Re: FOSDEM 2006

[Sašo Kiselkov]

Quoting Nicolas Roard <nicolas.roard@gmail.com>:

> On 3/2/06, Sa&#65533;o 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.

Alright, I've seen lots of people with machines, brilliant machines, I think,
right? We also got one LCD this year, so employ that as well. E.g. we could
have:

 - used my (crappy, but functional) notebook for showing GNUstep on a plain
Linux system. I also have FreeBSD 5 installed, so we could have demo'ed that as
well.
 - Nicolas' machine for showing off GNUstep with Camaelon, and perhaps the
Etoile system
 - some Apple hardware for showing that the same apps can run on GNUstep and OSX
 - some x86 hardware to show that GNUstep is even available on Windows
 - some other hardware (connected to the LCD we had) showing a
presentation/video on GNUstep - something flashy, with sound and talk. Quentin,
how about your portable?

Seriously people, we had the hardware resources for a very fancy booth.

> - 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.

Yes, this is a full "thumbs up" by me. LiveCDs are a really neat way how to demo
some system.

> - 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.

I think one LiveCD would be enough, we just need to structure the environment on
it properly.

> 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.

Sure, I'm all for it, unfortunatelly, my schedule wasn't, at least not this year
-_-;

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

Perhaps some GNUstep merchandize, like GNUstep T-shirts, GNUstep mouse pads,
GNUstep stickers, etc. Though I'm not sure we could so easily afford these yet.
Quickly lurking through the Internet, I calculated that 20 T-shirts come to
around 60 EUR, 30 T-shirts to ~85 EUR, and 50 T-shirts around ~130 EUR.

As for helping out: I'll always be helping out with coding :-) Etoile is still
far away from being end-user accessible. By next year's FOSDEM, I'd like this
not to be the case anymore. Also, I'll keep on improving other apps,
frameworks, and stuff generally :-) As for the actual event organization: I'd
like to do the GNUstep presentation/video, donate my machine into service at the
GNUstep booth as a sandbox for people to fool around with, and I'd love to have
some talks about either GNUstep in general, or Etoile or some other, more
specific part. Oh, and I'd also love to take the booth service for a couple of
hours, answering people's questions, showing them around in the environment,
etc.

> 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
>

--
Saso