CentOS Dojos: An Overview and Invite to Orlando

As I help plan for an upcoming CentOS Dojo in Orlando, FL at Fossetcon on Thursday, September 11th. I've had a chance to think over all the aspects of this unique event.

What makes a CentOS Dojo interesting is part of what makes it unique. Events by a Linux distro community are usually about the distro itself, and Dojos focus mainly on cool things done on top of or with the core or modified distro. Most Dojo talks focus on these areas of emerging technologies beyond just the Linux system itself, all in the domain of systems administration, operations, and best practises.

Another goal of the Dojos is to get the attendees to network amongst themselves. We give time at the start of the day to go around the room, introduce each person, and hear about their interest and usage of CentOS Linux. Lunch is usually extra-long to give more time for discussions amongst attendees and the speakers. In the end, the goal of a Dojo is only partially education, it's equally (or more so) about growing local communities of CentOS Linux users. It's a great way to find out who else in your area is interested, a user, and doing cool (or even boring but useful) things. A feature we added this year first at [FOSDEM](http://www.fosdem.org/2014) is a hackfest. In this format, the first part of the day are a series of talks, and after lunch everyone is invited to participate in a hackfest on one or several topics. In Orlando on September 11th as part of the Fossetcon event [there will be a CentOS Dojo](http://wiki.centos.org/Events/Dojo/Orlando2014) following the talks and hackfest format. In the morning we'll hear about why automation is important ([Garrett Honeycutt](http://twitter.com/learnpuppet)), about Active Directory integration (Dmitri Pal/FreeIPA), and have a tutorial on the oVirt all-in-one installer ([Greg Sheremeta](http://twitter.com/gregsheremeta)). In the afternoon will be a hackfest focused on Docker, Xen, and oVirt around the CentOS Project. In between will be a long sponsored lunch for talking with everyone. As our goal always includes collaborating with upstream projects that use CentOS Linux as their platform for community adoption, we're going to work with the other classes happening on the Fossetcon first day that are coincident with the hackfest material. If you planned to see Tim Mackey for the ["XenServer Master Class Live"](http://fossetcon.org/2014/session/xenserver-master-class-live) or Lance Hudson for ["Docker and why you should be using it"](http://fossetcon.org/2014/session/docker-and-why-you-should-be-using-it), we'll be making our hands-on experience as complementary as possible.