Originally published at: Flock to Fedora CFP Themes - Ideas and Tips! – Fedora Community Blog
Flock to Fedora will happen in the beautiful, historic city of Prague, Czechia from June 5 to June 8 this year. We cannot wait to welcome our wonderful contributors to the Fedora Projects’ annual event. Our Call for Presentations (CFP) is open until February 23. In order to enable as many of our contributors to submit talks,we have put together this blog post that might help you connect your topic to a theme, or help you to look at the themes in a different way. We hope this will make the themes resonate with you —and maybe spark a talk topic to match.
Interpreting Themes
Themes are just that: general topic areas. They are not meant to be binding and all-encompassing, but they are meant to help focus the conference. The good news is, there is room in our themes to tailor your topic to make it unique to you. The slightly less good news, sometimes creating that connection between your talk topic and a theme takes a little extra…creativity.
Imagine you get an invitation to a costume party, and the theme is ‘Halloween’. Easy, right? Dracula, Zombie, Witch, etc. They are the most obvious and easy ones to think of, and if you have a pointy hat or a set of vampire fangs, you are good to go. However, what if you do not have some ready-to-hand ghoulish accessories or apparel? What if you just have fairy wings or Hulk gloves? Well, there is nothing preventing you from using what you have, and with a bit of clever tweaking in the right areas eg; tear the fairy wings – you have a Zombie Fairy. Put fake blood on the Hulk gloves – you have a menacing Hulk. Or better yet – wear the fairy wings with the Hulk gloves for some chimera-type beast. All of a sudden though, voila! You have now hit the theme right in the bullseye, but with your own clever twist!
I do not know if that analogy helps you, I hope it does, but at the very least I hope it gives you a little chuckle. Fedora is such a diverse project, it would be a downright shame to feel like you cannot submit a talk or workshop idea to the CFP just because you are struggling to connect your work to the themes.
So, here is each theme broken down with some hypothetical examples of how talk topics might fit each theme.
Theme #1 – Empowering Collaboration: Tools and Practices for Fedora’s Future
Dive into the tools, workflows, ecosystems and practices that enable Freedom and Features in the Fedora Project. Topics can include the upcoming Git forge change, discussion related to bug tracking systems, communication platforms, building strong community teams, the power of community driven development and project management that drives Fedora’s collaborative efforts.
What might this mean for your work? Think:
- My work involves collaboration between various teams in Fedora. It might be cool to hear about valuable lessons we can and have learned from working together.
- I spend time improving the tooling or applications for Fedora. I could share how this work has benefited Fedora, and share any plans for even more good stuff to bring into the project.
- I could share about a success story I was part of or leading that happened in Fedora because of the power of community-driven development
- I could talk about how the group I am a part of has grown a really strong community within Fedora because of the work we do
- I could share some best practices on how to manage open source communities.
- I could talk about my work that involved introducing something into the distro that improved Fedora in some way, and what problem it solved.
- I could share my plans to improve or change workflows and present my plans to change things and how to help me, at Flock
- I could run a workshop that teaches people better ways to collaborate together in Fedora, eg package management pro-tips, how to be a good mentor in open source, etc
- I’m leading a significant change, or I have led a significant change in the project that has been or will be great for Fedora and I would like to talk about it to showcase the work
Theme #2 – Welcoming New Voices: Pathways for Fedora Contributors
Grow our community of Friends with an inclusive and welcoming space for new and current contributors. These workshops and talks should focus on beginner-friendly or hands-on sessions to introduce newcomers and long-time community members to some of the advanced topics of contributing to Fedora, and discover new ways of engaging in the project.
What does this mean to you? Think:
- I could host a workshop that hacks on easy fixes or good-first-issues in the area that I work in to increase contributions to the project in this area that could do with some extra support.
- I could do a talk on <insert your work here> to show how easy it is to collaborate with me/my team/SIG and interest some people in working on this more with me/us
- I could share some insights and ways on how best to maintain a package over several releases
- Could I talk about how I became a contributor, and share ideas on how to follow in my footsteps?
- Maybe I can present something about being blocked on something, and how I and/or my team worked through it in Fedora
Theme #3 – Driving Innovation: Fedora and Emerging Technologies:
Embrace First by exploring the technologies shaping Fedora’s future. Topics can be related to IoT, containers, AI/ML, edge computing, RISC-V, and other advancements that align with Fedora’s commitment to innovation.
What does this mean to you? Think:
- I could talk about the new architectures I am building Fedora on
- Maybe I should offer to host a workshop or do a talk on easy Fedora-based container deployments
- I could talk about the benefits we have seen in <TEAM/SIG/ETC> using containers based on Fedora
- I could talk about how using containers has made the development->deployment->maintenance lifecycle less complicated/easier
- I could talk about why RISC-V, the open hardware architecture, is key to pushing forward libre hardware
- I could talk about <home automation, sensors, etc..> and how Fedora IoT is involved
- I can talk about how I trained my model, running in llama on Fedora, to create my <status report, etc..> so I could focus on code
- I can talk about the importance of open source models/AI versus closed models/AI as a service (which are the current norm)
- For innovation, I can talk about why I prize moving forward and fixing fast versus stable stagnation
Our CFP is open until February 23 so don’t delay, get those submissions to us pronto! We hope this post will help you connect your ideas to our themes, and we look forward to reading about all the ways our community connects their work in Fedora.