[[ Since my blog is down, this is the all the report we'll see about FOSS- North; do read Augustin's notes as well, though, https://toscalix.com/ 2019/04/14/scale-summit-foss-north-and-some-routine-changes/ ]]
# Background The KDE community was invited to the FOSS-North [1] conference again this year. Last year I ran the booth there and gave a talk on KDE governance. This year I ran a community day event (hackathon/meetup) in cooperation with the Gothenburg C++ group (GBG-CPP), and the booth. A last-minute speaker cancellation saw me giving a talk anyway, about Calamares (not a KDE project). Other KDE-related speakers -- not speaking on KDE topics though -- were Mirko Boehm and Augustin Benito Bethencourt. Gothenburg is a beautiful city when the sun shines. Wednesday morning had very light snow falling; the beginning of April is not a "good weather" period for the city, but it was generally very pleasant. There is a large industrial software development community -- Volvo, SAAB, and lots of smaller ones -- with a lot of Qt and QML work being done. However, the Open Source bits are less well-known, and KDE is just not a thing there. The local GNOME community is more active. Calls for help / participation on the KDE lists led to Mirko and Augustin speaking up. Augustin added his RPi bits to the KDE community day. # Community day For the community day I had put together, basically, an onboarding talk of an hour and a half of going through tools, techniques, and best practices. I showed off kdesrc-build (there's some issues there) and now realise that our onboarding docs could still use more technical writing skill. The attendees of the community day were largely GBG-CPP folks, with a passing interest in what the KDE community is doing and what the frameworks are like. We didn't do much technical stuff. Thanks to Sylog Vaest AB for hosting us (with good coffee, and fruit and sandwiches). Like so many consultancies in the Qt space, they have trouble finding good engineers with some Qt experience. I reminded them that KDE is a good training space and they should send young people to us. # Conference booth The Open Source booths this year were "upstairs", away from the main vendor floor. Coffee and fika (cake) were served on the main vendor floor. During talks it was generally pretty quiet, so I went and talked to the various stands. GNOME was also there with a booth which had .. four people on it? Bastian Ilsoe is local, IIRC, and then some other peeps. They had T-shirts and a bunch of stickers and GNOME socks. The KDE booth had materials re-used from QtWS: a logo banner (but no blue table cloth), stickers (Katie, Konqui, and Qt-heart-Konqui), and postcards and flyers. I had my own Slimbook, a 7" One Mix laptop, and just-in-case a Rock64 (but no monitor). Since foot traffic to the upstairs was quite low, I didn't run specific demos, but mostly said "hi" to people who walked by. I gave away a handful of stickers, and kept the rest (still about 150 left over since QtWS). Given the level of traffic it's good we didn't really invest in getting a lot of *stuff* there; all the good Promo goods like A4 stand-ups with promo text, the roll-up, table-cloth, T-shirts for sale .. wouldn't have made a big difference. Getting the materials there would have been an issue as well (well, mostly it would have cost EUR 25 extra for luggage). Personally I'd like the Open Source booths to fit in with the rest of the vendor floor, but that may be a space issue (and the "real" vendors pay money). # Conference talk I gave a talk. It wasn't planned, but another speaker fell ill. I did 25 minutes on Calamares, using the KDE beamer theme and wearing my KDE shirt (and telling people that Calamares uses KDE technologies, but isn't a KDE project). It went ok. # Social There were various social events. There was beer (Swedish-expensive!). I chatted with Mikey Ariel, from WriteTheDocs -- you may remember her from Akademy in Brno -- and with Carol Chen from RedHat. For regular conference goers, the line "come home to KDE" still works pretty well; that handles "I use i3" as well as "I used KDE 3" people. I also stress that the "competition" is proprietary software far more than other Free Software desktops. Since FOSS-North had a fairly large number of consultancies / proprietary vendors around, I think it's important to keep pushing the Free angle. I have a handful of business cards, and handed out a bunch of "you should think about using Kirigami" notes. I also handed out my old-old KDE business cards (with "Vice President" crossed out, to give you an idea of how long I've been using them). # Costs - Materials were re-used from QtWS. - Travel & lodging EUR 492, which I'm trying to get back from KDE e.V. - Beer, food, train to the airport, and incidentals are my own. [1] https://foss-north.se/2019/
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