For the first time I’ve managed to arranged a FAD in Bangladesh. It held within BASIS SoftExpo, almost all Fedora Ambassador from Bangladesh met for the first time in a place.
The first day expo had less visitors, it might happened due the extra security for the Finance minister who inaugurated the expo. Almost all visitor of that day were other booths/stalls attendees. Our Fedora DVD (locally produced) was very catchy and everybody was asking price of the medium and were excited to get one free. We distributed only DVD and kept the T-Shirts for the other crowded day. Earlier this month we received a OLPC XO laptop from George Hunt, which we kept in our booth for display, it fetched lot of kids to our booth.
The second day plenty of Linux users flocked in front of our booth, informed via newspaper about our Fedora Both. They were telling about there problems and troubles, few brought their laptops and told they couldn’t manage to connect mobile broadband, we tried to make them happy. In this day we distributed DVD and Fedora Stickers along with our Fedora handbills. We setup a PC to burn DVD for those who brought blank media.
3rd day was public holiday. The expo had the record number of visitors in it’s history and we were exhausted. Fedora Ambassador Rejaul Islam joined me and shared half of the pain :) He proved to be very good at preaching, and later I found he is a man of Marketing. This day we finished almost half of our DVD and other swags. We were happy to introduce Fedora to lot’s of school boys, Rejaul informed them about the Fedora Scholarship and inspired to apply.
4th Day was public holiday too, but schools were open. Crowd was limited but everyone was stopping by our booth to get a free DVD, the word must have spread via various Bangladeshi mailing lists. we had adopt prize-for-the-quiz before giving a free DVD. We just inquired if they use any Linux distro or if they have heard about Fedora, even asked what are the 4 Fs and so on. But, the most important part of this day was the first ever real FAD for Bangladesh. We had already announced that long ago through mailing lists, and FB event page was there. Almost all Fedora Ambassador of Bangladesh showed up along with Fedora Users. Imtiaz Rahi told us about fedoraproject and it’s various sub projects and inspired us to join other sub projects as well. I told them about l10n subproject and found that everyone wanted to do some localization. We met Rana Khan, who planned a Fedora 12 Release party at his University, he was asked to make an entry in the event page. I decided to give 50 DVD for his party, all other ambassador agreed to attend his event. We agreed to arrange series of events through out 2010 and thought. Imtiaz Rahi also requested to step ahead for the Free Media project and asked to mail him if anyone is interested. Mizan agreed to that from his city Chittagong. At the end we distributed DVD, T-Shirts, Stickers, clicked group photos and had food. Click here for the photo stream.
5th and last day was a less happening cause it is the starting day of the week in our country, though we finished all our DVD (except 50 for the release party). A group from workshop named WALCOM(!) held in an university came to our booth and discussed technical things.
Later I became ill, standing throughout the 5 days of the expo and hence reporting lately. But I was excited to meet all the Ambassador of my country for the first time, this is the time I had the one of the F (friends); I want to do this again and again.
Captain Planet 