KDE at FOSDEM 2019

[Jonathan Riddell]

KDE at FOSDEM 2019

I organised the stall and evening meal at FOSDEM for KDE again this year.

Stall:
1 table again in building K, about as wide as stretching your arms out
sideways but we extended it with boxes.  Nice table cloth. Nice back
drop using Come Home to KDE in 2019 design.  Nice monitor from Kenny
C. Most stuff I drove from Scotland and back.

Demos:
Plasma Mobile
Slimbook (but my charger broke half way through!)
Pinebook (but I also lacked a charger for my one, other people brought
their ones)
Plasma Mobile on Nexus 5X (which similarly liked to run out of charge
when on USB and needed mains power)
RK3399 (worked great on the main monitor)
RISC V (Alistair did a stormer on the stall and got lots of queries on this)
Raspberry Pi 3
Krita - live drawing from Wolkera and Boud on hand for questions and selfies
GCompris - Timotee and Aish for demos, popular with children
KDevLive - Camille did a live demo which was so popular with questions
I'm not sure how far he got with the editing, which is a good thing

Sales:
Tally says we sold 35 t-shirts but in the rush that will miss some and
the stock difference is 43 t-shirts.
1 hoodie sold. 1 cushion. 1 krita bag. 6 krita videos.
I used a SumUp card reader for the first time which was a great help.
Some people insisted on paying with cash which is faffy.
total taken £706.11
Stock take at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QLH76Dk-F8vwIjJ1K56wDozj08NGn2BR6l1uTsIAOMM/edit?usp=sharing
My KDE GB stock has 30 random t-shirts left, 5 krita videos, 1
cushion, a table cloth, a backdrop, a roll-up poster stand for KDE and
one for KDE neon.  This is available for others to use as needed.
I was pretty jelous of Gnome's fold up set of shelves which allowed
t-shirts to maintain some sort of order, maybe an idea for future.

Food:
The venue I'd booked for the Saturday meal turned out not to exist so
I had to find another one at short notice but that seemed to work
fine.
25 people came. 13 KDE people, 5 nextcloud, 5 lawyers, 2 canoeists
Lots of KDE people did their own thing or went to a more fancy do with Pine.
We went to the Gnome beer event afterwards which was much more busy
but that's because it was advertised to the general public which I'm
scared to do with a food event incase we get too many people. I did
have to turn away some people from our event who in the end could have
come because I'd been told to expect more but this is pretty common
and it's never quite ideal.

Talks:
no KDE talks sadly

e.V.
I got a weird query from an e.V. board member in the week before the
stall suggesting it wasn't legal for me to help KDE.  e.V. has never
done more then token aid for these stalls and in the spirit of KDE
I've always just worked around that, so this was pretty insulting.
I'd hope that e.V. would start helping people running KDE stalls more
in future, it is its reason for existing, but until then people will
continue to do it through other means.

Various photos at
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jriddell/albums/72157678444061768

Jonathan