Organization of KDE Events

Speakers: Claire Lotion and Martijn Klingens

With the growth of KDE there are more and more events that require some form of organization, from setting up a booth at a trade show to organizing a contributor meeting from scratch. These events are important for KDE, but unfortunately we have to let opportunities pass because only a handful of people is involved with event preparation and their time is not infinite.

Many people perceive event organization as something scary and feel like they are not up to the task, often because they simply don't know what exactly needs to be done. More information about the various organizational stages would alleviate the work tremendously, because it provides exactly that -- guidelines about what roughly needs to be done and when.

The KDE Marketing Team is working to improve this by providing guidelines, ready-made document templates and even a complete 'booth kit' with all the materials needed for setting up a small KDE booth. Documentation for hosting a contributor meeting is also in the works. Much of this material is based on the experiences of the Dutch KDE team, which has gained a lot of experience with event presence.

In this presentation Claire Lotion and Martijn Klingens will talk about what needs to be done to organize an event and about the various resources that the KDE Marketing Team has created over the past year. The focus will be on the three most common events, small informal meetings for local KDE groups like KDE-NL, booth presence at trade shows and contributor meetings.

If KDE wants to be more present at various events and organize more contributor meetings we need more people to help out, and these resources lower the barrier to entry substantially. There is no reason anymore why you can't organize an event yourself!

The presentation will take about 20 minutes and will be followed by 10 minutes of Q&A and discussion.

Claire Lotion

Claire Lotion is studying Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. At an early age she developed an interest for technology in general and computers in particular. She gained professional experience through jobs like working as a software engineer at the Dutch software company TJIP BV, and volunteering as a member of the system administration team of various student associations.

In recent years, her focus shifted to marketing and organization related activities. This is reflected by her assessment of project team communication at TJIP BV and her work as the President of the board of the Electrical Engineering Society (ETV) during her studies. Claire started off within KDE as a translator in the Dutch local group. She gradually got more involved in activities of KDE-Netherlands, and joined the KDE Marketing Team. Within KDE-NL and the Marketing Team, Claire is focusing on documenting and streamlining the workflow for organizing events.

Organization of KDE events and KDE booth presence at events is one of the key activities of KDE. Most KDE volunteers have to combine their KDE contribution with day jobs, families and social lives. Current efforts are severely hampered by the lack of turn-key solutions, such as handbooks and templates, and a missing collaboration and communication framework. Claire's mission is to capture methods and best practices in order to create a solid organizational basis for future organization teams.

Martijn Klingens

Martijn Klingens has studied Computer Science in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. His broad interest in computer topics ranging from programming to system administration is also reflected by the contrast between his KDE activities and his day job, where he works as a Unix/Linux engineer for Yacht, one of the biggest Dutch contracting agencies.

Within KDE, Martijn has focused on several vastly different tasks since joining the project 6 years ago. Starting out as developer and maintainer of the KDE bug report wizard, he moved over to development of KDE code. His biggest development project to date has been KDE's messaging platform Kopete, where he has been one of the architects of the application's central library.

Martijn's interest in non-development activities has been growing over time, and he got more involved in the activities of KDE-Netherlands. During last year's aKademy in Malaga, Martijn has been one of the persons behind the formation of the KDE Marketing Working Group, becoming one of the members of the first installment of this working group.

Within the Marketing Team Martijn is focusing on coordinating the activities and creating a coherent platform that centralizes and documents all activities on SpreadKDE.org. Having this information readily available to all KDE contributors is one of the keys to making KDE enter the mainstream market.

Media

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Slides (PDF) (5.3M)
Video (Ogg) (163M)