[kde-community] KDE at FOSDEM 2015 report

[Jonathan Riddell]

KDE had a successful FOSDEM in 2015 with a staff, devroom talks and a party.

I brought a monitor and david's wee computer which worked great as a demo setup, needs the monitor box kept with the padding.  Plasma 5 was the main topic of conversation and lots of people had good comments as users and users wanting to come and come back to us.  We also had a mobile phone to show off kde connect and gcompris plus a second laptop.

The name badges and poster didn't arrive because Rick got called away but we made do with white stickers which were acceptable; and using the kde table cloth as a backdrop which worked great.

ovidiou got some t-shirts printed in romania at €5 each.
approx record of t-shirts sold: 
 S 7, 
 M 19
 L 15
 XL 7
 2XL 0
 9 others of different designs 

There were requests for womans fit t-shirts as well as children's t-shirts, which would be nice to have but economies of scale may not work.

The t-shirt designs were both white and it was commented that other colours would have been better as white t-shirts tend to be worn under other stuff.

We sold 4 knitted konqis and got lots of comments and twitter posts from these.

We sold 14 USB keys with the K logo on them, these were popular (and would have been even cooler with a distro pre-loaded).

We (KDE GB) spent £514.65 on t-shirts, collected last year's t-shirts and usb drives and knitted konqis, took in a few donations and and ended up with €1417.60 (+ €85 we found from last year).  I've given the money to Aleix to send to KDE e.V.

We had leaflets for KF5 which were quite popular (people like to pick up something for free, hard to know if they then read it).

We had a party on the Sautrday night in Le Paon in Grand Place which worked really well, we had most of the place for ourselves.  I spent €400 on food for the kubuntu party and we spend €530 on refreshments of which I managed to collect €450 from people.

Pau wasn't able to make it due to a newborn baby so I had to chair the devroom for a few hours on the Sunday with some helpers from Gnome and elsewhere.  The Gnome people who set it up in the morning didn't know they had to also set up the camera so I'm told there was some faff at the start of the Sunday.  There were only 2 talks related to KDE so more conjoling would have been good here, it was a shame not to have a Plasma 5 talk.

Some of us had a Telegram group (like Whatsapp but free-er) which was useful to communicate.

Thanks to all who helped on the stand or gave a talk.  See you next year.

Jonathan