Whoa, finally back home and no longer sleep deprived after Linuxtag in Berlin. It was a lot of fun. Got to meet some KDE people I had not had the pleasure to meet so far. And they were as great as I expected them to be. Every single one of them. The four I’d like to point out are Alexandra, Claudia, Monika and Franziska who made the number of women at the KDE and Co booths sky-rocket with me. You rock! Aaron even has a photo of the KDE booth that proves that the KDE team is 50% women :PĆĀ But seriously: It is great to see that more and more women are turning up in the KDE community lately and the benefits of this could clearly be seen at this years Linuxtag. Thank you for being such a welcoming community. It really shows that we are doing a good job at being an inclusive community no matter who you are and that we are good at attracting people who are reluctant to join other FOSS projects. In the 3 categories I can see in the free software world (1. actively excluding – 2. indifferent – 3. actively including) KDE definitely belongs to the scarcely inhabited number 3 and that makes me proud. This is one of the things that is making and will make KDE successful in the future. Or as Wade puts it: “Let’s all be different together!“.
Of course we worked hard at the booth every day showing people the awesomeness that is KDE 4 and Amarok 2. To make up for that hard work we had something planned for every night. After arriving in Berlin on Tuesday we went to the fair ground to set up the booth and then went to have dinner with around 30 KDE/Amarok/Kubuntu people.
On Wednesday we went to an Indian restaurant. Delicious food!
Thursday was reserved for the official social event which was at the same location as last year which was very nice but a little too crowded for my taste.
On Friday we were invited to the Trolltech and friends dinner (Thanks to the Trolls for that.). After that karaoke was planned as I already mentioned. Boy, that was fun! We will have to poke danimo to publish the videos š I now know who would win the KDE vs. Gnome song contest and who has the better dancers š I will keep the result secret though for my own world domination plans. One never knows when things like this are needed š
On Saturday Ubuntu-Berlin did a great job at organising a BBQ again. It was at C-Base this time, which is a great location modelled after an UFO landing side. Very different and very cool.
The two talks I was giving together with Sven and Harald went well and people really seemed to have liked the Amarok talk which was pretty much a “This is the new stuff in Amarok 2”-talk including the Summer of Code and Season of KDE projects and the new internet services.
And now I am back at home \o/. No more events/conferences for me until Akademy. I need a break after all these events.
Oh and to the people who take care of matching booths and projects at events: Please get Amarok and KDE booths as near to each other as possible. We belong together and tbh I hate having to switch from one hall to another all the time. (Before someone ask, yes we did ask for booths next to each other. And this was the 3rd event where we had booths that were way too far apart.)
(photos by Aaron, Carlos, Markus and me)