FOSS-North

[Clemens Toennies]

Thanks Adriaan for the nice wrapup and everyone who run the booth!

Clemens.
On Apr 25, 2018 11:16, "Adriaan de Groot" <groot at kde.org> wrote:

> Hi KDE Community and e.V.,
>
> On the weekend of 21-22 april 2018 I traveled to Sweden to the FOSS-North
> conference, in Gothenburg. I went there for two reasons:
>  - to give a talk (submitted via the CfP and accepted)
>  - to run a KDE booth (asked by the conference org)
>
> The conference had ~150 attendees, 30 speakers, 6 sponsor booths and a KDE
> and
> a GNOME booth.
>
> # Booth(s)
>
> Gothenburg is a little bit "GNOME country", so it was good to have both
> desktops there. In the run up I had quite a bit of communication with the
> GNOME booth organizer, since community booths take up a lot of time. We
> agreed
> before hand to take care of each other's stands as needed. Any pictures
> you
> may have seen of us in a fist-fight are, of course, staged (but I beat the
> tar
> outta 'em). The community booths, with T-shirts and some computers showing
> off
> the desktops, did a very small amount of business, but we did have a fair
> amount of people to talk with.
>
> Bastian, the GNOME guy, was looking at other merchandise options and we
> came
> up with something exquisitely silly, last I saw he was looking at CnC
> milling
> to make that silly idea come true.
>
> In short, I think the community booths together worked well -- still, you
> get
> people, young people, coming up and going "huh, huh, GNOME and KDE side-by-
> side, when's the fight?" I have *no* idea where this notion of viscious
> rivalry persists.
>
> # Talk
>
> I think my talk went well; it was recorded, so you can probably watch it
> somewhere. It was about KDE governance, but mostly "Free Software project
> Governance 101" with an emphasis on figuring out your moral stance as
> expressed by your license choice, contributor agreement choice (if any),
> organization choice, and manifesto, vision and CoC. A bit touchy-feely and
> not
> all that concrete.
>
> I gave roughly the same talk two weeks earlier at a start-ups gathering,
> so
> I've been holding up KDE as *a* way of doing things. We get a lot of
> things
> right, although the order we did things -- historically -- isn't the order
> I'd
> recommend nowadays.
>
> # Sales
>
> We sold 3 T-shirts at 200 SEK each (~19 EUR). Gave out some folders, a
> lanyard, some buttons. We didn't have stickers. This continues, IMO, to be
> a
> real missed opportunity -- stickers are cheap, easy to hand out, colorful,
> etc. I'm seriously envious of the GNOME sticker packs.
>
> # Booth (2)
>
> The booth showed Plasma 5.12 running on low-powered ARM hardware. This was
> the
> same theme as at FOSDEM, so if you were there, it was the same set=up with
> blinkenlights and a Pinebook running the latest stuff. This continues the
> narrative of "of course Plasma runs also on low-powered devices, that's
> been
> driving 8 months or so of work on reducing resource use; it really is a
> lean
> environment." That kind of ties in to something else I noticed: people
> seem to
> hang on to grudges for a damn long time. "I used KDE 4/6/30 years ago, and
> it
> was slow". "I once submitted a bug and it was ignored." Bleh.
>
> Now that I'm writing this down here, I realise I could / should have had
> Nate's this-week articles at hand, to better illustrate what's going on
> and
> what is being improved in the rest of the KDE ecosystem.
>
> GNOME has a nice release-video that they just left looping -- it shows off
> the
> new stuff, and even if my response to most of the video is "yeah, we had
> that
> 6 months/2 years/30 years ago already" it has movement, it has pizzazz,
> and
> saves the booth staff from talking about some of the basics.
>
> On the other hand, I had blue blobs and Lays' gource video to talk about
> long-
> term development.
>
> # Booth Resources
>
> The plastic IKEA box for booth-stuff (the roll of duct tape, the
> kensington
> locks we didn't have to use, pens, badges, etc.) broke on the flight; I'll
> be
> donating a new one.
>
> Sune's blue tablecloth is still in my possession; it still has "KDE" on it
> in
> Frozen-brand duct tape (Olaf is so cute!). This could be better.
>
> Left over T-shirts are now at my house, for whatever conference I go to
> next.
>
> # Wrap-up
>
> I'd like to thank Johan for organizing the conference overall, and Bastian
> for
> being a good neighbor in the Free-Desktop space. Thanks Helio for also
> spending a lot of hours running the stand.
>
> [ade]
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