Two weeks ago, Laurent, Sébastien, Julien and I (with the help of some other people) held a booth at the RMLL 2005. I believe this was a really great success for GNOME-FR, for various reasons:

• we were very active on the booth, talking to people and trying to not hide behind computers ;-)
• the big GNOME poster was fantastic.
• we also brought some other posters, to make our booth even more visible.
• we offered some "Why Choose GNOME?" flyers.
• we gave a lot of Ubuntu CDs. Many many many thanks to the Ubuntu guys for sending us so many CDs for free. This is really a great way to promote GNOME because it looks nice, it's free, we have a lot of them and people can test it.
• we had a nice 19" LCD screen at the front of the booth, attracting people.
• running on the screen, we had a french version of Glynn's 101 Things to Know about GNOME (thanks Glynn!).
• we gave some small talks on the booth, e.g. "What's new in GNOME 2.12?", "GNOME-Love, how to contribute to GNOME?", "How to translate GNOME in French?", etc. I believe this was really appreciated by people.
• we also made a small example of how to contribute to GNOME: we needed a feature for evince (an automatic mode, so that Glynn's slides could be running without the need of someone always pressing space), and so we created a small patch. We invited people to look at how to make a patch. And I'm glad to see that some of the people who were in the audience have started to contribute!
• we sold some nice t-shirts and gave the GUADEC bags we still had.
• and probably some other things I forgot.

As a result, our stand was voted the second best booth (the first one was the stand of the local LUG, and we obtained as many votes as Lea-Linux, also second).

I'm really happy of what we did. I don't think we ever had such a great stand in France (correct me if I'm wrong!).

I'd also like to thank Jean Bréfort and the people from the ALDIL, who were really nice and helpful. Also many thanks to Sébastien Viralata for the most useful work he's done.

I believe that the European GNOME Events Box will enable us to make even better booths in the future. I hope it will be available for the JDLL 2005 :-)

I came back from GUADEC yesterday evening. Thanks to Daniel for the nice trip and his comments about swiss people that made us laugh.

GUADEC simply rocked: I'm more motivated than ever, and my list of interesting things to do is also fuller than ever. Jeff's 10x10 talk was great and Glynn's 101 Things to Know about GNOME was so fantastic I think we'll translate it into french so we can show it. I also enjoyed Owen's talk about Cairo and the other ones I attended.

Davyd and I found some time to talk about applets and where we should go. We now have a nice and sensible plan, and I'm pretty excited about it since it should make applets more consistent and easier to write.

The french people (as for example, these two guys) also found some time to meet and discuss a bit about GNOME-FR. We have some really great ideas (short term and long term) and I hope everything will just work out fine.