State of Open Con 2023 review

[Rohan Garg]

Hi
I've just wrapped up attending State of Open Con 2023 and thought I'd
share my thoughts with the community while they're still fresh.

State of OpenCon 2023 was very well organized and brought together a
diverse set of people from across the software industry. There seems
to be good mix of newcomers to the open source community as well as
open source industry veterans.

I didn't really get a chance to attend talks but had plenty of
opportunities to chat with people in the hallway track as well as
KDE's booth.

Some conversations that stood out over the course of two days:

- I had multiple conversations with people who still thought that
Plasma was bloated and were pleasantly surprised to see it running on
the Pinephone. Maybe KDE should do some promo around how we've come a
long way?

- Conversations around ARM laptops being very attractive to developers
working with cloud infrastructure.

- The KDE Education suite of applications was very attractive to educators.

- A brief chat with the Morello R&D team at Cambridge University.
Apparently they have patches to get Plasma and friends working on
Morello(?). Might be good idea to reach out to them and extend a
invite to Akademy.

- A lot of interest in LAS 2023.

- Questions on being able to run Android apps on the PinePhone.

- Konqui was perceived as very cute and caught people's attention who
weren't familiar with KDE.

- "KDE 6, when?"

- A lot of startups seem to be looking for funding and would like to
keep their offerings open source. I pointed them towards the NLNet
fund.

- Some people were concerned about patents et all and wanted to know
if there was some kind of organization that deals with patents in the
open source world. I pointed them towards Open Invention Network.

- There's a big push towards getting women in tech, the KDE community
should promote such success stories within our community around this
and talk to other NGO's working in this space.

Personal thoughts on running the booth:

- I think we would benefit from having things to giveaway apart from
stickers. Other booths were giving away pens, chocolates, etc. The
Github booth ran a raffle that got a lot of people hyped and got them
to stay at the booth for the duration of the raffle.

- Shout out to Lydia for sending over the media wiki folks. Happy to
have made some new friends :)

- I think it's a good idea to run a booth again next year!

Cheers
Rohan Garg