State of Open Con 2023 review

[Paul Brown]

On Thursday, 9 February 2023 17:27:36 CET Rohan Garg wrote:
> Hi

Hello Rohan,

First of all, thanks for doing this!

> 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.

Great idea. We'll copy it over as a post-mortem for the event for next time.

> 
> 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?

Heh! This we do ALL THE TIME. It is so hard to get rid of a reputation. But, 
yeah, maybe we should be more up-in-your-face about this: "Plasma: Powerful 
and light!" or something.

> - Conversations around ARM laptops being very attractive to developers
> working with cloud infrastructure.
> 
> - The KDE Education suite of applications was very attractive to educators.

Were there many education-related people? Was there like a special track on 
the matter? If so, we would definitely want to leverage that the next time 
around.

> - 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.

This sounds interesting. 

Info on the project here: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/
cheri/cheri-morello.html

> - 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?"

Late 2023, it seems. Date still to be confirmed. Stabler version in 2024.

> - 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.

We have a special group called KDE Inclusive which deals with this. Aniqa, 
Lydia, and others are involved.

> 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.

I thing that has workd for us is to have someone painting stuff live using 
Krita. That never fails to attract crowds. 

Point taken about the raffle. Maybe we can get some konqi/katie plushies made or 
something.

> - 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!

Sounds like it.

Again, Thank you for you help. This is really good feedback too.

Cheers

Paul
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