GCDS day whatever

GCDS is continuing. The party Monday night was very quiet for me, and I noticed many other people being rather quiet as well. Guess we should have at least one day between parties so people can gain their strength back.

Anyway. Lots of stuff going on here. We've moved to the university. It's hot here, no airco. But power and a cable for every chair - very good network. I'm now listening to Gokmen who's talking about Pardus and KDE integration. On my left there is Jonathan with a beach pic of him and our BUGSQUAD mistress (we all know who she is...).

Yesterday the two PR ppl (Thomas Keup, GNOME and me) planned a cross-desktop marketing meeting. Well, it was initially planned for Thursday morning, then moved to Tuesday. Me being slightly off on Monday, I failed to notice there was the KDE e.V. meeting. No cross-desktop meeting after all.

We did have some interesting discussions while we planned the bof, and I'll try to put some of the ideas we had here (or rather, MY interpretation, don't go and kick Thomas for what I say).

The goal we have is to get a bottom-up approach in marketing for the Free Desktop. As both KDE and GNOME can do this, we wanted to discuss this together. This is not about technical plans or roadmaps - it is about getting people enthusiastic and get them to spread the word about what they love.

That's basically the point - love. Why do we love KDE or GNOME? Those reasons are different for everyone, but often emotional rather than rational. This is a well known fact - how do you get people to believe you? Focus on emotion rather than ration. So we need to know what emotions we feel and convey them to others.

According to research there are 5 important areas people are sensitive to these days:
- Persionalisation
- Emotionalisation
- Simplicity
- Eco-awareness
- Austerity (less is more)

To keep things simple, I'll group this into three, cuz personally that's how I feel about these:
Personal
Simple
Good

So how does KDE make you happy in these area's?

For me, one of the strongest points of KDE is how personal it is - you can make it look and work any way you want. Especially plasma is very good in this department. It makes me feel like my laptop is really mine - compare it to putting a sticker on something that's yours, or painting your room, or even picking your own clothes. Wouldn't it be boring if we all were wearing the same grey clothes?

And of course a second part of this is the community - all the great people here are so cool. The new Social Desktop initiative is already bringing the KDE community to your desktop - in KDE 4.3 there is the social desktop widget showing KDE users in your neighborhood! You'd be surprised how many people within 5 kilometers of my home already are testing KDE 4.3 and run this applet.

Simplicity is there in many area's - take network management, it is far easier with the networkmanager plasmoid in KDE than on windows or mac. The same goes for many other things, and I like that a lot.

Finally, I truly believe contributing to Free Software (and just USING is contributing already and makes you a real member of the KDE community) is very important to the world. Thanks to what we do, children in Brazil and other countries all over the world have access to good education. Thanks to what we do the reliance of governments around the world on a small number of large corporations is decreased. Thanks to Free Software computers don't need to be replaced as often and use less power, helping our environment. We spread freedom in China and other countries were freedom is limited. We allow computer users around the world to take back control over their own hardware. After all, in a world where speech depends on software, Free Speech depends on Free Software*.

So. Think about this. Why do you love KDE? What is it that makes you happy? Then go and tell people about it. Tell your boyfriend, tell your girlfriend. Tell your friends, family. Boss, colleagues, competitors. The pizza boy, the cleaning lady. Everyone!

I'd love to hear some blogs about what makes you love KDE!

Another piece of Cool Stuff from GCDS:
Will Stephenson just said he was green (SUSE green, of course) with envy about the work Pardus has done on KDE integration, and he said we, as KDE community, should applaud them for it. And so we did ;-)
(their tools are integrated in plasma and systemsettings, they use KDE things like Solid and Phonon etc etc - really makes for a unique and smooth experience).

There is more talk going on about cross-distro collaboration, getting (more) tools upstream and such. I'd love that ;-)

I' working on two articles for those not here to give an impression of this conference and to tell ya'all about the cross-desktop collaboration, sit tight!


* by Don Marti jr.