organize the next Fedora Release Party to become a great success and attract new contributors.

Which brings me to the good news; I was happy to see Mariana, a fellow contributor taking on more and more things and being in the process of becoming a Fedora Ambassador! This is huge news for us, as it will allow the community to grow more and decentralize responsibilities. We went on to discuss and present the new features of Fedora 26 and showcase them on our machines. As there were people attending who weren’t at Fedora events before, we showed them how the community works and they can get involved as well.

Until Fedora 27 then! With hopefully friendlier temperatures…