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FOSDEM 2006

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Stefan Urbanek

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Mar 1, 2006, 3:28:17 AM3/1/06
to GNUstep Discussion
Hi,

How was the FOSDEM 2006? Any success/achievements for GNUstep? What was the
feedback of others?

Regards,

Stefan Urbanek
--
http://stefan.agentfarms.net

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then
you win.
- Mahatma Gandhi


Sašo Kiselkov

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Mar 2, 2006, 2:37:37 PM3/2/06
to Stefan Urbanek, discuss...@gnu.org
Quoting Stefan Urbanek <ste...@agentfarms.net>:

> Hi,
>
> How was the FOSDEM 2006? Any success/achievements for GNUstep? What was the
> feedback of others?
>

For my part, I can say that I successfully borded everyone at the GNUstep Core
Data presentation almost into coma and technically screwed it up on the
ProjectManager presentation :-) Thanks, Nicolas, for letting me borrow your
machine for the presentation.

Honestly though, I think that the overall GNUstep presence on FOSDEM 2006 was
really poor. By that I don't mean that few people of the GNUstep core team
attended - no way - but I think we could have done so much more about the
GNUstep booth, material, promotion and activity. Next year I'd like to
participate more in this part of the process - getting more attention to
GNUstep. We really need to show to _every_single_passant_ that we are a whole
lot different from the KDE/Gnome/Ubuntu/Debian... folks just a few steps away.
We need to stand out and shine! :-)

--
Saso

h...@computer.org

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Mar 3, 2006, 2:36:20 AM3/3/06
to
> attended - no way - but I think we could have done so much more about the
> GNUstep booth, material, promotion and activity. Next year I'd like to
> participate more in this part of the process - getting more attention to
> GNUstep. We really need to show to _every_single_passant_ that we are a whole
> lot different from the KDE/Gnome/Ubuntu/Debian... folks just a few steps away.
> We need to stand out and shine! :-)

I completely agree!

Having the classes was great - between 10 and 30 attendees. But what I
would like to see in addition is an (open) developer's discussion
session (about targets, timelines, future projects, next FOSDEM plans,
etc.). Other projects did have this in their agenda and it gives
prospective users more confidence in a project.

But what was missing (compared to other projects) was to sell or
distribute
- most recent brochures
- CDs with debian and other prebuilt packages, plus recent source
tree
- T-Shirts
- Books
- screen shots at the pin-board

The issue of "sell" might be that we are not an official organization
with a president, treasurer etc. Therefore we also have no money to
spend for such activities.

And for "book" we don't have one. Helge suggested to me to write one
and I have started to create a concept so that we have by next FOSDEM
some "GNUstep in a nutshell". I would volunteer as the editior and we
need some authors. Some chapters can be easily based on the slides
presented during FOSDEM 06. Ideas and volunteers welcome!

-- hns

Nicolas Roard

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Mar 4, 2006, 8:27:41 AM3/4/06
to Sašo Kiselkov, Stefan Urbanek, discuss...@gnu.org
On 3/2/06, Sašo Kiselkov <dia...@manga.sk> wrote:
> Quoting Stefan Urbanek <ste...@agentfarms.net>:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > How was the FOSDEM 2006? Any success/achievements for GNUstep? What was the
> > feedback of others?
> >
>
> For my part, I can say that I successfully borded everyone at the GNUstep Core
> Data presentation almost into coma and technically screwed it up on the
> ProjectManager presentation :-) Thanks, Nicolas, for letting me borrow your
> machine for the presentation.

I'm just sorry I didn't think to show you immediately how to make []
and {} with a french keyboard ;-)

Anyway I think I'll be able to cut that during the video editing, so,
no worry ;-)

> Honestly though, I think that the overall GNUstep presence on FOSDEM 2006 was
> really poor. By that I don't mean that few people of the GNUstep core team

> attended - no way - but I think we could have done so much more about the
> GNUstep booth, material, promotion and activity. Next year I'd like to
> participate more in this part of the process - getting more attention to
> GNUstep. We really need to show to _every_single_passant_ that we are a whole
> lot different from the KDE/Gnome/Ubuntu/Debian... folks just a few steps away.
> We need to stand out and shine! :-)

Well I sure as hell wouldn't have mind some help :-)

My view for this fosdem is that it wasn't too bad (from a gnustep
point of view):
- we had a booth
- we had a devroom
- we had interesting talks
- we had people assisting to the talks ;-) (and not just gnustep dev)
- we had prospectus to distribute on the booth
- we had many gnustep people attending too and interesting discussions.
- we even filmed some of the talks (sadly not all of them due to
technical problems)

So I think that all in all it wasn't such a bad presence, but I'm
perhaps saying that because there was progress from previous years
(though obviously not as much as we could have had)

Now, obviously, we certainly can improve a lot what we did:
- we should have had a much better organized booth
- we could have had a better organized talk session too -- and our own
videoprojector would have been very helpful sunday, when all we got
was a very blue tinted projector.. :-/

Problems with the booth:
- we didn't have a proper organized rotation of people on the booth /
devroom talks
- we didn't have an exciting booth -- nothing to show, no demo, just
people behind a booth with prospectus.
- we didn't distribute a live cd

Better rotation is just a matter of slightly better organisation, and
if we do that just a tad bit more in advance it won't be a problem.
This year we started early, then more or less forgot / were too busy
to do anything until a couple of weeks before the event...

An exciting booth is a bit more tricky to do; here, we would need some
materials:
- at least one computer / screen showing a gnustep environment people
can play with
- if we can, the ideal would be to have more computers, and then we
can show for example the same app running in different environments;
we can also have some "demo" sessions people could assist on the booth
at regular interval.. or we could have some pre-recorded demos on the
computers, etc.
- we really need an up to date live cd to distribute to people. Most
people won't make the effort of installing a full gnustep system, with
all the problems that could arise, unless they are already convainced.
But most of the same people will try a livecd in a heartbeat.
- We could even have specific livecd - eg, imagine a "desktop" livecd,
a "development" livecd, an "opengroupware" livecd, etc. Or we could
stick everything properly configured on one livecd but display a nice
menu system at login so people come up with a ready to use environment
for the specific topic... there's a lot of things we could do on a
livecd.

Also for the event itself, I think it would be neat to meet a day
before somehow. Perhaps if we plan that much earlier this time, it
will be possible ? Because that way we could:
- hack together on some problems
- discuss things
- do the last bits for preparing the event
and that will let us enjoy much more the fosdem itself, while having a
better prepared presence.

Anyway, those are just comments/ideas, as usual, what we need is
actual volunteer to tackle the jobs...

Cheers,

ps: I'll try to upload the videos of the talks next week. If you
didn't already send me your slides, please do it :-)

--
Nicolas Roard
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-Arthur C. Clarke


Sašo Kiselkov

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Mar 4, 2006, 6:48:08 PM3/4/06
to nic...@roard.com, discuss...@gnu.org
Quoting Nicolas Roard <nicola...@gmail.com>:

Alright, I've seen lots of people with machines, brilliant machines, I think,
right? We also got one LCD this year, so employ that as well. E.g. we could
have:

- used my (crappy, but functional) notebook for showing GNUstep on a plain
Linux system. I also have FreeBSD 5 installed, so we could have demo'ed that as
well.
- Nicolas' machine for showing off GNUstep with Camaelon, and perhaps the
Etoile system
- some Apple hardware for showing that the same apps can run on GNUstep and OSX
- some x86 hardware to show that GNUstep is even available on Windows
- some other hardware (connected to the LCD we had) showing a
presentation/video on GNUstep - something flashy, with sound and talk. Quentin,
how about your portable?

Seriously people, we had the hardware resources for a very fancy booth.

> - we really need an up to date live cd to distribute to people. Most
> people won't make the effort of installing a full gnustep system, with
> all the problems that could arise, unless they are already convainced.
> But most of the same people will try a livecd in a heartbeat.

Yes, this is a full "thumbs up" by me. LiveCDs are a really neat way how to demo
some system.

> - We could even have specific livecd - eg, imagine a "desktop" livecd,
> a "development" livecd, an "opengroupware" livecd, etc. Or we could
> stick everything properly configured on one livecd but display a nice
> menu system at login so people come up with a ready to use environment
> for the specific topic... there's a lot of things we could do on a
> livecd.

I think one LiveCD would be enough, we just need to structure the environment on
it properly.

> Also for the event itself, I think it would be neat to meet a day
> before somehow. Perhaps if we plan that much earlier this time, it
> will be possible ? Because that way we could:
> - hack together on some problems
> - discuss things
> - do the last bits for preparing the event
> and that will let us enjoy much more the fosdem itself, while having a
> better prepared presence.

Sure, I'm all for it, unfortunatelly, my schedule wasn't, at least not this year
-_-;

> Anyway, those are just comments/ideas, as usual, what we need is
> actual volunteer to tackle the jobs...

Perhaps some GNUstep merchandize, like GNUstep T-shirts, GNUstep mouse pads,
GNUstep stickers, etc. Though I'm not sure we could so easily afford these yet.
Quickly lurking through the Internet, I calculated that 20 T-shirts come to
around 60 EUR, 30 T-shirts to ~85 EUR, and 50 T-shirts around ~130 EUR.

As for helping out: I'll always be helping out with coding :-) Etoile is still
far away from being end-user accessible. By next year's FOSDEM, I'd like this
not to be the case anymore. Also, I'll keep on improving other apps,
frameworks, and stuff generally :-) As for the actual event organization: I'd
like to do the GNUstep presentation/video, donate my machine into service at the
GNUstep booth as a sandbox for people to fool around with, and I'd love to have
some talks about either GNUstep in general, or Etoile or some other, more
specific part. Oh, and I'd also love to take the booth service for a couple of
hours, answering people's questions, showing them around in the environment,
etc.

> Cheers,
>
> ps: I'll try to upload the videos of the talks next week. If you
> didn't already send me your slides, please do it :-)
>
> --
> Nicolas Roard
> "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
> -Arthur C. Clarke
>

--
Saso

Jesse Ross

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Mar 5, 2006, 11:16:00 PM3/5/06
to GNUstep Discussion List
> But what was missing (compared to other projects) was to sell or
> distribute
> - most recent brochures
> - CDs with debian and other prebuilt packages, plus recent source
> tree
> - T-Shirts
> - Books
> - screen shots at the pin-board

<snip>

> And for "book" we don't have one. Helge suggested to me to write one
> and I have started to create a concept so that we have by next FOSDEM
> some "GNUstep in a nutshell". I would volunteer as the editior and we
> need some authors. Some chapters can be easily based on the slides
> presented during FOSDEM 06. Ideas and volunteers welcome!

Great ideas!

If we do the book idea, I would certainly do whatever
design/typesetting would be needed, and we might want to consider
getting a bunch printed up on-demand style (a la CafePress) to sell --
shouldn't be too terribly expensive and we can always direct people to
the site to purchase it if we sell out :)


J.


Gregory John Casamento

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Mar 5, 2006, 11:44:58 PM3/5/06
to Jesse Ross, GNUstep Discussion List
All,

I, of course, volunteer to write the Gorm section.   It would also be good if the book was available under a free license (like the GPL, the GFDL has some faults) and available on the website.
 
Later, GJC
--
Gregory John Casamento
Principal Consultant, Open Logic Corp.
_______________________________________________
Discuss-gnustep mailing list
Discuss...@gnu.org
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep

Gerold Rupprecht

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Mar 6, 2006, 7:42:48 AM3/6/06
to Jesse Ross, Discuss...@gnu.org
Hello,

I would be willing to proofread and review. English is my mother
tongue, and I have some experience...

Sincerely,
Gerold Rupprecht

Quentin Mathé

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Mar 6, 2006, 8:24:45 PM3/6/06
to Discuss GNUstep
Le 5 mars 06 à 00:48, Sašo Kiselkov a écrit :

> Alright, I've seen lots of people with machines, brilliant
> machines, I think,
> right? We also got one LCD this year, so employ that as well. E.g.
> we could
> have:
>
> - used my (crappy, but functional) notebook for showing GNUstep on
> a plain
> Linux system. I also have FreeBSD 5 installed, so we could have
> demo'ed that as
> well.
> - Nicolas' machine for showing off GNUstep with Camaelon, and
> perhaps the
> Etoile system
> - some Apple hardware for showing that the same apps can run on
> GNUstep and OSX
> - some x86 hardware to show that GNUstep is even available on Windows
> - some other hardware (connected to the LCD we had) showing a
> presentation/video on GNUstep - something flashy, with sound and
> talk. Quentin,
> how about your portable?

Do you mean my Mac mini ?… If I haven't resold it at this time, I
would be glad to bring it with me.
I hope to have a laptop next year also (not sure though).

Cheers,
Quentin.

--
Quentin Mathé
qma...@club-internet.fr

Helge Hess

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Mar 6, 2006, 9:00:10 PM3/6/06
to Discuss-gnustep Discussion
On 5. Mrz 2006, at 00:48 Uhr, Sašo Kiselkov wrote:
> I'm not sure we could so easily afford these yet.
> Quickly lurking through the Internet, I calculated that 20 T-shirts
> come to
> around 60 EUR, 30 T-shirts to ~85 EUR, and 50 T-shirts around ~130
> EUR.

I think we could easily afford this. But where do you get 50 shirts
for 2.50 EUR? :-) Unfortunately your calculation seems to be broken.

Also I wonder how many shirts would be neeeded.

Greets,
Helge
--
http://docs.opengroupware.org/Members/helge/
OpenGroupware.org

Sašo Kiselkov

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Mar 7, 2006, 2:24:37 AM3/7/06
to h...@computer.org, discuss...@gnu.org
Quoting h...@computer.org:

Hmm, I don't think a full book would be very good for a start. Perhaps we should
rather start with a slight bit overgrown brochure, like 20-30, perhaps 40 pages.
You know, like the distro manuals - 30 pages total, 4-5 color pages on glossy
paper for nice pictures, harder paper cover, paperback binding. I don't,
however, have any experience at organizing this kind of thing, so the only
contribution I could make is with some contents of the brochure...

--
Saso

Helge Hess

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Mar 7, 2006, 10:22:06 AM3/7/06
to Discuss-gnustep Discussion
On 7. Mrz 2006, at 08:24 Uhr, Sašo Kiselkov wrote:
> Hmm, I don't think a full book would be very good for a start.
> Perhaps we should rather start with a slight bit overgrown
> brochure, like 20-30, perhaps 40 pages.
> You know, like the distro manuals - 30 pages total, 4-5 color pages
> on glossy
> paper for nice pictures, harder paper cover, paperback binding. I
> don't,
> however, have any experience at organizing this kind of thing, so
> the only
> contribution I could make is with some contents of the brochure...

The major issue is selling those brochures. Do you want to do that?

Thats the difference to a publishing company which takes care that a
book is sold.
Note: don't expect to make any money from such a book, its usually
consumed by the production costs at least in the first revision :-)

Sašo Kiselkov

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Mar 8, 2006, 4:02:57 AM3/8/06
to Helge Hess, discuss...@gnu.org
Quoting Helge Hess <helge...@opengroupware.org>:

Of course I don't want to make money, I want to "spread the word" :-) If I
wanted to make money, I wouldn't participate in the GNUstep project in the
first place.

--
Saso

Helge Hess

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Mar 8, 2006, 12:29:06 PM3/8/06
to Discuss-gnustep Discussion
On 8. Mrz 2006, at 10:02 Uhr, Sašo Kiselkov wrote:
> Of course I don't want to make money, I want to "spread the word" :-)

Not sure, but maybe you misunderstood me.

The production of the brochure costs money which someone needs to pay
for, so you either find a sponsor for that (I guess this is hard,
because producing nice-looking brochures is quite expensive) or you
need to sell the brochure to cover the costs (which is also hard and
involves up-front costs).

You don't have this problem with a book (even if its a small one)
produced by a publisher. Of course it spreads less because people
have to pay for it, but it doesn't cost you a dime except the work
put in :-)

Jesse Ross

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Mar 8, 2006, 6:54:08 PM3/8/06
to discuss...@gnu.org
> The production of the brochure costs money which someone needs to pay
> for, so you either find a sponsor for that (I guess this is hard,
> because producing nice-looking brochures is quite expensive) or you
> need to sell the brochure to cover the costs (which is also hard and
> involves up-front costs).
>
> You don't have this problem with a book (even if its a small one)
> produced by a publisher. Of course it spreads less because people
> have to pay for it, but it doesn't cost you a dime except the work
> put in :-)

Unless we can find a way to do it "on-demand", such as via CafePress. We could
then pick up a small quantity (purchase them ourselves) to sell at FOSDEM next
year. If each person bought one book, and each person sold that book, we would
just recoup our costs. The books wouldn't cost more than probably $20 per
person (depending on size and binding options), and if we sold out, we could
always direct people to our CafePress page. Brochures might be a bit
different,
but we might be able to find a similar vendor, or see if one of the CafePress
book options works for us.

It's maybe not the most beautiful option, and we do still each have to spend a
bit of money, but it lets us produce something without having to secure a
publisher first.

J.

Sašo Kiselkov

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Mar 9, 2006, 2:58:19 AM3/9/06
to Jesse Ross, discuss...@gnu.org
Quoting Jesse Ross <gnu...@jesseross.com>:

I probably used the wrong word, I ment somelike a small booklet - 20-30 pages,
not more. I think we could produce and sell like 50 of those at FOSDEM without
them costing too much. I've seen people gather up sums far greater than this
just by mere force of will, so I think it's not at all impossible.

--
Saso

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