Community Central Demos Upstream Awesome at Summit 2015

Coming out of the Red Hat Summit is a little like coming out of a euphoric whiteout of moments where you know good things happened, but you aren't exactly sure what.

The build up alone to an event like Summit takes weeks of preparation, and for the Open Source and Standards team, it marks just the start of a summer-long season of trade shows and community events where we can show off our respective projects.

For OSAS, all of the action happened this year in Community Central, a large venue within the Hynes Convention Center where many of the headliner projects Red Hat works with were located.

Leading the communities of interest this year were most certainly Project Atomic and CentOS, with booths that had a lot of foot traffic. Containers were a hot topic at Summit this year, and it showed for sure with a mobbed Atomic stand. The CentOS booth was also a hub of activity, as the enterprise platform's community of users took the opportunity to get some face time with the key members of the CentOS team.

This isn't to say other booths were ghost towns. RDO, oVirt, and ManageIQ also received a lot of visitors--some seeking out information and help about these management platforms, and others just looking to learn something about these projects which were new to them. Storage users weren't going to be disappointed, either, and every time I walked by, the Gluster and Ceph booths certainly looked busy.

Another popular area in Community Central was the Fedora booth, where that vibrant community had a chance to learn about the upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as well as see 3-D printing in action using Fedora and pick up some choice swag.

Fedora is actually not a project that falls directly within the OSAS umbrella, though we certainly work closely with them. It was one of many projects within Community Central that were representative of Open Source projects Red Hat works with outside of OSAS. Others included OpenShift, Foreman, and JBoss. The JBoss and RHEL Developer Programs were also represented on the floor.

One project that I was personally excited to have join us this year at Community Central was the PatternFly project, which is delivering on the promise of a unified look-and-feel to all of the OSAS projects and beyond. It was also cool to have the new OPNFV and OpenDaylight projects in the room, spreading the word about network functions virtualization and software-defined networking, respectively.

Community Central also hosted a special-guest organization, USENIX, a non-profit that hosts some of the most technically forward-thinking conferences in the world.

In the center of it all was our version of community theater. No chintzy versions of "A Chorus Line" here--this theater was actually host to experts from the various projects listed above sharing with audiences what was going on with their projects and how they were integrating with other projects in the room and throughout the open source community. Of course, we couldn't help but let some of our weird humor slip through.

Overall, the event was a success for the OSAS team, since visitors were asking great questions and seemed to come away from the Community Central room with an even greater understanding of some of the upstream work Red Hat does. Which is all we could have hoped for.

(Images courtesy of Deborah Bryant and Jennifer Madriaga)