From Friday, January 11 through Sunday, January 13, the Fedora Project will be holding its annual FUDCon event at Red Hat‘s Raleigh, NC headquarters.

FUDCon is the “Fedora Users and Developers Conference” - a time when members of the Fedora community who usually only communicate via email or IRC have a chance to meet in person. FUDCon includes two full days of hackfests, in which specific technical problems are worked on in small group code sprints, as well as one day of talks, sessions and presentations that are of interest to a variety of users and developers.

The second meaning of FUDCon is to stand opposed to the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt that opponents of free software often try to promulgate.

The first FUDCon was held in February 2005 in Boston, MA. In the three years since, FUDCon has been held globally, with events in India, England, Germany, Brussels and the United States. The January 2008 Raleigh FUDCon will be the 4th event of this kind held in the United States.

There are currently over 100 attendees signed up for this year’s FUDCon, with sessions ranging from highly technical programming projects to open source marketing strategy and legal issues. There will be demonstrations of Fedora on a USB key, tutorials on how to become a Fedora packaging expert, sessions on documentation, customization of Fedora, OLPC, Fedora in classrooms and much more.

For information, please see here and here.