Franz Keferböck

Wow, there’s been four days of aKademy now, and there has been so much exciting happening to me… first off, i’m on PlanetKDE (so hi there!). Second, i was accepted as a member of KDE e.V. – thank you very much, it means a lot to me! Thanks especially to Sebas and Adriaan for supporting me with actually showing me how valuable promotional and marketing work is – so for KDE. And that’s just about what i intend to push further, i guess i can do it, it’s good fun, and there’s so much i get back (now that’s cheesy, but yes, the feeling to be active part of the community).

Then there’s one thing i’d like to do – and i’ll start with this post: Aaron was complaining once, that people is well posting about their technical process they’re having, but it’s only him giving those nice insights into his reallife. Well, i’m not a celebrity (well, yes, that term was actually used by some guy in a pub, telling his girlfriend who we where – greetz in case you read this) and generally doing so would just so bore you. But there are quite a lot KDE related incidents, that i guess are worth being told…

So yesterday – after the official evening programme – a whole cluster of KDE people moved over to a pub cross St. George’s Square. Been there before, cheap, nice. When an older guy (hi, Leo!) next to the table we decided to occupy came to ask if us was some international students, having some student’s night in there (not sure if he was kinda scared of this idea…). Telling him that we were not, i happened to end up in a longer conversation with him (i’m talkin’ ’bout hours). Thing is, i really stayed with answering his questions, not distracting him with technical detail, kept things simple. And he was oh soooo interested, kept on asking, and really got hooked up by the ideas of open source – and KDE. I managed to get him a LiveCD (thanks, Jos) and explained the problems of proprietary formats, the problems governments impose on citizens by (implicitly) forcing certain software on people – sometime not even realizing so!
OK, now usually even people who’s sitting alone in a pub will turn a conversation on computer science down (well i would, if it wasn’t in my explicit interest), so either he was _really_ brave, or just plain interested. Still it was really cool!