KDE @ SCaLE 19X
I am happy to share that this year we were able to host the KDE booth at the 19th annual Southern California Linux Expo-SCaLE 19X that took place on July 28-31, 2022 at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport in LA, California.
SCaLE covers visitors from all over the United States and around the world. It is the largest, community-run, open-source, and free software conference in North America.
We collaborated with OpenSUSE, LOPSA and NextCloud with the vision to promote cross community growth and to provide outreach and knowledge regarding our communities.
Our booth was appreciated for a lot of things but the main attraction was the banner, attendees loved finding the logos of their favorite KDE tools. Our setup consisted of one big screen showcasing a promotional video of KDE, interactive laptops, Plasma Mobile, and lots of Katie and Konqui stickers.
I was pleasantly surprised to see the excitement attendees had seeing us participate; they were willing to know more about our products, and what was going on with the KDE community. People love experimenting on Plasma Desktop and had fun trying out our applications. Plasma Mobile was also a hot topic of discussion and attendees were very eager to know the updates regarding it. Amongst our attendees, we had a lot of college students interested in joining our community and contributing to open source projects in general.
Attendees of all ages showed a keen interest towards our GCompris Application, with lots of kids enjoying playing educational games. One of the attendees was part of the education administration of a local school district and even expressed some interest in integrating the application as a beta at a few schools.
This was the first time we offered swag at our booth and the Katie and Konqui Stickers were a big hit in attracting attendees to our booth.
We went into this conference with a specific goal of outreach and spreading the word about KDE and I believe we succeeded quite a bit as we got a chance to work at a grass-roots level and find the next generation of open source contributors who are excited about the future of KDE.
This entire conference would not have been possible without Drew Adams and the entire OpenSuse community who played a huge role in helping us get a foothold at this conference. On behalf of all of KDE we want to thank them and acknowledge all the hard work that was involved to make this event happen.
Hope to see you all at SCaLE 20X next year in March.
Till then Happy coding.