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

Konqi Randa Mascot

2 Weeks ago myself and Françoise had joined the [http://www.randa-meetings.ch/ Randa Meeting] in Switzerland.

This event is a full hack-week where between around fifty people, that help to change the world, met together and hack around [http://www.kde.org KDE Community] related stuff. More on
KDE sprint page

I’ve heard about Randa from years, and had seen numerous reports about how Randa hack-week has allowed lots of changes : Plasma, Software collection, etc…

This year, we decided not only to financially sponsor the event, but also be part of as simple helper, with the status of newcomers in the KDE community contributors. Just to check how it goes.
Mario Fux (the organizer) didn’t fake his involvement to make this week a success, in a full open source spirit.

We’re reporting below a number of blog post that have been made during the hackweek.
And as the icing on the cake, you could just watch the video realized during the week.

Where’s the Geeko at Randa?

I was proud to see number of people wearing openSUSE t-shirt, using openSUSE on their computer.
Mario still has a number of old 11.4 t-shirts to spread. I’ve also given a very limited number of new usb key.

Interesting enough to note that the big marketing effort done years ago, is still used.
Yeah I’m looking at you dear big openSUSE’s Sponsor

Geeko’s car at Randa 2014

Lucie is a professional Video-maker, working with kdenlive. The temptation to do something with the camcorder, Lucie’s competencies, and all the attendee was high enough to start a new spontaneous “PRESS” team

Thank you!

Once again, we would like to give a special hug to Mario Fux, for his enthusiasm, and kindness. Yes Mario, it will be an honor to be part of Randa Verein, to help you to achieve more next year.
Also we send our warmest thanks to all participants. You were all impressive about your friendly welcome, your guidance, the work you achieved.

Conclusion, we’ll be there next year!
Shouldn’t we, openSUSE Community, model this success for our Free Future?

Picture collections about the meeting

* Vijay Dhameliya on Panoramio
* Bruno Friedmann on Google+ Sat Sun
* Bruno Friedmann on G+ Monday
* Bruno Friedmann on G+ Tuesday
* Bruno Friedman post about Randa Meeting 2014 video

Blogs

* Mirko Boehm (25 Aug 2014): How to contribute to the KDE FrameworksCookbook
* Valorie Zimmerman (23 Aug 2014): Counting the days until Akademy!
* Călin Cruceru (19 Aug 2014): Randa Meetings 2014 – Impressions
* Denis Steckelmacher (18 Aug 2014): Google Summer of Code 2014: QML/Javascript language support for KDevelop 4 and 5
* Kevin Funk (17 Aug 2014): Randa Report: Hacking on KDE and meeting friends
* Mirko Boehm (16 Aug 2014): The KDE Randa Meeting 2014 in retrospective
* Dan Vratil (15 Aug 2014): Hacking my way through Randa
* Alvaro Soliverez (14 Aug 2014): KMyMoney – Randa wrap-up
* David Edmundson (14 Aug 2014): Randa Part 1: Gwenview on Frameworks
* Jos Poortvliet (14 Aug 2014): How else to help out
* Harald Sitter (14 Aug 2014): Mountains, Multimedia, and Cheese
* Albert Astals Cid (14 Aug 2014): KDE Randa Meetings 2014 – The End
* Christian Esken (14 Aug 2014): KMix ported to KDE Frameworks 5
* Andreas Cord-Landwehr (13th Aug 2014): Artikulate KF5 Porting Almost Done
* Vijay Dhameliya (13th Aug 2014): It’s all about Hacking, Adventures and Food : Randa Meetup 2014
* Simon Eugster (13 Aug 2014): Randa meeting 2014
* Denis Steckelmacher (13 Aug 2014): Randa: Meeting many people and working together
* Cornelius Schumacher (13 Aug 2014): The Book
* Harald Sitter (12 Aug 2014): Phonon + GStreamer + VLC 4.8 Beta
* David Narvaez (12 Aug 2014): Kig on Frameworks!
* Albert Astals Cid (12 Aug 2014): KDE Randa Meetings 2014 Day 4
* Harald Sitter (11 Aug 2014): Volume
* Valorie Zimmerman (11 Aug 2014): Randa Meetings sprint: KDE Frameworks Cookbook progress
* Christian Esken (11 Aug 2014): Plans for KMix during the Randa Sprint
* Cornelius Schumacher (10 Aug 2014): Announcing first Inqlude alpha release
* Denis Steckelmacher (10 Aug 2014): KDevelop QML/JS ported to KDevelop 5
* Randa Meetings (10 Aug 2014): The Randa Meetings 2014 are on
* Albert Astals Cid (9 Aug 2014): KDE Randa Meetings 2014 Day 1
* Kdenlive team (5 Aug 2014): Cleaning things before next impulse
* Denis Steckelmacher (5 Aug 2014): The DOM and your wish-list
* Valorie ZImmerman (5 Aug 2014): Coming up: excitement and work

My suggestion (unaware if it’s possible or not) was probably to explore GNOME3 features to serve YaST integrated already with GNOME3. This could be an interesting approach as it would offer integration and some advantages:

* Better integration with GNOME3 without having to write(/maintain another application;
* Take advantage of YaST2 modular structure;
* Present YaST in a prime space in GNOME3, thus offering a openSUSE differentiation point;
* No conflicts with possible KDE existing front-ends for YaST2;
* Improve users experience.

My proposal would be something like (maybe to be served as an extension for gnome-shell). Please neglect my ‘lame’ photo manipulation skills:

Mockup: YaST2 on GNOME3

What I intend to do can be summarized with Share your Kraft. Up to now, Kraft is working fine for a single user. But what if a team wants to use Kraft and share number cycles (which are base for the document numbering like invoice number), documents and template catalogs? Well, as long as they share the same database, it might work (I didn’t test deeply) but if they happen to be on different locations it becomes difficult. I try to make that possible.

My development target for Kraft is simplicity. For the user of course, but also for the setup. The server to share data, which is obviously needed, must work on a cheap hosting offer, and it must work with a weak internet line. So a database connect via internet is not possible.

I decided to investigate in ownCloud and enhance it with a plug-in called KitoC. ownCloud is a project started by Frank Karlitschek and implements a handy but scalable WebDAV Server beside more. Seems to fit my needs perfectly. Yesterday I implemented the number server function in KitoC after good conversation with Cornelius at breakfast in the office. Not very much achieved yet, but had to learn a bit of ownCloud first. I keep you posted.

Make a click on http://picasaweb.google.com/RICARDO.A.CHUNG/OpenSUSEAtLibreSoft# to watch some photos

Today, Sourceforge posted a blog about Kraft after they kind of mail-interviewed me. It’s nice, it really focuses on the things also important to me. This might be another step towards a broader user base for Kraft. I say that because one could have the impression that the number of people actually really using Kraft could be larger. A high number of users is one of the fundamental criteria for a successful free software project and thus I am constantly trying to understand whats the reason for the impression or the fact.

The first idea is that the Kraft project simply does something wrong in the way a project should be driven. But there are releases, there is a so far ok website, there are communication channels with information on it and people answering questions. Of course, it always could be done better, but I hope and believe we are not doing too bad. Marketing could be more, that’s granted.

The next thing could be that nobody needs this kind of software. But there are quite some companies doing this kind of software in the commercial space. So there must be a market. Actually I think the market is huge. People are writing invoices all over the world and I bet many of them are not really satisfied with the way they do it usually which makes Kraft at least an option to try for them.

And this might lead to better path: Probably these people do not know that the option exists. They simply haven’t heard about Kraft yet and if they would there is a good chance that they would not believe that it is free etc pp. And this is probably not specific to Kraft but also applies, of course much more weaker, to larger projects like openSUSE or KDE: A lot of people from the ‘real world’ don’t know about free software communities, the ideas behind and the benefits for users of the software. That sounds strange to us, as this is our daily reality, but start with asking your parents or non computer related friends if they really understand what it is about. Imagine what people know who have no computer job nor -hobby nor know you!

What consequences can that have for us? Well, we could decide to skip this group of people. That would mean, beside some other effects, that Kraft would not make sense any more and I don’t like that. It probably should influence the way we see the ‘product management’ aspect of our projects. For me, ‘product management’ is often equivalent to “take care that the result is especially useful to non computer scientists” (which is probably not what PM really is about) and the focus on that is very important and the precondition for the next point.

We might have to take our projects even more out of the geek niche and go to places where the ‘real world’ happens. That is difficult for various reasons. First, it means that we have to start to explain again from start, and maybe also get questions where the answer is not obvious. Furthermore it might have practical issues, because for example fairs for handcrafter utilities charge seriously for software boothes which is not the case if we present projects on FOSS events.
On the other hand its easy because we all just have to spread the word even more and tell everybody about free software, our projects and free culture. And try to think as if we weren’t free software people. I know, most of us do already what they can and that’s great