Was a real pleasure to meet so numerous openSUSE users.

If running a booth is, for sure, an investment of time, energy and money (even if TSP contribute to help you), We often forget to say
how much it’s important for our community and project.

Booths makes openSUSE alive in all open source events! and it’s a great experience to live, for any of us.

Feel the beat!

I strongly believe that openSUSE has be to visible on events like KDE Akademy, Scale, Fosdem, Guadec.
It’s not a question of "Bang for the buck", than a simple obviousness:

• Fosdem : the biggest open source event in Europe (perhaps in the world) with more than 5000 hackers visiting.
• Scale : biggest event in North America with more than 3000 attendees
• Guadec : The annual conference of Gnome Hackers with lot of worldwide attendees
• KDE Akademy : This year with around 150 active contributors coming from all over the world.

The obviousness is: if openSUSE has no booth there, you just see Ubuntu and Redhat, and let’s add Debian, Mageia etc for Fosdem or Scale.


You all know how much I like our Geeko community. And when Akademy staff proposed us to run a booth, I said yes, great I will be there!
After comparing ways to go to Brno, the Geeko’s car was the less expensive, and allow me to pick the demo touch screen at SUSE Headquarter.
So I took a full week off and drive 2000 kilometers to make it happens.

Open the Fun can

Running a booth is not that hard. You will find flyers in the booth box presenting openSUSE and related tools.
There’s goodies like several kind of stickers, pens, USB flash keys, beer mate.
About the poster, if not allowed on walls, let’s your creativity soar. Use boxes, a pen can also fix that big banner around the guard-rail.

On the human part, I would say than 3 persons is not too much. For example at Brno, the booth was very calm during the talks, but when the break
arrives, you just see 30-50 people coming all at the same time in your direction.Don’t run away!
Organize yourself! For example one of the staff is delegated to spread swag, and drive attendees to the next expert.

Try to give as much as possible short-quality answers.

No matter if you are not at all technical guru, the priority is to welcome visitors and listen to them.

If you have a demo computer, organize a bunch of bookmarks related to the conference subject inside the openSUSE community.
At Brno, we were essentially demoing live factory with kde stable 4.14 and Factory with plasma5 and Frameworks 5, and all related web pages about kde on obs, wiki.
Our moto was What openSUSE can offer to KDE developers and contributors.

It’s rarely on a booth that we can resolve a bug, but that’s where a beginning of a social interaction starts.

Don’t worry if you can’t awnser directly, offer a visit card, try to write down the contact details and its related question.
You will, once the event is done, follow-up the contact with precious data, that will be really useful.

Beat the Green next on stage

As any other contribution, running a booth is an awesome experience.
It’s the best way to meet users and potential contributors.
It’s always an opportunity to evolve, a challenge to be done and an experience to share.

Back home, as usual a lot of things to do. But I feel important to share this experience in this lizard article, to post a few pictures, to share my
feeling with my fellow openSUSE community. I hope to see more of you, taking the challenge to run one, next to your location.
Do it, just run an openSUSE booth. You will learn a lot about you and our fellows, share with outcomers and meet others communities.

My final words are a big Thank you people who ran booth in the past,
and I encourage all of you still hesitating.

See you soon on stage!

More pictures available at: openSUSE booth KDE Akademy photo album

While most of the topics were technically or very much related to KDE such as talks in the community track, on sunday there was a keynote from Cliff Schmidt from literacybridge.org with the title Digital Audio to Reduce Illiteracy, Poverty and Disease. Danny has already blogged about it. It was a real mind opener that a lot of our efforts are useless to people who simply can not read. Cliff and the literacybridge project has a deep insight of how that can be improved. It was a real impressing talk and hope that the success for that project continues. Please check the project out.

On monday we had the general assembly of the KDE e.V. where Cornelius and Aaron Seigo were reelected into the board of the KDE e.V. Furthermore it was decided about a Community Code of Conduct for KDE that gives some hints how to behave in our community which seems to be needed these days and some other interesting and important stuff.

Today there is the “Embedded and Mobile Day” on Akademy which started with a talk around the Maemo platform where now Qt4 is available and everybody is invited to port interesting (KDE)  applications to it. Nokia was nice enough to give lots of N810 devices to KDE developers. Very motivating

openSUSE is also very present on Akademy, not only as a sponsor. Coincidentially most of the conference speakers were standing very near to the openSUSE poster and as a result it was very prominent, but more important is that openSUSE is running on many desktops I saw…  Some people approached me and mentioned things like openSUSE 11.0 is really cool, KDE 4.1 is most easily installable with one-click-install, zypper rocks and other cool things. Nice.

Akademy is great and I enjoy some hacking on Kraft now