FOSS-North report

Tue Apr 16 09:49:25 BST 2019

[[ Since my blog is down, this is the all the report we'll see about FOSS-
North; do read Augustin's notes as well, though, https://toscalix.com/
2019/04/14/scale-summit-foss-north-and-some-routine-changes/ ]]

# Background

The KDE community was invited to the FOSS-North [1] conference again this 
year. Last year I ran the booth there and gave a talk on KDE governance. This 
year I ran a community day event (hackathon/meetup) in cooperation with the 
Gothenburg C++ group (GBG-CPP), and the booth. A last-minute speaker 
cancellation saw me giving a talk anyway, about Calamares (not a KDE project).

Other KDE-related speakers -- not speaking on KDE topics though -- were Mirko 
Boehm and Augustin Benito Bethencourt.

Gothenburg is a beautiful city when the sun shines. Wednesday morning had very 
light snow falling; the beginning of April is not a "good weather" period for 
the city, but it was generally very pleasant. There is a large industrial 
software development community -- Volvo, SAAB, and lots of smaller ones -- 
with a lot of Qt and QML work being done. However, the Open Source bits are 
less well-known, and KDE is just not a thing there. The local GNOME community 
is more active.

Calls for help / participation on the KDE lists led to Mirko and Augustin 
speaking up. Augustin added his RPi bits to the KDE community day. 

# Community day

For the community day I had put together, basically, an onboarding talk of an 
hour and a half of going through tools, techniques, and best practices. I 
showed off kdesrc-build (there's some issues there) and now realise that our 
onboarding docs could still use more technical writing skill. The attendees of 
the community day were largely GBG-CPP folks, with a passing interest in what 
the KDE community is doing and what the frameworks are like. We didn't do much 
technical stuff.

Thanks to Sylog Vaest AB for hosting us (with good coffee, and fruit and 
sandwiches). Like so many consultancies in the Qt space, they have trouble 
finding good engineers with some Qt experience. I reminded them that KDE is a 
good training space and they should send young people to us.

# Conference booth

The Open Source booths this year were "upstairs", away from the main vendor 
floor. Coffee and fika (cake) were served on the main vendor floor. During talks 
it was generally pretty quiet, so I went and talked to the various stands. 
GNOME was also there with a booth which had .. four people on it? Bastian 
Ilsoe is local, IIRC, and then some other peeps. They had T-shirts and a bunch 
of stickers and GNOME socks.

The KDE booth had materials re-used from QtWS: a logo banner (but no blue 
table cloth), stickers (Katie, Konqui, and Qt-heart-Konqui), and postcards and 
flyers. I had my own Slimbook, a 7" One Mix laptop, and just-in-case a Rock64 
(but no monitor). Since foot traffic to the upstairs was quite low, I didn't run 
specific demos, but mostly said "hi" to people who walked by.

I gave away a handful of stickers, and kept the rest (still about 150 left 
over since QtWS).

Given the level of traffic it's good we didn't really invest in getting a lot of 
*stuff* there; all the good Promo goods like A4 stand-ups with promo text, the 
roll-up, table-cloth, T-shirts for sale .. wouldn't have made a big 
difference. Getting the materials there would have been an issue as well 
(well, mostly it would have cost EUR 25 extra for luggage).

Personally I'd like the Open Source booths to fit in with the rest of the 
vendor floor, but that may be a space issue (and the "real" vendors pay money).

# Conference talk

I gave a talk. It wasn't planned, but another speaker fell ill. I did 25 
minutes on Calamares, using the KDE beamer theme and wearing my KDE shirt (and 
telling people that Calamares uses KDE technologies, but isn't a KDE project). 
It went ok.

# Social

There were various social events. There was beer (Swedish-expensive!). I 
chatted with Mikey Ariel, from WriteTheDocs -- you may remember her from 
Akademy in Brno -- and with Carol Chen from RedHat.

For regular conference goers, the line "come home to KDE" still works pretty 
well; that handles "I use i3" as well as "I used KDE 3" people. I also stress 
that the "competition" is proprietary software far more than other Free 
Software desktops. Since FOSS-North had a fairly large number of consultancies 
/ proprietary vendors around, I think it's important to keep pushing the Free 
angle.

I have a handful of business cards, and handed out a bunch of "you should 
think about using Kirigami" notes. I also handed out my old-old KDE business 
cards (with "Vice President" crossed out, to give you an idea of how long I've 
been using them).

# Costs

 - Materials were re-used from QtWS.
 - Travel & lodging EUR 492, which I'm trying to get back from KDE e.V.
 - Beer, food, train to the airport, and incidentals are my own.

[1] https://foss-north.se/2019/
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