FOSDEM Report

[Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org>]

Hi,

The GNOME presence at FOSDEM this year was quite good, and I believe
things went (surprisingly ;-)) smoothly:

 + we had a good booth, thanks to the event box, t-shirts, stickers,
   and most importantly thanks to the amazing volunteers.
 + the devroom went quite well, with a good attendance and interesting
   talks: http://live.gnome.org/Brussels2010/Devroom. On Sunday, the
   room became a cross-desktop devroom.
 + the beer event on Saturday evening was a good place to catch up with
   GNOME friends.
 + it's always a great feeling to see many people wearing on Sunday the
   GNOME t-shirt they bought on Saturday :-)

I quickly looked for pictures:
   booth: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mariosp/4341072001/
   stickers: http://www.flickr.com/photos/itkovian/4337980448/
   t-shirts: hrm, I can't find a picture (?). I'm sure someone can fix
             this!

Here's a quick list of things to improve for next year:

 + have nametags for GNOME people. This helps various people,
   unsurprisingly.
 + don't forget about the group photo. We were all too busy...
 + make sure the computer from the event box has the latest cool things
   to showcase (it didn't have gnome-shell; but Siegfried saved the
   world with his laptop)
 + try to get some more hardware for the event box: this year, a netbook
   with moblin and a n900 would definitely have helped. We're already
   asking around to get some donation for this, but feel free to ask too
   if you think you can make this happen!
 + do not organize things at the last minute ;-)

We used the money we got from selling t-shirts during FOSDEM 2009 to
print new t-shirts and stickers. T-shirts were sold €10 (or €5 for
Foundation members). Money-wise, this results in (approximately, I don't
have the exact figures myself):

 + Expenses:
   - t-shirts: around €900
   - stickers: around €300
 + Income:
   - around €1650 (from t-shirts)

This means that we already have some money for FOSDEM 2011. We'll likely
do stickers and t-shirts again, but we can possibly do more: feel free
to suggest ideas for next year!

As a reminder: the original money for all this came from the Foundation
(in 2008, if I'm not mistaken), and since this bootstrap step, we're
able to sponsor the GNOME presence at FOSDEM with the money we get from
t-shirts. The money is handled by GNOME-FR.

Many thanks to the people who helped make sure everything went smoothly,
especially Christophe (for the devroom), Lionel (for the organization of
the booth), Xavier (for the event box), Frédéric (for the t-shirts),
Andreas (for the design of the t-shirt) and Baptiste (for the stickers).
We had many people helping with the booth, which was great!

Vincent

-- 
Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés.