I came back from FOSDEM on Sunday evening, completely burnt out. Not because it was bad, quite the contrary: it was a blast, really. Especially since there were all those familiar faces, some of which I hadn't seen in a long while. I didn't really help with any booth (except the openSUSE one, for an hour or so), or devroom, which was quite a change from the previous years. Instead, I had tons of discussions with many different people on a large set of topics, and it felt extremely productive to me. Of course, the bad thing is that I came back with many more things to do ;-)

The openSUSE booth was well alive, thanks to Martin who made sure everything would be ready. There was a computer to try SUSE Studio, and to create some images on USB keys and it attracted a lot of people. Stickers and DVDs were of course available, and some people even got a great t-shirt! It was also good to be able to talk to Henne, Andrew, Zonker and others.

Love Wall at FOSDEM

Image from faerie_eriu (Creative Commons BY-SA)

As for the GNOME community, I can only say it rocked! When I look at the past and remember the GNOME presence we had in the previous years at FOSDEM, I can only say that I'm impressed with the progress we've done:

  • Andreas had made a great design for the t-shirts (I can't find any picture of the t-shirt yet), and Baptiste Mille-Mathias did all the hard work to get them printed. It was quite cool to see people wearing the GNOME t-shirt on Sunday :-)
  • Baptiste also took care of stickers, and so we had 5000 stickers to distribute. And those stickers, wow... I love them: simple and beautiful. I loved them so much that I took a good bunch of them and walked around to give them away to people I met or on other booths.
  • Reinout and Lionel did a fantastic work organizing and manning the booth, with the help of a few other people.
  • Thanks to Olivier Le Thanh, we had the GNOME Beer Event on Saturday which got a good attendance and was really a great place to be for random chats.
  • I didn't see much of the GNOME devroom, but I'm sure that Christophe did a good job there -- at least, I heard of some talks in positive ways :-)
  • Frédéric has the GNOME group photo in his camera, and since he loves being pinged on IRC, don't hesitate to do so and request the photo to be posted!

Really good stuff. Make sure to hug all those people to thank them for their hard work!

Oh, and my "Bits from your GNOME team" talk in the openSUSE devroom went okay. Especially if you consider the fact that I could have fallen asleep while delivering it...