grabin' them at a tradeshow

So our cool booth dudes and dudettes are regularly hard at work at booths on tradeshows, telling people about our great community.

I've been there many times, and there are a few thoughts I'd like to share. This isn't just meant as a how-to or a finished plan but also to start a discussion - we can improve in some area's and why not discuss it in public so anyone can weight in and add comments ;-)

So here a few insights from others and me since the last happening at Linuxtag:

• first of all, the booth must be clean. Either we 'work' at the booth, or sit/hack somewhere else.


• We must make sure we know what we're selling. We should have a list of selling points. The promo team is on this, and we'll distribute it to booth attendants once it's done!


• Reciprocity: giving something makes ppl want to give something back. If we want to get them to sign up for our supporting membership, having some give-aways is important. This is related to the booth box, also in the works. But we currently don't have many give aways, as funds are limited. Should we put money in this?


• Have pretty things at the booth. We should have one or more cool devices in our booth box which ppl will want to play with. Touch screens +1! However, again something which might be costly, so we should probably ask sponsors for things.


• Ask questions. Not only to figure out what people want or are interested in to find an angle to talk to them, but also because questions simply make people more open.


• Use examples: talk about successful KDE deployments, how we have millions of users and how we get a lot of positive feedback!

I could go into the evil psychological schemes behind the these things, but they're probably clear. So who knows other things we can and should improve on at the booth?

Help KDE promo!

Hi all,

Again a little call for help...

Pretty picture
Soon, there will be a new release of our bunch'o'stuff ("KDE SC 4.5). We need a pretty picture for our blogs ;-)

Writing
If you're a writer, we're always looking for new authors. I've often have magazines ask me if I know anyone, you can even make a buck that way. Let me know!

book
The KDE promo team has worked on a booklet with information about the KDE community and our products for a long time. It's mostly done but needs 2 things: someone to push for finishing it, and someone to do layouting. If interested in either or both these tasks, let me know...

openhatch
Some of you might know Openhatch. It's a cool way to help people get involved in FOSS projects. We do have a little presence there, but there could be a lot more. Anyone up for being the official openhatch manager? Contact kde-promo to coordinate ;-)

Promo at Akademy

Hi all,

As you might have read, Lydia wrote about some ways of following what will be going on at Akademy. See, we do stuff ;-)

So the promo team has been working to prepare for Akademy. We've tried to get articles out every once in a while, get in contact with magazines and journalists etc. Meanwhile we are also working on a press kit (a first, afaik) and will try to take good care of our journalists. We'll have a press conference on the first day with the keynote speakers and of course we'll be working on the usual dot articles and other communication channels.

Meanwhile, we've had more plans than what we could finish (as usual). And we'll be needing help at Akademy itself as well. Someone needs to be in the press room, we need help doing interviews and dot articles and keep twitter & other media up to date.

Also I'm looking for a 'dedicated' photographer who will make sure we have plenty of good pictures readily available for us (flickr, the dot etc) and for our journalists.

So if anyone feels he/she could help out, let me know!

Flameworthy LinuxTag Notes

As I kind of promised in my previous blog - here some notes from LinuxTag, worked out in an opinion :D. Now this blog is different from my usual ones. While I do write about strategical stuff, I try to stay away from controversial things. Not this time, sorry.

KDE in the early days
At LT I spoke with quite a few interesting people, including Georg Greve (the dot will feature an interview with him soon) and Matthias Ettrich (who started this whole KDE thing). The latter had a fairly interesting opinion about his 'kid'. After we started talking about stuff not for this blog (mostly politics and economics) we came on the topic of why he started the KDE project.

Basically, it was to give the common user access to the freedom and power of a better platform (Unix/linux). When Gnome started he was fine with that as some in the KDE community moved over there and added a whole bunch of features he didn't want in KDE anyway. But at some point, Gnome and KDE started a feature race - which was lost by Gnome, so they re-focussed themselves on user experience with help from Sun. Basically, Gnome 2.0 was what Matthias had envisioned for KDE in terms of user experience. He decided things didn't go his way, and instead of fighting or following the new direction he stepped out and started working on Qt.

KDE now
Since then, a lot has changed. That doesn't include the difference in focus between Gnome and KDE - Matthias complained Gnome builds a great user experience on inferior technology, KDE creates super technology while not doing enough on usability. He's not wrong.

So KDE has created a very open culture which results in innovation, experimentation and new technology. The user experience, while more of a focus than in the KDE 3.x times, imho still ain't what it needs to be, might never be the way we currently work. At least, the finishing touch is boring and hard to do in such an open meritocracy.

How to create usable software
You'd need a strongly design-driven development for a finished, consistent experience, were developers follow a common vision laid out by a few brilliant designers. And follow through on the boring stuff. This simply doesn't fit how we work - developers decide on what happens to their applications and what they spend their free time on. So different applications have different ways of solving certain issues (like with the + hover button on folders). This leads to innovation, and in time to better solutions - but while these are fleshed out (and there is always SOMETHING going on) it makes the whole set of apps less consistent, less stable, less usable.

Users
Another issue is the large influence users have on how we work. Yes, that's right, I'm blaming active users here for unusable software. Many of our vocal users are powerusers and demand features easily accessible which only 1% of the world needs. And we cater to them, which often leads to a more bloathed piece of software. Especially removing functionality often leads to a big flamewar. Gnome simply ignores those who don't agree with the vision they have, and the end result is at least more consistent.

The last mile
Many in our community hoped the distributions or other commercial parties would be able to pick up where we left, and finish that last mile. They didn't - well, they tried, but every distribution which successfully did so either didn't contribute upstream (xandros) or went belly-up, was bought or had to change focus (mandrake/mandriva, suse). Ubuntu does the last mile for Gnome but Kubuntu lacks resources to do it for us.

What do we do?
Now we could start some top-down effort and force these things. Kill innovation, chase away a large proportion of our brilliant developers, having less fun. Please let's not. KDE, as it is, is great. We have a lot of fun, we innovate, and most of our current users love our products. So I am not advocating any change in how we work here. But we need to create a more usable and stable product if we want to grow beyond 1% of the market. So I think change needs to come from the outside. From a new start. How? I do have ideas, but I'll first put on my flamesuit and enjoy the heat...

What do you think?

LinuxTag from my view

So I finally took a little time to blog about LinuxTag. Still a lot of writing to do/finish (count on a bunch of articles and 1 or 2 longer blogs from me) but I should give a little shout out as to how amazing LinuxTag was.

Yes, for me it was amazing. Last year wasn't that useful (even though it was fun, maybe even more than now) but this year we spoke to a huge number of visitors, got quite a few to sign up for the supporting membership (and hopefully convinced many others to sign up later on), got away with a lot of business cards to follow up on and spoke with many other FOSS people. And as usual, there was a lot of hugging. I'd complain if there wasn't (must admit I had to surprise-hug a few ppl - what's wrong with a hug?).



Eckhard did a good job at organizing the booth stuff as usual, and boy, was he nervous the first morning... We all had to stay out of his way a little as he was jumping-jumping and trying to move the world a bit to make it fit better. Now it's surely the case we can improve a few things - we should set up booth rules at some point to prevent a few baddies (yes I know, baddies is not a word). For example, sitting at the booth for hacking is NOT GOOD. Yes, I did that too, a lot, sorry Eckhart...

Another rule I'd like to institute is "more Lea's". We actually thought about simply putting her in the booth box, but were afraid Daniel wouldn't like that. Lea? Oh, she was amazing... She came with her boyfriend and Amarok hacker Daniel Dewald, and initially was sitting in a corner of the booth, looking around with a face saying "wtf am I doing here". Understandable, of course, if you're not a big geek. So at some point I gave her the excellent talkpoints we had on paper about our supporting membership program (written by Sebas) which, in bulletpoints, explains what KDE e.V. is, does and why you should support it. Frederik and a few others gave her further info about KDE later on - and she turned out to be a wirlwind, eclipsing us all when it came to talking to visitors. I think over half the people who signed up at our booth for the supporting membership did so because they were approached and convinced by Lea!



And although the high heels on the first day didn't work out that well for her feet, she had a great time and claimed she wanted to do more conferences - sounds good to me, we can use some help...

Now of course I shouldn't dismiss the other people at the booth, I especially think Torsten Thelke (our KDE e.V. intern) did an amazing job, and so did Frederik in his sometimes-scary way. Yes, showing off Fluffy Bunny themed plasma desktops, then jumping some of your fellow booth mates for a hug could be off-putting. Especially for ppl with gay-fobia - I even heard some opposed the Fluffy Bunny project as it might make young boys gay. Interesting concept - I've heard of ppl claiming to be able to 'heal' gay ppl into being hetero, so pink could 'heal' hetero's into gays? Who knows... Either way, a warning for you all - Frederik, despite his hugging and happy nature, is NOT gay, and I would keep your girlfriends away from him as he's quite the womanizer.

There were at least 10 more booth people I should talk about but this blog is getting long and potentially boring so I'll stop... Count on two more blogs with less ppl content and more thoughts over the next week ;-)

booklet

2 days ago I wrote about the booklet the KDE promo team has been working on.

I noticed a few contributions, really cool!

However, those ppl did not add themselves to the authors list in the document - you should :D

And of course - keep on doing this! I'm looking for some ppl to help out in creating the layout and stuff, meanwhile, the text must be finished...

more writing!

Hi all,

Found someone for the interview I asked about last time, thanks! You'll see his name on the dot soon ;-)

There is however another writing job I have which is a bit different. At the last KDE marketing sprint we started working on a booklet which has as goal to introduce newcomers to KDE and it's products. This booklet has been shaping up nicely but there are a few things which need some more work and some reviewing would be great. Let me include the todo here:

* Add a few succes stories!

* On the bottom, help is needed from a developer or someone familiar with development to give some clues on how developers can get involved - more practical things. And some teasers like "phonon makes multimedia easy" or something.

* There should be a few more games mentioned in the learn & play section, maybe also some mor edu?

* Communicate needs text about KDE PIM

* Create needs a bit more text about KWord, KSpread etc

* the first page with short texts is not complete yet.

* introduction needs to be discussed

* reviewing text

* Screenshots

* Layout

* final review

* printing and celebrating!

This booklet can be a great source of information to people completely unaware of who we are and what we do, and thus make a great addition to booth boxes. Try to look at it from that perspective - if you know little of computers and nothing of KDE, what would you like to know?

As you see I've put 'add a few success stories' on top - I think it is very important to show our audience what we have accomplished already. A big deployment or two would rock. I've already written a piece about KHTML vs WebKit, it needs review of course and having more such stories would be great.

And as usual: if you doubt you'd be helpful, add your ideas and text anyway. Maybe add a comment - but in general, others will go over it and it'll turn out much better and far more useful than you might think ;-)

The current text can be found here:
https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AcGKfTnzk5_7ZGhoZ2JwamZfN2M1OTNjdGNk&hl=en

Special thanks to those who have already contributed - Luca Beltrame, Stuart Jarvis, Justin Kirby, Roger Pixley, Carl Symons, Vivek Prakash, Lydia Pintscher, Valerie Hoh, Pradeepto, Frederik Gladhorn, Daniel Laidig, Eckhart Woerner, Claudia Rauch AND YOU?

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions but keep in mind: pretty much anything is useful, really. Having some text to work with makes it very easy for some of us to go in and finish it up (for ex. Carl is real good at that). So just go ahead. Google docs (we're moving to Etherpad but this was started on G-docs) has nice rollback so don't worry about breaking stuff. Again, any help or any comments are welcome!