SIB 2010

This year's local expo SIB [1] and [2] has just wrapped up down here in Tunis and we're glad to announce that we, Tunisian Fedora Ambassadors, were there at the event where we had a dedicated booth (albeit for a limited time) to present Fedora, the project and the distribution.

The expo itself is an opportunity for the local companies, businesses and telecoms to expose their latest computer software/hardware offering and services. For this year's exhibition, the local emerging open source community (mostly university clubs, few businesses) negotiated with the organizers a dedicated booth that would be allocated for every group according to a time table [3].

Fedora presence has been scheduled for the 25th of November and for the occasion we decided to produce some Fedora 14 DVDs to distribute them among the attendees. Nihed brilliantly took care of the task and these were actually ready only on the last day of the expo (Saturday the 27th) just on time for the last and biggest meeting for the local open source attendees at SIB. We're going to distribute the remaining stock of the produced DVDs in the forthcoming days, during meet ups at universities and Engineering schools.

The booth was managed by me, Nihed and Zied during our time slot. We had mostly students from the Engineering schools asking a lot of questions about open source, Linux, Fedora, the 4 Fs, the difference vs. the other distributions. We used [4] as a basis for our presentation and [5] as a custom poster for the event. Eventually, Nihed managed to get interviewed by the local radios [6, 7] which are thriving for interesting and exciting content, where he mainly spoke about open source as a viable alternative for user.

It was an amazing opportunity to meet people, talk about a common passion, think about how we could improve things and do better.

One of the coolest highlights was Tech. and Engineering school staffers and students asking us to organize practical days and workshops on site, that's in their own schools, to talk about Fedora, Linux and open source in general. We already asked to provide us the major themes/concepts they’re interested in and started brainstorming and drafting a program/course. Indeed, this would bring a lot to the student as far as awareness, competence, visibility and communication are concerned.

-Ilyes Gouta

1. http://www.sogefoires.com/index.php/salon-sib.html
2. http://www.tekiano.com/tek/tek-news/3-4-2919/tunisie-le-sib-it-2010-comme-si-vous-etiez.html
3. http://www.tekiano.com/tek/soft/3-10-2910/tunisie-le-logiciel-libre-a-l-honneur-au-sib.htm
4. http://fedoraproject.org/w/uploads/a/af/FOSSMeet09.odp
5. http://ilyes.fedorapeople.org/Fedora%20Poster%20Final_2000x1000.png
6. http://www.mosaiquefm.net/index/a/Actif/Cat/57
7. http://www.radioexpressfm.com