[Kde-events] Hey dude, what's that, KDE? Some random notes about CeBit.

[Frederik Gladhorn]

Hello Events :)

I'm still rather new to KDE as devel, so don't shoot me yet, but I thought I 
could share some experiences made during my four days of CeBit.
I don't know how much of this has been discussed so far, and don't want to 
point fingers. I'd just like to improve the experience for both - visitors 
and us staying at the booth.

A fair like CeBit is different from FOSS events because the audience is mostly 
business, of over twenty exhibition halls, one half hall is mostly about 
opensource.
Of course we had visitors ranging from "kde fan" to "never seen linux" before.
Which is really not a bad thing.

But I realized we were not prepared in a few points. It would have been great 
to have a printout giving some basic facts about KDE and the e.V. because of 
the not very OSS oriented audience. There are questions coming up about which 
company is behind KDE and I think many people did not realize that we do this 
in our spare time. 99% of the people standing around smiling there are being 
payed to do that. I don't envy them, because most of the time it was great 
being there, representing KDE. Talking to users, turning people into users or 
excited users into potential devs is great, also meeting some people again, 
some for the first time was really enjoyable.
It would have been nice to have more merchandising available, like t-shirts 
which we did not have at all.
Also it would be very nice to have some guideline concerning merchandise. For 
example a price list that stays in the booth box would not be bad.
I'd still give a kid looking at my desktop with sparkling eyes a free sticker 
but some hints would be nice.
And we had some discussions whether it is beneficial to ask for donations or 
if that would look unprofessional.
But if Ubuntu collects them for example, I am not much ashamed, considering 
their financial status which should look slightly different than KDEs.
Another point was that we did not have a real clue as to what to do with the 
booth box in the end. The transport was not organized, but Torsten already 
excused himself for letting that slip a little.

Whoever put the "people oriented programming" and the like printouts in the 
boothbox gets a big hug from me, as that seems to reach people. Having 
friendly colorful pictures in the gray landscape of thin gray walls is a good 
idea. We would have liked to have a few more printouts, people would probably 
even "donate" for them. There still is a big kde3 desktop poster in there 
which we put up in lack of better choices.

I think we did a good job keeping on smiling, despite sometimes the 
conversations were quite tiresome. All in all CeBit was a good success, the 
booth team was really nice and I'd like to thank everyone involved. Together 
with Carsten I did a little talk about KDE 4, which was a live demo 
basically, from plasma over kwin to some apps. We had a good audience and 
things went rather well I guess.

The current state of KDE really makes an impression on many people it seems. 
It looks good. Better.
I hope 4.0.2 holds what I promised ;)

Being there was really fun but also quite exhausting. I'm still pretty 
downbeat, so maybe I'm exaggerating a little.

Greetings to all,
Frederik

-- 
Parley - The Vocabulary Trainer
http://edu.kde.org/parley/

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