[Mageia-marketing] WebWorkersCamp presentation post-summary

Mon Apr 18 16:05:46 CEST 2011

Hi there,
+
+just a quick note for information, in case it can be reused somehow.
+
+Anne, Damien, Nicolas, Arnaud and me went to WebWorkersCamp in Paris
+past Friday/Saturday, and I did a presentation about Mageia, in this
+context (BarCamp, centered around new/edgy Web technologies).
+
+Most of the audience was made of Web professionals and developers -
+that did not hear about Mageia before (but were aware of the Linux
+ecosystem in general).
+
+Briefly (because the slides were in French and did not hold all of the
+speech), that was done in three parts:
+
+ 1. what is Mageia? and what happened since past September
+    - project/distribution/association
+    - #1 goal was to give control of the project to the community/governance
+    - history of 7 past months
+    - coming months (final release, brainstorming)
+
+ 2. why should you be interest in it? (as a Web dev)
+    - focus in the project to help developers and contributors (tools,
+resources, mentoring)
+    - technology stacks available and their integration status (perl,
+ruby, python, php, others) - packaging of package managers (cpan, gem,
+rvm, npm, pear/pecl, etc).
+    - small project, lots of things to do, room to invest yourself and
+have an impact
+    - straightforward governance model
+    - friendly community, humane project
+
+ 3. (asking the audience) questions? what is missing for you in
+existing OS stacks? what could be done? (Q/A part of the speech
+actually); so questions were (from memory):
+    q. why yet another distribution? what will be success like for
+you? what difference? when?
+        => explained the first need to move the project into different
+hands/governance - and that fragmentation is not a bad thing, or
+something to fear, as long as one differentiate enough from others, to
+explore different paths - paths to actually be defined _after_ Mageia
+1, during the brainstorming session - so this answer was far from
+convincing, of course.
+
+    q. how many downloads/users have you already? and compared to Mandriva?
+        => very difficult figure to get in general; however, last
+year, MDV could count about 3M users, all versions included; for
+Mageia, we can't count users yet, our finale is not yet released - but
+we've experienced about 60k downloads for alpha2/beta1 and we expect
+to aim for 1M downloads for Mageia 1 over the year.
+
+    q. speaking of packaging package managers, what is it about actually?
+        => tricky topic to discuss like that actually - took the
+example of properly packaged (or not) typical PHP Web app (with Pear
+library dependencies) or gems packaging - mostly only explained the
+problem, depending on one's view (being a developer or being a
+packager/sysadmin) and the need to find something satisfying for
+everyone. Hinted about devops current movement, but with no practical,
+generic solution yet.
+
+That was it. Apart from my preparation and speaking-skills to improve,
+people seemed interested by the presentation (at least, those that
+gave some feedback).
+
+Here you are.
+
+Cheers,
+
+Romain
+