State of Open Con 2023 review

[Carl Schwan]

Le jeudi 9 février 2023 à 7:44 PM, Paul Brown <paul.brown at kde.org> a écrit :

> On Thursday, 9 February 2023 17:27:36 CET Rohan Garg wrote:
> 
> > Hi
> 
> 
> Hello Rohan,
> 
> First of all, thanks for doing this!

Yeah thank Rohan for helping with the booth!

> 
> > 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.

The easiest thing is to buy candies. It's relatively cheap and people usually
like that a lot ;)

Cheers,
Carl

> 
> > - 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
> --
> Promotion & Communication
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