The Fedora Project has partnered with Arizona State University on its annual Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon). FUDCon gathers together Fedora contributors for technical sessions, code sprint sessions, hackfests and workshops focused on Fedora features, projects and community building. This year’s North America FUDCon will be held at Arizona State University in Tempe, Jan. 29-31, 2011.

"Arizona State is committed to providing its students with opportunities to explore, participate and contribute to open source software and communities," said Ronald Askin, Director, School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, "We are pleased to support the Fedora Project and host FUDCon on campus, and look forward to many ASU students attending."

Open source has been integrated in ASU’s Computer Science and Engineering curriculum and research programs. An example is what Nicholas Radtke, an ASU Ph.D. candidate and occasional open source contributor, is doing. His research, supervised by Dr. James Collofello, is to use agent-based modeling in concert with data from open source repositories like SourceForge to gain a better understanding of the open source development process. "Much of what is done in open source development is contrary to what is considered best practice in traditional software engineering," states Radtke, "yet much of the software included in the Fedora distribution – most notably Linux – is very high quality and successful." This is the exception, notes Radtke, as most open source projects are abandoned before producing useful software. "One of our goals through modeling is to better understand the factors that cause some open source projects to be successful, possibly even predict from an early stage which projects will thrive."

FUDCon will include many sessions on topics ranging from SELinux and Fedora Spins to BoxGrinder, the Fedora Security Lab and how the Fedora Ambassador program has evolved over the years. This year’s event will also include a robust Legal track with sessions devoted to what Red Hat does to protect and enforce the Fedora trademark, special legal issues faced by many open source projects and how Red Hat’s legal team makes decisions affecting Fedora, including the company’s obligations to Fedora. A full schedule of sessions and events for FUDCon is available at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Tempe_2011.

"The goal of FUDCon is to bring together several groups to share knowledge and plan for the next generation of open source technologies," said Jared Smith, Fedora Project Leader. "It is very fitting to hold the event at Arizona State University, a premier higher education institution where new ideas and concepts are encouraged and innovation comes to life."

The Fedora Project holds FUDCons at various locations around the globe. Its 2010 FUDCon schedule included locations such as Santiago, Chile and Zurich Switzerland. As with all Fedora events, FUDCon is free to attend. To register for FUDCon, please visit https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Tempe_2011#Pre-registration.

Hope to see you in sunny Arizona this weekend!