Last month, we again got together in Rheinfelden to plan Fedora activities in the EMEA region for the next year (Fedora follows the fiscal year of Red Hat that starts in March and because it’s named after the calendar year it ends in, the next fiscal year is 2015).

This time I chose to fly instead of going by bus. And it was a much more pleasant option. I left home in Brno at 9am, joined Miro Hroncok at Prague Airport, and landed in Basel at 3pm. The attendance was much better than last year. In September, I approached most active ambassadors and asked them to sign up. It seemed to work because most of them really came. There were 17 ambassadors from 9 countries.

We started Saturday with country presentations. Ambassadors of each country prepared a presentation about activities in their location in the last year or two. Then we came to the most important agenda of the FAD: creating a list of events and activities we want to do in FY2015 and making a budget based on this. Today, I put all the numbers together and made the first draft of the EMEA budget for the fiscal year 2015. The total amount is $39,900 which is higher than last year when we asked for $32,000. But because our options were a bit limited after cuts in the current year and because it looks like we’re going to spend up all our budget, we are going to ask for more. But it’s just a draft. We will discuss drafts of regional budgets in FAmSCo before we propose final versions to FPL and OSAS.

In the evening, Gerold, our host in Rheinfelden, prepared another great social event: kart races. Sunday morning was pretty much devoted to discussion. We discussed the Fedora.NEXT proposals and what it means for ambassadors. It was definitely a heated discussion. I also proposed that we should more focus on events that are out of traditional Linux circles because that means real outreach. Most people already know us at Linux conferences. We also discussed another of my proposals: that we should more focus on schools, mainly universities because that’s the biggest source of open source contributors has always been.

The FAD ended after noon when we were leaving home, with even stronger feeling that the EMEA FAD is worth organizing and traveling. I and Miro had to cross the bridge over the Rhine from German Rheinfelden to Swiss Rheinfelden where we took a train to Zurich Airport to fly back to Prague.

Photos by Joerg Simon.