Happy New Year, this is how it should be more post to start this year.

 

First of all, sorry my last post was about Flisol 2015 in Panamá, while many things had happen since then, many words and thoughts  never become a post. Therefore here we go.

Flisol was nice event, thanks to Universidad del Itsmo to host the event, but was the first one I missed on the last five years, was travelling,  visit Ecuador on Family matters, while there manage to talk with some Fedora people there, it was not face to face as  wanted but at lease can confirm we have some users and community members. In a way they do not participate to much out side Ecuador and while we try to change that it seems it will not happen. Some how we need to work on a way to reach them and start working with them to grow the community there.

With that in mind there are other countries in Latam which has some community members but nothing is done in them out side a talk Flisol and not sure if they talk about Fedora. Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica and Guatemala for instance are countries where Fedora latam has Ambassadors but cero activity other than Flisol. Which remain me there is a lot of work to do on our region but resources are basically used to support local activity on countries that have activity. Since cross border travel is expensive that is a limitation for us to visit and start developing a community there.

Latam community has grow in general with more Ambassadors and with a bit more enrolment in other parts of the project, how ever there is to much to do, to find more people that will enjoy been part of Fedora on others areas than Ambassadors.

Let go back to Panama, our group has grow in members some of them still in our training face and hope will join other groups within Fedora soon, we have five local students learning Python and other skills to join infrastructure and other groups it is a slow process but Potty is the may lead on this project.

But that was not all, we had been working with people from San Miguelito Town Hall,  small district embed in Panama City, they wanted to implement free software on this poor town, which then had less that 20 pc to manage all their task. So we help their IT department by training them on Linux as workstation and servers, plus  Libre Office training which was done by Monica Mora from Floss-pa. While it was on really complicated conditions it paid of San Miguelito runs over 100 pc with Fedora and free software. The real hero there is the IT team, that sacrifice after ours to be train by me on Linux while they were trained on Fedora and Linux Mint as they were not make their mind about what distro to use, at the end they choose Fedora. So make me happy.

San Miguelto, IT team deserve my congratulations as that was not easy task to do, teach people how to use a Linux (some workers there never used a pc before others only new Windows) , they have face many challenges on this implementation but they had manage it with really little  trouble. While there are many things to do there there time and mine is been complicated to help them more, but if they keep that way they will do great work.

San Miguelito require more free software as some government software only runs on Windows, but they manage to have the minimal amount possible of Windows PC, saving money from licenses. While this is the first case of massive use of free software in Panama, it is in the right direction.

Floss-pa with Kiara Navarro, team up with Panama City Hall to train kits on Robotics they did 3 courses of 4 Saturdays each on municipal libraries to 8 to 14 years olds kits, they enjoy learning and working with arduino and Fedora to code them. This was posible thanks to Monica Mora and Alexis Heiva from Floss-pa.



Other eventos as Software Freedom Day hosted by Universidad Interamericana de Panama were organize by the new members of Panama team, tutor by experience ones.

Fedora 22 Release Party was hoste by Universidad Tecnologica de Panama organized by Luis Manuel Segundo




At the end of this year Gonzalo Nina from Fedora Bolivia, spend some time in Panama working, but as a good Fedorian we ask him if he could talk about his expertice Security and Fedora Security Spin on two universities, and he was happy to do so. Thanks Gonzalo.


Last night we meet and enjoy our last Floss-pa and Fedora meeting of the year.

Last thing to say is it was great year many work done too much still to do, many thanks to all Fedora Panama team. Floss-pa members.

 

April, is Flisol (Free Software Installation Festival in Latin America) and normally it is held on April 3rth Saturday  we planned and held it on April 11 on David Chiriqui the main reason we don't live in David and is about 7 hours drive to get there for us.

Prof. Ender Gonzalez from Universidad del Istmo helps us organize the evento on its Univiersity in David. We took a bus at mid night and arrive there early in the morning everything was ready for us.

Event started at 9 with a full house we started talks about free software, Fedora, Firefox OS, Mozilla, Docker and many other topics, we talk with students and teachers who were really into learning about Fedora and Free Software.

It was our first visit to David and its people make a big impression we added more Fedora members and help install some machines plus give away stikers and Fedora ISO. We hope to have some of those new Fedora members start collaborating on translation and other areas within Fedora.


Thanks to U. del Istmo.

 

It is the first time Panama celebrates the Open Data Day, this time organize by the recently new Panama Mozilla Community, as part of the foss local community, Fedora Panama and Floss-pa was invited to this event.




Local members share talks about big data, open data, open hardware, it was an interesting experience with many people from the out side tech world. It was fun day.

Many thanks to Mozillians Omar Vasquez Lima and Lia Hernandez from IPANDETEC who organize it and to Centro Cultural de España who provide the venue.

 

After a long wait Fedora 21 Release is a few days away, since alpha has been testing Fedora 21 on virtual machines, with no  real issue how ever do to my work load had not time time to upgrade my main notebook.


Today run fedup and upgrade run flawless, simple upgrade instrucion:


sudo fedup --network 21 --product=workstation

Notice the additional parameter added to fedup for Fedora 21, values are workstation (Gnome desktop), server, Cloud and nonproduct which let fedup work as in its previous version.   

After downloading 3248 packages a warning about some external repository packages dependencies nothing critical, reboot and about 30 minutes waith, until upgrade process finish at the end it greet me with this beefy miracle asci image.




Next reboot and I was running Fedora 21 Workstation. It works fine. Thanks to all the effort and congrats to all involve into this release, it is looking really great.

 

 Mozilla community was there and Luis Manuel from Panama show how to develop small app for Firefox OS.

 Hacking nights thanks to the people at Mansion Teodolinda Hotel

 

On April Latam celebrate FLISOL as many cities across latam.  Event host was at Universidad tecnologica de Panama.


Event had talks, workshops, installations exibiths prepare for the students about free software.


Fedora community prepare two booth places one with Fedora were we show Fedora and did some instalations, we talk with many people and studens about Fedora.


Luis Bazan, did a talk about his live in Fedora, where he cover all his activities within Fedora community, while my talk was about communities on general, Abdel Martinez did a Pyhton workshop. Kiara Navarro share her experiences with FEL with the free hardware show case. Karina Sanchez help out at the booth. Johel Batista was streaming the event.


It was a great event manage to talk to many people interested on Fedora. 

Many thanks to our sponsors

 

Around five years ago, joined Fedora community with the goal to learn more technical stuff, expand my knowledge of Linux and Fedora, so read wiki page and started to get involve into Fedora world. Started by trying to join Infra group but got not attention, there looking around on how to help Fedora a few months later, found and join the Ambassadors group, mentor by Tatica and with Jsimon's help.

Did not have any clue about local community, what to do or how to start, but by coincidence Richard Stalman visited Panama and went to his talk there I meet some local free software people and a few Linux users.

Learning about local groups with my friend Ricardo Chung from Open Suse we join the local community and history start, meet a great Panamanian Free Software advocate like David Narvaez and Diejo Tejera and many others, meeting people at local universities and doing something I'm not good at doing talks about Fedora and Free Software, on that road meet people like Abdel Martinez and others who started the Fedora Panama community, also meeting Latam people and others reading inode0 on IRC and how he lead NA community, I learn that Fedora was beyond the tech stuff and was more about the people, the great people that has only one border the limit of you internet connection, people that jump to help you that is open to teach you,  and make Friends one of the core values of Fedora.

Over the years, we have the opportunity to bring to Panama Fudcon 2011 and with it we learn more about the community the time I spend working with Toshio and Dennis during that brift period show me and others all many things we can learn and can do on the community, talking to Jared face to face show me how we have to be as community members, those moments will always be on my heart, looking at Luis Bazan pushing Itamar show he teach him how to build a package, Gomix experience Fudcon Panama was an event that transient into the live of many local people.

Local community grow and join the Fedora Friends.  While we keep working with other communities and expand our reach to Latam and later became part of FAmSCo serve there for one an half terms, but had a great right.
Leading latam community has been a great opportunity to learn more about people and about my self.

We have enjoy meeting latam and part of the friends we meet at Fudcon Panama, at Fudcon Valencia and Fudcon Cusco, having the opportunity to share with more people what Fedora has teach me and that I have teach others.

I can believe it has been five years now, time flies when you are having Fun the lose "F" missed on Fedora core values. 

This is a some how a resume about this five years there are many things I can say about them, hope you  want me around Fedora for many more years.


I have meet many people, have make many new friends, thanks to all of you who support me and Fedora Panama over this five years, it has been fun.

 

People from Fedora local team meet at CoworkingPty to celebrate the Fedora 20 Release Party, we meet with old friends and new people interested on Fedora.

After a short introduction about Fedora community,  Abdel Martinez presented the new features of Fedora 20 later we talk about Docker.io and play around with it to show its uses.

We enjoy Pizza and cake. Many thanks to Pedro Colmenares and the coworkingpty for hosting the event, and Kiara Navarro for organizing.

 

Thanks to Christoph Wickert. New Fedora pins looks awesome, we got latam batch. Now will repackage and send to other ambassadors around latam.
I have post address for most of latam countries, but now I need Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay.







Gracias Christoph Wickert. Los pins de Fedora que llegaron hoy,  se ven muy bien. Ahora me toca repartir a los países de Latam, tengo direcciones de envió de colaboradores en la mayoría de los países de latam, sin embargo requiero de Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay y Paraguay. Favor algún embajador de esos paises dispuesto a reenviar a sus compañeros me envié su dirección por email.