FOSS-North report

[Agustin Benito (toscalix)]

Hi,

On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 10:49 AM Adriaan de Groot <groot at kde.org> wrote:
>
> [[ 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).
>
<snip>

Thank you Adrian for all the effort you invest in this and other
events. It is amazing to see how much passion and dedication you put.
You are an example in this regard.

Best Regards

Agustin