As every year, the Fedora Diversity Team decided to organize the Fedora Women’s Day event, an event that also happened in Tirana, Albania. The official day for that would be around mid September, but unfortunately being an organizer of the LibreOffice Conference too, things got a bit out of hand and the event was postponed until the 30th of October 2018.

We decided to organize this event at the “Hermann Gmeiner” technical high school in Tirana.

The event started at 11:30 AM at the auditorium of the high school. The participants were ALL girls, a whole 58 of them to be exact. They were eager to learn about the Fedora Project and how to get involved and contribute in open source.

Participants

Jona started by introducing us to the participants and where we came from, about Open Labs as the root origin from where the Albanian Fedora community was born in, about Fedora and other projects that strongly cooperate with it etc.

Jona talking about Fedora

The participants had questions and we were more than happy to answer those. Most of them hadn’t heard about Linux before or used it, so this was a good opportunity for me to start from zero and explain Linux and distros with an easy terminology, so beginners could also understand it.

After, Jona explained more about the Fedora Women’s Day and the Diversity & Inclusion Team in Fedora, some initiatives that the girls could participate in, such as Google Summer of Code, Google Code-In, Rails Girls Summer of Code, Outreachy etc.

Jona talking about initiatives

As we were approaching the end of the event (about 2 hours in total), I prepared the food (delicious muffins 🍩) and drinks 🥤 for the participants, and of course, the swag table, where the girls could take some stickers and spread the love for Fedora ❤️.

Stickers table

Muffins and drinks

Everyone got a muffin and discussed a few minutes in groups with each other 👩‍💻 about the event and we answered a few questions some students had.

Students eating

To wrap up the event, as always, we had a group photo 📸 (not everyone was there, they were shy). Funnily enough, I was the only guy in a room full of girls, haha.

Group Photo

All in all, it was a successful event and we’ll try to organize more in the upcoming future.

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