[dot] Report from Open Mind 2008

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1211972253/

From: Giovanni Venturi <giovanni at kde-it.org>
Dept: ciao
Date: Wednesday28/May/2008, @03:57

Report from Open Mind 2008
==========================

   Earlier this month KDE Italia [http://www.kde-it.org/] attended Open
Mind 2008 [http://openmind05.it/]. A Free Software event organised by
Roberto Dentice in San Giorgio near Naples.  There were KDE talks and
KDE demonstrations.  Read on for the report.

Giovanni's [http://www.kde-it.org/e107_images/articles/openmind/kde.jpg]
KDE presentation in the library
     At the three day event, a lot of school children with their
teachers were involved to participate in the educational labs, for the
talks and the workshops. We tried to show them why it is a good reason
to replace Microsoft Windows on their computers to host GNU/Linux Free
Software on their disks, they can learn more and be really free using
KDE.

Daniele [http://www.kde-it.org/e107_images/articles/openmind/amarok.jpg]
showing how Amarok rocks
     We had about 1500 attendees. Me and Daniele Costarella, as KDE
Italia, demonstrated KDE and its applications to the school children.
Especially the ones that let you move to GNU/Linux very simply, without
regret for Windows. I made a general presentation of KDE and then during
the 3 days we had our KDE workshops on K3b, Amarok, Digikam, Konqueror,
Dolphin, Kopete and KOffice. Daniele explained about KDE very well and
very precisely which let me discover some nice Digikam and Amarok
features I did not know. To get the students full attention I had to use
some tricks with Konqueror. When I wrote "bluetooth:/" in the Konqueror
address bar, we saw that all the audience were more involved when more
than 30 icons appeared in the virtual Bluetooth folder.  They were
interested when I said, "now we can connect to this phone and spy in
it...". Of course, I spied in my Bluetooth phone showing them a Konqui
photo.

Qt [http://www.kde-it.org/e107_images/articles/openmind/qt4.jpg] 4 in
action on Giovanni's Laptop
     The Open Mind organiser told us that at the end of the event people
were very crazy about what we had shown and a lot of people wanted a
GNU/Linux distribution with KDE. A boy asked me about the KDE
distribution :) so I explained him that KDE is a Desktop Environment not
a distribution itself. We burned some Kubuntu 8.04 CDs and told people
that they can also download it from the Internet in legal way, copy it
and redistribute it in the same legal way we did.

Our [http://www.kde-it.org/e107_images/articles/openmind/kde-italia.jpg]
KDE Italia booth
     Someone asked me and Daniele about "programming Linux" and "where
is the source code?" so, at out booth, we showed KDE and explained them
about KDE and Qt programming. They had a lot of questions, often very
specific questions, so I understood that they were really interested and
then I showed KDevelop in action. I created on the fly the classic Qt 4
simple text editor application and the very few line of code to have a
browser with Qt 4.4 WebKit. I showed them the rich Qt documentation. I
spoke all day but at the end everyone was satisfied, so I hope to see
some new young Italian developer in the KDE team in the near future.

     We also socialised with the other speakers, had beers and pizza. 
See you on the next Free Software event,
 Giovanni Venturi