[Mageia-marketing] WebWorkersCamp presentation post-summary

[Romain d'Alverny]

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