FOSDEM 2014

See other FOSDEMs

Who What Where When Why

GNOME Developers from all across Europe get together to meet old friends, discuss new technologies and other GNOME related stuff at the FOSDEM Conference, and especially in the crossdesktop devroom. Contrary to the previous years, GNOME doesn't have a dedicated devroom this year, but we'll share one with our fellow KDE, XFCE, ... hackers during the whole FOSDEM.

Please let us know you're coming by adding your name to list. Check the FOSDEM website for more information about the main conference.

• When: February 1-2, 2014

GNOME Stand

To help with the GNOME stand to promote GNOME and share goodies with people, or if you have any idea for the stand: /Stand.

Please let us know that you're coming: sign up on /Stand#attendees. It will help us organize things.

Saturday Evening

We organize a GNOME event in a bar on Saturday evening. Like the previous years, it will happen at « La Bécasse » where there is a great collection of Belgian beers, particularly lambic, gueuze, and kriek. There will be more details available at the GNOME booth.

• http://www.alabecasse.com/en/info.html

• http://www.alabecasse.com/en/drinks.html

• rue de Tabora 11 (2 minutes from the Grand Place)

• Location in Google Maps

Here's the Google+ Event

Questions:

• Is smoking allowed?

No, smoking is prohibited in the whole bar.

• When can I arrive?

We have the first floor booked for us from 21 but you can probably arrive a bit earlier if you want to.

• Where are you guys?

We have the whole first floor for us, the stairs are on the left when you enter into the bar.

• Where are the beers?

To make things easier, beers have to be ordered and paid at the bar on the ground floor.

• What should I drink?

I strongly suggest you to try the "Lambic Doux" and "Lambic Blanc" which you can find only in this bar! It's served in big jugs so you can order a big one for a bunch of people. Speaking of ordering, it would be nice to try to group orders as much as possible to make the life of the waiters easier.

• Wow, these beers are awesome and now I'm drunk and hungry!

Don't panic, the bar is just in front of one the best french fries place of Brussels: Tabora.

• How do I get back to my Hotel or the place where I'm staying after?

Fortunately the bar is right near the starting point of all the night bus in Brussels, called the Noctis network, these runs from 0.15 a.m to 3 a.m. For the lists of buses or a plan, see http://www.stib.be/noctis.html?l=en

Alternatively you can take a taxis, there are plenty in the center of Brussels so it's easy to find one.

• Oh, I know "La Bécasse" it's like 2 minutes from the ULB!

No, it's not! There is two bar called "La Bécasse" in Brussels; the one where we'll be Saturday night is in the city center, NOT the one close to the ULB/FOSDEM

Aftermath

Let's list the things we need to improve for the next time so that we can have an even better presence. So the stuff in here should either be gotten or taken care of next year. Feel free to put things in here that worked well or did not work so great. Please have a look at the old feedback: ../2013/#feedback

• We should have more balloons! They're a good way of making ourselves present away from the stand.
• Need t-shirts in a range of sizes (we ran out of some sizes quite early), including childrens.
  • We had requests for generic GNOME t-shirts.
• People coming to the stand often seem to want to take something away with them. Ideas for this:
  • A leaflet (or infographic) with an overview of the key developer tools/resources for GNOME (could cover libraries, tools, websites, etc).
    • Maybe a developer quick start? (Build your first gnome app in a couple page leaflet, using some of our new tutorials).
  • Friends of GNOME leaflets (with details about how money is spent, what the Foundation is, etc).
  • GNOME 3 quick reference (shortcuts, etc).
  • GNOME 3 live image on a USB stick for cost of the stick (see 'Things to buy' and 'Possible activities' below).
• It would be nice to have things to buy other than t-shirts/stickers/posters.
  • Mugs?
  • Keyrings?
  • USB sticks?
• GNOME Foundation donation box.

• Our demo hardware doesn't show GNOME in the best light - the screen on the demo machine isn't very high quality, and GNOME doesn't really work on the WeTab.

  • Could we get a better screen for the existing box?
  • We should make sure that we have a couple of the Chromebook Pixels next time.
  • It might be interesting to demo a Wacom tablet - since we have good support for those, and people might be interested to try one (also, they can be quite cheap, or maybe Wacom would like to donate one).
• Possible activities to have around the stand:
  • Make your own GNOME t-shirt or pin badge activity.
  • GNOME "Genius Bar" - get your GNOME bug fixed by the experts. (Or simply "talk to a developer".)
  • Get GNOME installed on a USB stick.
• We could try to have a more prominent visual presence in the future. Other stands had big banners that were suspended high up in the air, which made them easy to see from a distance or when lots of people are stood in front of the stand. In our case, or main banner was obscured by the t-shirts we hung up (see picture below).
  • Visually, it would also be beneficially to have a smaller number of larger banners and posters, that use a consistent colour scheme.
  • On the plus side, the stand up banner opposite to the booth was super effective.
  • The design below has one idea for giving us a more prominent visual presence - it involves: 1. Getting a new, bigger banner. 2. Replacing the suspended line of t-shirts with posters for the various designs and prices (this could be helpful anyway, since we can show prices for each design and which sizes are available). 3. Getting a table cloth that matches the color of the banners.

  • We could try to leverage the developer potential of our audience at FOSDEM. We can suppose people to be technically inclined. We would need to prepare a lot, but if we had a development environment readily available (USB pendrive) we could ask people to fix a tiny bug for a t-shirt. Or translate a handful of strings or so. Taken to the extreme, we would have a small "fixing" corner where a few people sit and are instructed by someone of us.

Photo of the 2014 stand:

Possible design for next year:

CategoryEvent