Trip report: Qt World Summit 2019

[Nicolas Fella]

Hi,

this week Kai Uwe, Roman and I represented KDE at Qt World Summit in Berlin.

TL;DR Went fine overall, some things can be improved.

Preparation:
I feel that preparation time was a bit short. Knowing who will go and what 
kind of booth to expect earlier would have taken off some organizing pressure.
We expected some generic promotion material (e.g. flyers) to be available, but 
the material found on the promo wiki [0] was outdated. We hope that we can 
improve this in the future [1].
Another thing that can be improved is getting demo hardware for the booth. 
Instead of relying on the attendants having suitable hardware at home or 
knowing people who do a public register of people that have and are willing to 
lend out demo-suitable hardware could help the process a lot.
We ordered a bunch of flyers (designed by Andy), stickers with the KDE logo and 
Konqi, and KDE beer coasters (desgined by Carl) as well as KDE Polo Shirts for 
the three of us. We have quite some leftovers, a process to reuse them for the 
next event instead of reprinting them would save costs and would be good for 
the environment.

Booth:
Our booth was on the first floor (or second, for the folks that don't start 
their floors at 0). It was a bit special since all the corporate booths were on 
the 0th floor and we were the only booth on our floor, but it was a deliberate 
decision to show that we are different than the corporate folks and we did get 
enough people passing by on their way to the talk rooms.

Having 2-3 people more at the booth would help both from an organizing point 
of view and it would allow us to attend more talks and show presence at the 
other booths.

We did not have any talks about KDE stuff this year. We should look into that 
into having more in the future.

Hardware-wise we had:
  - A KDE Slimbook (courtesey of Slimbook)
  - A Pinebook (from Kai)
  - A One Mix 2S 2-in-1 convertible (Kai). Very interesting device, but needs 
some work to be really usable
  - A Nexus 5X running Plasma Mobile (from me)
  - A Librem 5 developer kit running Plasma Mobile on postmarketOS (from Jonah 
Brüchert). Unfortunately part of the touchscreen wasn't working so 
demonstrating the full capabilities was hard.
  - A Samsung Galaxy S6 running Android (courtesey of KDAB)
  - A TV screen running a slideshow (rented from the organizers). The 
slideshow could use some love and more up-to-date screenshots.
  - A Kirogi-compatible drone (from Eike). Unfortunatley we had some software 
issues so we couldn't really show it off

We also planned to show the PinePhone developer prototype, alas it didn't ship 
in time.

People:
Since it was my first World Summit I don't have any reference to the previous 
years. From what I've heard general attendance seems to have gone down a 
little compared to last year, but the quality of the event has gone up. I feel 
like interest in KDE was decent and and we've had a bunch of interesting 
conversations.

A lot of people were interested in Plasma Mobile and the 2-in-1 convertible, 
not so much in the laptops we were showing. To me this indicates that we 
should try to grow more into this direction, especially in the area between 
desktop and phone (think tablets and convertibles). In the future it would be 
nice to have flyers with a give-away message for our mobile offerings.

Frameworks is interesting for the attendees but kinda hard to promote since 
you can't really demo it. When I got the chance to talk about Frameworks 
people were interested, with Kirigami being the one we talked about most. 
However, many people indicated that LGPL is not a feasible option for them, 
but I'm not sure they understood the dos and don'ts of the LGPL correctly. 
Maybe having a list of 'success stories' from external Frameworks users can 
help.

Cheers

Nico

[0] https://community.kde.org/Promo/Material
[1] https://phabricator.kde.org/T11867