Intrepid Party

As every 6 months, the Ubuntu Party has taken place in Paris, in addition to the 12 Ubuntu install parties in France.

This event, organized by ubuntu-party and the French loco team, ubuntu-fr, took place in the "Cité des sciences et de l'industrie" in Paris, during the week-end of 29 and 30 November 2008.

We received there 4000 visitors, awesome statistics given and certified by the "Cité des sciences" overtaken last year's record, when we reached almost 3000 visitors!

Entree CSI retouchee[1]

But an Ubuntu Party is not only a party where geeks come, eat food, drink beer and share great time[2]. An Ubuntu Party is made of a whole bunch of activities, for people of all levels... and of course, we share great time too :)

In a nutshell, we had:

  • 14 hours of conferences on various subjects. Some aiming our lovely distribution like "what is ubuntu?", "how to contribute to ubuntu?" and "what is the French community ubuntu-fr?". Others on more global problematics like accessibility, dealing computer science and freedom, art and free culture, open formats...

All those videos have been directly diffused over the Internet and will be soon available online.

  • 8 hours of initiation training: beginners (learn how to use ubuntu in a daily basis) and more advanced session (introduction to command line usage). Approximatly 200 attendees have been able to pratice on those two subjects.

  • Hundreds of machines where ubuntu was installed by lots of voluntary worker. More complicated cases have been handled by the parisian LUG: Parinux.

  • April non governemental organization and Mozilla European fundation were also invited and a dedicated room has been provided to them. They organized some conferences and activities which attracted and passionated its audience.

  • 10 demonstration PC, with some team members around to help guests to go through and discover ubuntu's interface.
  • We also runned a bug jam in one day where 10 persons have been able to learn how to triage bugs. Some programming and packaging courses have been also provided to people who wanted to get involved in FOSS development and contribution.

  • More than 20 hours of radio emissions thanks to oxyradio, a French webradio broadcasting only free music. They had interviewed people handling the conferences in a one hour debate, enabling those who could not go to Paris this week-end to interact with the party.

  • As the traditionnal loco-pack is not sufficient (futhermore, ubuntu-fr didn't received it this time, seems that the request has been lost..) Thankfully, ubuntu-fr has provided 3000 CDs and sold as the association has not other founds. Those are localized: that is to say the live CD embedded directly all softwares in French (OOo, Firefox...) which is not the case by default.

Ubuntu-fr sold also tee-shirts and new awesome mugs!

Press

Thanks to our press contacts, we had a full page dealing with Ubuntu in a French national newspaper called "Libération" (140 000 papers a day).

After the party, the national French press agency has published a news about the party and this has been widely diffused in all kinds of news feed.

To conclude

More photos available here, where those (except the first) have been extracted. They are all in CC:by licence. Thanks to Kagou, Mauriz, Rock_n_pol, Darksiegfried and Luc Byhet!

Great events, uncredible voluntaries, large audience of people just discovering ubuntu and free software! Some weeks to get off being tired and the road is opened for organizing the jaunty ubuntu party! Hope to see you, with more and more people on the next turn, in May 2009! Makes Tux fly!

Notes

[1] Ok, I must admit, this photo is a fake :)

[2] We organize some release parties for that!