================================================================= Ambassador's report on FOSS Conference in Ukraine ================================================================= I'd like to share my experience on organizing Free and Open Source Software Conference in Ukraine that took place at my University on 15th and 16th of December 2010. The purpose of the conference is to popularize free and open source software among students and attract their attention to the problems of IT. It's the second time we run this conference, and I must say we got some improvement since the last year. Not only, had we 47 papers published in our booklet, 75 presentations (see the plan of the conference http://fossua.org/plan-konferencii-foss-2010/), 84 speakers and somewhat less then 200 visitors during these 2 days, but also the quality of the whole event was on much higher level than the one we had last year. Though, it took us almost a year to prepare for the event, help students to make their presentations and read prove their papers, but it was worth it. Still I must confess that the last few months just before the conference were pretty tough on me and working on 2 jobs i'd spend nights reading the papers of the students and making the final preparations. Video conference with openSuse representatives Andreas Jaeger and Jos Poortvliet made the even more vivid and interesting for our participant who were coming from different parts of Ukraine and Russia. The youngest speaker was 14 !!! years old and came from the South part of Ukraine - Herson city. Booklets with FOSS Conference papers, calendars, magnets (for fridge), and DVDs with the openSuse distribution sponsored by Novell made awesome presents for our participants who love IT. High interest from the students to the problems of FOSS made it possible to prepare great presentations, make posters, magnets (mentioned earlier), and help us to run this event. We've made a new site for the conference http://fossua.org and if you're interested to see the pictures from the conference, please take a look at http://fossua.org/foss-2010-photo/ Please also see the videos with some of the presentations from the conference ( 50 separate video files) http://fossua.org/video/ You can find us on Twitter http://twitter.com/foss_ukraine or join our club in a social network http://vkontakte.ru/club20844095 I'd like to thank Novell and Jos Poortvliet and Andreas Jaeger in particular for their sponsorship, help and support and we hope to have you as our guests on the next event we're going to have on 15th and 16th of December 2011 :) If you have any questions concerning FOSS Conference or would like to make any suggestions or participate next time, please let me know. (You can find me on LinkedIn.com as Kostyantyn Ovechko) Best regards, Kostyantyn Ovechko