Re: FOSDEM 2006

[Nicolas Roard]

On 3/2/06, Sašo Kiselkov <diablos@manga.sk> wrote:
> Quoting Stefan Urbanek <stefan@agentfarms.net>:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > How was the FOSDEM 2006? Any success/achievements for GNUstep? What was the
> > feedback of others?
> >
>
> For my part, I can say that I successfully borded everyone at the GNUstep Core
> Data presentation almost into coma and technically screwed it up on the
> ProjectManager presentation :-) Thanks, Nicolas, for letting me borrow your
> machine for the presentation.

I'm just sorry I didn't think to show you immediately how to make []
and {} with a french keyboard ;-)

Anyway I think I'll be able to cut that during the video editing, so,
no worry ;-)

> Honestly though, I think that the overall GNUstep presence on FOSDEM 2006 was
> really poor. By that I don't mean that few people of the GNUstep core team
> attended - no way - but I think we could have done so much more about the
> GNUstep booth, material, promotion and activity. Next year I'd like to
> participate more in this part of the process - getting more attention to
> GNUstep. We really need to show to _every_single_passant_ that we are a whole
> lot different from the KDE/Gnome/Ubuntu/Debian... folks just a few steps away.
> We need to stand out and shine! :-)

Well I sure as hell wouldn't have mind some help :-)

My view for this fosdem is that it wasn't too bad (from a gnustep
point of view):
- we had a booth
- we had a devroom
- we had interesting talks
- we had people assisting to the talks ;-) (and not just gnustep dev)
- we had prospectus to distribute on the booth
- we had many gnustep people attending too and interesting discussions.
- we even filmed some of the talks (sadly not all of them due to
technical problems)

So I think that all in all it wasn't such a bad presence, but I'm
perhaps saying that because there was progress from previous years
(though obviously not as much as we could have had)

Now, obviously, we certainly can improve a lot what we did:
- we should have had a much better organized booth
- we could have had a better organized talk session too -- and our own
videoprojector would have been very helpful sunday, when all we got
was a very blue tinted projector.. :-/

Problems with the booth:
- we didn't have a proper organized rotation of people on the booth /
devroom talks
- we didn't have an exciting booth -- nothing to show, no demo, just
people behind a booth with prospectus.
- we didn't distribute a live cd

Better rotation is just a matter of slightly better organisation, and
if we do that just a tad bit more in advance it won't be a problem.
This year we started early, then more or less forgot / were too busy
to do anything until a couple of weeks before the event...

An exciting booth is a bit more tricky to do; here, we would need some
materials:
- at least one computer / screen showing a gnustep environment people
can play with
- if we can, the ideal would be to have more computers, and then we
can show for example the same app running in different environments;
we can also have some "demo" sessions people could assist on the booth
at regular interval.. or we could have some pre-recorded demos on the
computers, etc.
- we really need an up to date live cd to distribute to people. Most
people won't make the effort of installing a full gnustep system, with
all the problems that could arise, unless they are already convainced.
But most of the same people will try a livecd in a heartbeat.
- We could even have specific livecd - eg, imagine a "desktop" livecd,
a "development" livecd, an "opengroupware" livecd, etc. Or we could
stick everything properly configured on one livecd but display a nice
menu system at login so people come up with a ready to use environment
for the specific topic... there's a lot of things we could do on a
livecd.

Also for the event itself, I think it would be neat to meet a day
before somehow. Perhaps if we plan that much earlier this time, it
will be possible ? Because  that way we  could:
- hack together on some problems
- discuss things
- do the last bits for preparing the event
and that will let us enjoy much more the fosdem itself, while having a
better prepared presence.

Anyway, those are just comments/ideas, as usual, what we need is
actual volunteer to tackle the jobs...

Cheers,

ps: I'll try to upload the videos of the talks next week. If you
didn't already send me your slides, please do it :-)

--
Nicolas Roard
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
  -Arthur C. Clarke