halfway around the world and back

As predicted conf.kde.in was indeed pretty damn amazing – great people, conference, country and food (even if my stomach kinda disagreed with the last part but whatever). Pradeepto and his team did an amazing job in making sure everyone had a great time starting with picking us up at the airport. Many people were interested in GSoC and I hope we get a lot of top-notch proposals.

If you ever go to Bangalore you must not miss two things: the city market (especially the amazing flowers in the lower parts of the main hall – see pictures above – thanks Lennart for the tip) and a ricksha ride with at least 3 other people + the driver.

I’m thinking a lot lately about how we can get away from what is happening to a lot of Free Software projects: You recruit who you are unless you actively do something about it. Meaning whatever people you already have you will get more of them if you don’t actively reach out to other groups in some form or another. In this regard conf.kde.in was a huge success. There were a lot of people who were really not your average Free Software hacker (yay!) and comparatively many who were not very familiar with KDE and its software yet but still traveled quite far for the conference. I will have to pick Pradeepto’s brain a bit for all the reasons for this. Whatever the reasons were: It was really really cool and we should have more of it. We need more events where new people can get a feeling for our community. Akademy definitely isn’t it at the moment since the talks are not entry-level and we don’t advertise it much as an event where people can come to who don’t contribute to KDE yet but are thinking about it. The release parties could be it but my feeling is that only some of them really draw in new people (well ok Step has a new maintainer since the last release party here in Karlsruhe – how cool is that?). So dear reader: Suggestions? Ideas for world domination? Silly jokes? Keep it coming.

PS: Thanks a lot to KDE e.V. for sponsoring my travel. Want to see more of that happen? Join the Game!