This is my own (unofficial) report of FUDCon APAC 2014 Day 0 (Friday).
Preparation
There were no speech sessions for FUDCon on Friday, so it was all about event preparation in the day. At around 11:00 AM, I called Justin Wong, another guy from TUNA, also a volunteer of host, to help me move event gifts in my lab downstairs, where Emily waited for us with her car. We went to the venue, New Main Building in Beihang University, on the car full with sponsored gifts, including but not limited to cafe cups, hats, DVDs, books. Dongfengweixiao also just arrived when we got there. We had a brief lunch together at PengLaoShi, a Chinese fast food restaurant.
On the way back to the venue after lunch, we ordered the bottled drinking water for the three days. In the afternoon we are busy with setting up everything. Zamir (zsun) arrived to help. First we set up the booth with the desks rent from venue as well as desks from Beihang leagues (credit Wang Yang). The shop owner of bottle water helped with moving the desks from outside to venue. We had a booth for Fedora too, which dongfengweixiao took care of, so we left some Fedora flyers (and later on many stickers, F20 Live DVDs) there. We met one guy in orange T-shirt while setting up the booth. He asked about the place for upcoming GNOME training sessions. The next day I knew it was Tobi, the host in main hall from GNOME side!
Tong Hui (tonghui) arrived later and then event roll-up posters, X posters, and vertical banners arrived. I helped to hang up the two vertical banners in the main hall with tonghui and dongfengweixiao. It took three up-and-downs to finally make them look good (symmetric and smooth). Next I helped to buy some utilities such as power strips, mark pens, glue, and “postit” sticky notes. I also fetched the express of stickers. After I came back, many sponsors were there. There were some disagreements with booth position, but they were solved later. Li Bin (libin) and many other volunteers also arrived, and the registration desks (sign-in office) was set up. They put various small gifts into conference bags. T-shirts arrived and classified. Large banner which sat on the ground arrived a bit late, but was put up quickly. Time went by without being noticed, and it was almost 7 o’clock when we headed for the FUDPub, i.e. the welcome party.
FUDPub (Welcome Party)
The FUDPub was at Sculpture in Time Cafe, a cafe bar on campus and quite near to the venue. It was scheduled to begin from 6:00 PM, and we had volunteers waiting there to help from that time. As mentioned above some volunteers and I arrived a little late, and there were few empty seats then. Some early birds already begin to drink beer when we started to order pizzas and noodles! Around 60 people from the event were there, and the cafe bar seemed to be not able to handle so many people. The service was slow and a bit chaotic, but luckily we had sunny (and later on libin) who took care of the detailed list of ordered and served food. Except the long waiting time for food, it was good. I met and said hello to Ankur, Nitesh and other guys. Max called on emily, libin and me to toast to everyone. Ankur asked to continue discussion at the hotel after the party, but I stayed till 10:00 PM at the cafe bar since tonghui had so many interesting stories to tell! While we went to the hotel, I picked up the Fedora 20 Live DVDs with GNOME Desktop, whose creation was finished late due to some issues with DVD sleeves during production.
Hotel
The conference hotel is Beihang Training Center, which is inside Beihang and near to the conference venue. There was no WiFi at hotel, only one wired interface available. Luckily tonghui set up a WiFi AP using his laptop with GNOME 3.12. He also charged his camera for next days’ activities. I replied some emails, took a shower, and then went to bed. I had planned to revise my slides, but it had to be delayed to Saturday.