invitations and perception

[Matthias Ettrich]

On Monday 28 April 2003 16:08, Scott Wheeler wrote:
> I was just talking to Ralf on IRC.  It seems that there's some confusion as
> to who will actually be allowed to attend the meeting.
>
> By way of posting something on the dot, I think most readers interpreted it
> as an open invitation:

[snip]

Thanks for the feedback, I'll work on the messaging. 

The conference clearly is not a user's conference, but a developer's 
conference (where other contributors most certainly count as developers).  
The talks will be technical and targeted towards developers. KDE users that 
seek more information on how to utilize KDE do better visiting e.g. the 
LinuxTag.

If nobody comes up with a better suggestion, the name will be in good old KDE 
tradition

  KDE FOUR - Developer's Conference 2003 ("Kastle")

The purpose of a conference in that scale is to help KDE development and to 
promote both KDE and GNU/Linux. This is done in various ways:

- get to know each other better
- exchange knowledge and ideas
- work and plan together (in bofs and the session after the conference)

In addition there's anothe important factor: Movitation and new contributors. 
Most KDE developers started with smaller contributions and eventually got 
hooked. And a conference is an excellent place to finally give into your 
burning desire of creating free software every spare minute of the rest of 
your life.

We have facitilies for many people in NoveHrady, we can easily host 150 guests 
or more. This means we can and should explicitely invite new contributors 
that just started, and also contributors in spe that want to start. The 
conference then can also be a place where you find new contributors for your 
projects. My understanding is that there are many people who would like to 
contribute, but don't exactly know how to start. Some personal contact to a 
maintainer is a good way of starting.

Matthias