When we organized the first Fedora release party in the Czech Republic to celebrate Fedora 15 we didn’t know what to expect. Are there going to any people willing to come? Can we make a program that is interesting for them? The party turned out to be much more successful than we’d expected. About 100 people showed up and they seemed to like what we’d prepared for them.

That’s why our expectations were higher this time. But like the last time the result was even better. The party took place in our office on Wednesday Nov 23rd. When I checked a registration list Wednesday morning I was a bit worried because the number of registered attendants was high, about 130. That’s a crowd our lecture rooms can barely accommodate. Fortunately, it all went well. The room was packed, but everyone seemed to be having a good time eating, drinking and chatting, checking new F16 media out etc. Like the last time, we prepared several talks on news in Fedora that were given by people that had worked on them:

• GNOME 3.2 – me
• KDE 4.7 – Jaroslav “Rezza” Řezník
• How to participate in Fedora testing – Josef Skládanka (Fedora QA)
•  Aeolus – Tomáš Hrčka
• systemd – Michal Schmidt

During the whole evening, people could test their knowledge of Fedora by taking our SelfTest quiz (my big thanks go to Honza and Ivana Hutařovi that have again prepared a great set of questions). People with the best scores got some presents – hats, caps, mugs, flash drives, tags,… Those who weren’t so successful could at least grab a Fedora 16 DVD, stickers, or pins. A group of 15-20 people continued celebrating even after the official program when we moved to a pub. There was one more reason to celebrate: Jarda Řezník had a birthday. Originally, I wanted to have the party on Nov 22nd, but when I found out that Jarda was going to have a birthday on Nov 23rd I had to postpone it 🙂

I hope everyone enjoyed the party. From my point of view, it was another pleasant event where Fedora developers and users could meet one another. I’m really glad we’ve managed to restart the Czech Fedora community. When we organized the Fedora 15 release party we weren’t even sure if there were enough people interested in attending and 100 of them showed up in the end, so the user base was there, we just needed to build a community which I hope is going pretty well so far. Now, we’re facing a problem that our office can barely accommodate such big crowds. Well, there is a football stadium for 12,000 people down the street… 😉