I set a pretty hard goal for myself this year – to organize three Fedora 17 release parties in three different cities. The last release party in Brno was really crowded, close to limits of our office rooms. So I decided to try other cities, too. Prague was an obvious option because it’s far the biggest city in the Czech Republic with a big Linux community. So it was already two. And then guys from Košice asked me to do one there. Košice is quite far away from Brno, but we had such a great experience there in March that I said “yes”.

All three release parties had different programs, different talks, and different speakers. I was the only one who attended all three and the traveling was exhausting. We traveled by trains carrying all things we needed for the parties. However, it absolutely paid off. We saw a lot of new faces that looked enthusiastic about Fedora (mainly in Košice), we also saw a lot of “old” faces that came to the party to meet each other (mainly in Prague). And I also saw that those events matter. When we were in Košice in March there were almost no users of Fedora in the audience, it was just a typical forest of hands when I asked who was using Ubuntu. This time, the number of Fedora users was much higher and many of them have become Fedora users after our first event in Košice.

So… another round of three release parties for Fedora 18? Maybe, a bunch of Fedora enthusiasts here in Red Hat Brno office is crazy enough to go even higher 🙂

 Hot dogs with many flavours. That was Fedora 17 release party in Brno.