Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to follow it all. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for August 5th, 2014:

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Late? Flock re-registration is not required

This week, is Flock our annual conference for Fedora contributors. We alternate between Europe and North America, and this year, we’re in Prague in the Czech Republic.

While we asked for pre-registration, that registration is not necessary to attend. You won’t get a t-shirt, lunches, or a conference badge, but you’re still welcome to attend. Just show up at the Czech Technical University in Prague tomorrow, August 6th, or any day through Saturday.

Don’t take a taxi — take the bus

If you’re coming from the airport in Prague, we recommended you take the bus] — see transportation details on the Flock page. It’s simple and costs just 32 CZK — about $1.50 US.

Flock keynotes: free and open software, from governments to laptops

We have two exciting keynote talks at Flock. The first will be from Gijs Hillenius of European Commission’s Open Source Observatory & Repository, giving an overview of FOSS in public administrations in Europe. The second is from Sean “xobs” Cross, on the Novena laptop project — an entirely open hardware system built around a quad-core ARM processor (and available for preorder from Crowdsupply).

A sampling of sessions

Many sessions at Flock focus on practical, technical aspects, like Josh Boyer’s State of the Fedora Kernel or Aditya Patawari’s Orchestration with Ansible at Fedora Project. Others focus on important social and community issues, like Jiří Eischmann’s Fedora Ambassadors: State of the Union, Marina Zhurakhinskaya’s Outreach Program for Women, or Sarup Banskota’s The curious case of Fedora Freshmen (aka Issue #101).

Flock is also about planning for the our future, and there are two of these in particular I’d like to highlight.

First, on Thursday, Stephen Gallagher is running Fedora.next.next: Planning for Fedora 22. Fedora 21 is now approaching alpha, but Rawhide, our development branch, is already the first inklings of Fedora 22. We already have some approved features targetted for that release next year (for example, the DNF command-line package manager), and many of the ideas we’re starting with F21’s Fedora Cloud, Fedora Server, and Fedora Workstation will really come into realization in F22. Come and help us decide what we’ll aim to accomplish.

Second, on Saturday, Toshio Kuratomi and Haïkel Guémar are moderating a discussion on the future of Fedora governance. This will be much more broad than just the Fedora.next product working groups, and will probably focus on a proposal to restructure the Fedora Project Board to be a representative council with membership drawn from various Fedora subprojects. Of course we won’t make any decisions at a conference which not everyone can attend, but we do hope to come out of this with a solid plan — so, again, come join us if you’d like to help.

Can’t be in Prague? There will be video!

Live video will be available from at least the bigger session rooms at Flock, and available online after the conference as well. Take a look at the Flock Conference 2014 Prague YouTube Channel, starting at (approximately) 06:45 UTC Wednesday morning. (That’s 8:45 here in Prague.) Note the last-minute channel change!

Bonus call for help!

If you will be here, we could use help writing up summaries of the talks for Fedora Magazine. Just a few paragraphs on any talk that you find interesting would be great — you can contact Chris Roberts or Ryan Lerch for access. (Ryan’s at home in the U.S., but Chris will be at the conference, and in fact has a session about Fedora Magazine on Wednesday morning, so if you come to that we can hook you up.)