The Fedora Project has been participating since 2006 and I am of the opinion that again it should be part of the conference with a stand (regardless of the presentations advocates & ambassadors might have related to Fedora). This event is very developer-oriented and every year it was quite challenging making sure we have code-oriented advocates to fly to Belgium and stand behind the booth. Since the event is online, more people from different countries and timezones can join and help answer questions.

FOSDEM has been a great place to showcase the Project to people who would just start contributing to open source, but this year I assume that "virtual attendees" will be mostly people who are already familiar with any form of open source. Thus, in case it is decided to submit an application we have to make sure to have enough people around during the 2 days of the event.

+1 on my behalf
let's do it and you can count me in
I can volunteer but just on day 2 (Feb 7th)

+1 - try to email the organizers and see if they will let us in :D

I can volunteer too

+1

+1

+1 for a presence but I cannot commit to be available then, yet

Our belated booth submission was accepted! Now we need to prepare for our virtual booth. I am pasting below the original email we received from the conference organizers with instructions:

Hello team behind The Fedora Project,

Your submission for a stand at FOSDEM 2021 has been accepted.

We welcome you to FOSDEM 2021, our first fully digital edition.

As a reminder, this is what you can expect this year.
- A spot on our exhibition website (stands.fosdem.org).
- A Matrix chatroom.
- A place to store video's.

The exhibition website is a static site generated by hugo (gohugo.io). We have set the theme >and the structure, and you can add as many pages as you want. The code for the website >currently lives at https://github.com/FOSDEM/stands-website . Documentation will be added >shortly (and will be communicated via the list).

To get started with adding content to the website, follow these steps:

1. Create two git repositories (public), one for your content and one for your static files. Provide us with both links and make sure we can pull anonymously.
2. Add pages in any format Hugo accepts. Note that you cannot add more levels (if you want a deeper structure, ask us).
3. Once every hour a script will rebuild the website.
4. You can add links to your own website(s) as well, but we ask that you keep stand-related things on our stands website.

We'll provide more information on where to upload the video's later this month. It is up to you >if you wish to create them, but we think it will add value to your stand.

More details on the chatroom will also be made available in the coming week.

This week, we'll publish the list of accepted stands on our website, and add the primary and >secondary contact to standholders@lists.fosdem.org for further communication. By the >beginning of next week, the exhibition website will be put online (behind authentication as it is >not public yet). As soon as the infrastructure is in place, the video site and the Matrix chatroom >will be configured.

We'll send further updates to the standholders mailing list. Please bear with us, this is new for >us as well ;-)

We hope to see you at FOSDEM!

Kind regards,

The FOSDEM Stands Team

+1

The Mindshare Committee discussed this in the regular meeting today and came up with the following notes/ideas:

Notes:
- Thoughts on chat staffing: doesn't seem like the best use of time to staff the booth the entire time. Instead we envision doing a social hour, AMA, live Q&A, or demo at a specific time.
- Swag give-away: want to give away swag to the first 50 non-fedorans who show up on each day. We will set up a LimeSurvey to gather this info.

Videos to upload:
Budapest video
?? Need more options here

Matrix chat:
Waiting to get more info, this is in our wheelhouse already

Spot on the exhibition website, things we think should go there:
- Changes implemented in F33, upcoming changes for F34
- Info about becoming a Fedora contributor and all contact info for Join SIG
- Mindshare team infographics
- Info on publications, events

FYI: created a request for a badge: https://pagure.io/fedora-badges/issue/795

Regarding videos: We could ask Feature owners if they could provide a short demo of their feature where feasible. Possible candidates at first sight with user visibility would be
- IoT edition
- i3 spin
- overview of benefits from btrfs as root filesystem
- ELN
- swap of zram
- sqlite rpmdb
- systemd-resolved
- nano as editor
- network time security
- thermal management
- sotrate instatiation daemon
- reserve resources for active users
- DNS over TLS
- module obsoletes and EOL
- restart services at end of rpm transaction
- rust crate packages
- update-alternatives for cc and c++
- wayland for KDE
- xwayland as standalone package
- gitrepos master to main
- compress kernel firmaware
- maybe something for language updates or package updates that explain the new benefits (don't want to list all of them)
- ntp replacement

I can see if I can get a demo for the NetworkManager change to use keyfiles.

Also some intro videos about the different projects/teams might be nice.

Further update from the FOSDEM stand organizers:

I've updated the README
(https://github.com/FOSDEM/stands-website/blob/master/README.md) with
details on how to test everything locally. Long story short; this is
what you should do.

1. Download the repository.
2. Put your content directly in content/stands/your_stand and
   static/stands/your_stand. We'll use submodules to tie everything
   together, so the content should be in the root of your repository.
3. Run hugo serve to test.

I've also created (or improved the script enough to have it create) a
directory for each accepted stand, a .md file with the data for the
overview and every theme; your tests should thus look more or less like
the finished version.

• Swag give-away: want to give away swag to the first 50 non-fedorans who show up on each day. We will set up a LimeSurvey to gather this info.

I like the idea of a give-away. Focusing on only the first X people excludes so many people who might come later. Doing a raffle and/or making it a competition might make it more interesting. For example a pictionary contest might allow more people to participate.

• Thoughts on chat staffing: doesn't seem like the best use of time to staff the booth the entire time. Instead we envision doing a social hour, AMA, live Q&A, or demo at a specific time.
• Swag give-away: want to give away swag to the first 50 non-fedorans who show up on each day. We will set up a LimeSurvey to gather this info.
  

+1 for give away swag for non-fedorans*

FYI: I created an events page on the wiki for further collaboration: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FOSDEM_2021 - I will ask for people to provide Links to videos for the booth there.

@till thank you for creating the wiki page for this!
A short update: @siddharthvipul1 is helping us build Fedora's page [1] (thank you!!) and @riecatnor and I are brainstorming on what we can include there. [2] So far the page has some generic info around Fedora which will be replaced. This is not final yet but I hope we manage we prepare everything (the page, the ruffle, etc) on time :)

[1] https://stands.fosdem.org/stands/the_fedora_project/
[2] https://hackmd.io/0rEyRRneR5C1wzBfMyjQ7w?view

@siddharthvipul1 another note re: the web page from the organizers:

I realise it is quite confusing and I have updated the docs to (hopefully) to make it more clear (https://github.com/FOSDEM/stands-website#workflow).

In short:

• All your content should go directly in the root of both repositories.

• Clone the stands-website repository (https://github.com/FOSDEM/stands-website) and update all submodules (git submodule init && git submodule update). Your two repositories are already added, so anything you committed will be "active" (see https://www.git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Submodules for more details).

• Test everything with hugo serve.

• Make any changes, commit and push.

Hi folks-- here is the latest update from the FOSDEM organizers:

I've created a Welcome event for each stand on Saturday from 9.30-10.00.

This is to increase stand visibility by making sure the stands
appear in the schedule, including on mobile apps, BEFORE the
main events of the conference begin at 10.00.

e.g. https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/apache_welcome/

It should also give you a pre-configured event room you can use to give
a live introduction on video / screen share at that time if you want.

(I'll probably also mirror these events across to Sunday.)

Any of you who are also devroom managers or speakers will be able to
edit your stand event(s) directly in our pentabarf system. (Note - no
prerecorded video upload.)

You'll also start to get summary emails that are primarily aimed at
speakers but which will contain some relevant information about using
the platform.

At some time soon you'll receive an invitation from matrix to join
room(s) for your stand(s).

Link to our welcome event:
https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/fedora_welcome/
Link to overall schedule:
https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/
(is this in CEST time? I didn't see that confirmed anywhere...)

We need to do two things here:
- organize staffing of the welcome event
- update the event page with text

This happened! It went great.. see notes here for next year if we go virtual again.

https://hackmd.io/0rEyRRneR5C1wzBfMyjQ7w?view

thanks to @marianab @siddharthvipul1 @thunderbirdtr & Mindshare committee!