FOSDEM retrospective

[Adriaan de Groot]

# The good

 - We were there
 - We were on time
 - People pitched in amazingly well, and we had the booth staffed with 2 or 3 
people all the time; there was enough overlap also to take an hour off from 
the booth if needed.
 - The materials we brought to FOSDEM were sufficient to build the booth and 
run it, mostly.
 - Cooperation with the GNOME booth.
 - The blinkenlights draw people in, it was amazing (even had people coming 
back to ask what OS was running on the switch, which is a 10 EUR piece of crap 
that I stripped out of its beige plastic case just for looks -- perhaps we 
should have installed a Turris Omnia).
 - The live art demo of Krita on Saturday was *amazing*. The artist was kind 
of hidden behind the monitor, not everyone understood that it was live 
sketching.

# The bad

 - Extra Kensington locks and other security measures were not actually needed 
or used; this is unfortunate, although it means we've got these materials for 
(re)use elsewhere. (This is also good, because it means that security wasn't 
really an issue for us)
 - The booth-box list should have included:
   - scissors
   - A4 sheets with "KDE" printed on them
   - 4 paint clamps (e.g. https://www.gamma.nl/assortiment/stanley-veerklemmen-metaal-50-mm/p/B431362 ) .. this is FOSDEM-specific as long as 
we're in building K with the windows unavailable for posters.
   - KDE banner of sorts
   - Blue tablecloth (thanks Sune)
 - All the wired networking stuff was useless.

# The ugly

 - The Sun type 5 keyboard I brought was confusing to people who don't know 
where the Caps Lock key belongs (e.g. lower left, because Ctrl is supposed to 
be next to the A). On the other hand, it gave us a chance to say "hey, it's 
KDE, of course it's configurable!"

# The what can be improved

 - Sticker situation (there are other messages about that, too). I remain 
envious of GNOME's sticker selection.
 - Messaging beforehand.
 - Signage (see "banner", above)

# The missing

 - Stickers, T-shirts maybe (I do prefer to be a tech stand)
 - We should have had a plan on what to show on the screens of the desktop and 
laptop machines at the booth. A movie with recent features / neat stuff would 
have been a good addition. Some more applications with actual content would 
have been nice (like Krita).

[ade]
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