Franz Keferböck

The KDE project was recently invited to come and present itself at the OpenExpo 2008 Bern, Switzerland, which i am happy to take up and organise. However, though the event will not be until 12th/13th of March, the Call for Papers ends already this Friday, Nov. 30th!

Busy with University and the KDE 4 Release Event MV, CA i completely missed that it’s already Tuesday, so my personal “punishment” will of course be to do a presentation on the KDE community and structure (i guess, not completely decided on the topic yet…), and Mario Fux, also part of the OpenExpo organisation team, offered a talk as well. However, more input and possible talks very welcome, besides, we also need people to man our KDE booth (i’d seen Alexandra Leisse raising her hand already…)!

So if you are in Switzerland, southern Germany, south west of France, north western Italy, Liechtenstein or western Austria, and you are willing to meet people and get involved with the project (short: fun!) – or you know all the people already and are in the project and want to give a talk (short: also fun…) – then let me know (via the kde-promo list or the soon to be announced wiki page…)!So, and finally one paragraph not to end with an ! . But it’s so exciting!

update: the already mentioned wiki page can be found here.

update: there seems to be utter interest in KOffice 2 – which i think is cool! Anybody nearby who can serve this topic properly ?

Thanks Aaron for indirectly reminding me of this hilariously funny parody on our “most favorite” office application! Who said we’d need KSpread to be stupid…?

update: as the very first comment complained this would be offensive, i want to make clear that this is not meant to offend Hip Hop – i also don’t consider it to be against MS Word. I actually do listen to some Hip Hop, and the wording used it an exaggeration of an actually used language of today’s Hip Hop culture. If one reads carefully, i indirectly refer to it as “being stupid” – so this was through and through just meant to make people smile… Oh, and referring to the image’s origin: It’s not made by my obviously, but is from a friend’s friend (as far as i know he did some arts school).

Before actually getting to where i wanted, hi and hugs to the planetKDE readers! I’ve been around in mailinglists and with work for a while now, but i never managed to introduce myself on the planet – not even blog at all! Well, here i am, in Dresden right now taking the chance of a break to report…

The fair is pretty small – but quite nice and is doing some good for free software here, there’s a lot of potential users, mostly young students and elderly people who on the one hand happen to show up at the “wrong” booth asking the “wrong” questions (but how should they know the differences between KDE, Kubuntu and Linux – i’m not complaining here), on the other hand really show interest and want to be informed (rather than just taking CDs). Giving insight on this layered ecosystem of choice is actually a lot of fun! The questions it whether we come up to their expectations (system wise as well as presentation wise).

And you know what? We do! Jos is doing a fantastic job in showing all the cool mini-features that make KDE so pretty (even to us…), and Tobias Pfeiffer and me are given little time to relax either. I gave a Plasma workshop this morning, introducing plasma applet development with ECMA Script (the outcome of an improved script-applet and the scripts used will be made available soon), Jos was presenting a visual guide to KDE4 and Tobias König did a more advanced introduction to it. KDE is very strong and getting stronger with people getting their hands on a current KDE4 build.

OK, now that i’ve finished writing (using several of these “breaks” mentioned above) it’s almost 6pm. Pictures will follow soon, promise