Description

Akademy-es 2025 will be held in Málaga, Spain, from June 20 to 21.

This event will attract a large and diverse crowd, as it is held within the larger OpenSouthCode 2025 event, an event that has scheduled a large number of talks, activities and workshops for all ages and technical skills in a popular venue in the city.

Goals

• Encourage users to adopt KDE software on any platform
• Find contributors, testers, feedback for our current software
• Recruit contributors
• Encourage public institutions to adopt our software
• Encourage companies to adopt KDE technologies
• Find opportunities for collaborating with, funding and support from public institutions
• Encourage donations to KDE e.V.
• Encourage donations to KDE España

Plus

• Push the End of 10 agenda and convince Windows 10 user to migrate to Linux with an installfest to be held on the Saturday

Selling Points

• Software of excellent quality
• No license payments, can be shared
• Environmentally friendly and cost effective, as it can run on low end and old hardware
• Will be supported into the foreseeable future

Important Dates

• Event: June 20 - 21

TODOs

Booth

• Obtain booth
• Staff booth
• Source materials
  • Tablecloth (provided by venue)
  • Banner (provided by KDE Spain)
  • Stickers
  • QR sheets (from prior years)
  • Devices
    • 3 computers for demos
    • Large monitor (@paulb)
    • Painting tablet (@paulb)
    • Plasma mobile devices (@paulb)
    • Steam Deck (Rosie)

Budget

Costs

Please read this:

Money Raised

Note that this money goes to KDE España! Not KDE e.V.

Post mortem

What it was

On the 20th and 21st of June the Spanish KDE community, represented by KDE España, organised and attended Akademy-es.

Akademy-es is usually set within another event and this year was held jointly with OpenSouthCode in Málaga.

We also fitted an End of 10 activity in the shape of an installfest and rose awareness about the impending end of support for Windows 10 from the booth.

What we did

Talks

• Covering topics such as the latest releases of Plasma, KDE Linux, video game development, apps, KDE technologies applied to IoT, etc.
• Speaker included Alber Astals, Baltasar Ortega, Fernando Rosa, Rubén Gómez and other fixtures of KDE España.
• The room was relatively small, but we were able to fit between 15 and 20 people into it.

Booth

The booth was located at the end of a corridor and was not in the most ideal position for foot traffic.

At the booth we had

• Merch: T-shirts, amigurumi dragons (thanks Albert's mum!), stickers, mugs, sweaters, etc.
• Hardware:
  • A Slimbook laptop on loan from Slimbook
  • A laptop from 2008 running Plasma 6.3 as an example of how even old hardware could run a modern graphical OS. This proved a more popular item than we expected and many people played with it and marveled at how fluid it was
  • A more modern laptop with a touchscreen. Kids played with GCompris on it on day 2.
  • A Steam Deck set to "desktop mode"
  • A gaming laptop to run demos of CPU/GPU intensive apps, like Kdenlive and Krita (also extremely popular)
  • A drawing display connected to the gaming laptop for Krita
  • A large monitor mirroring the drawing display facing outward

Installfest

The installfest was set in a smallish room (but which was ample enough)

How things went

• The talks were well attended and the room was full most of the time.
• The booth was busy when there were pauses between talks on the Friday and most of the time on Saturday. Despite teh location we managed to attract a steady stream of visitors and managed to talk and showcase KDE stuff to about 50 people on day one (the Friday) and maybe about 70 on day 2 (Saturday). Many of the visitors on day 2 were parents with their children who came to try out Krita and GCompris; and teens who came enquiring about Kdenlive. We also met with several organisations with which it would be interesting we partnered. More about this in separate tasks.
• Setting up an installfest is always a risky proposition, but we did manage to attract two or three people, who brought their laptops (one punter brought three ancient Thinkpads) to be upgraded. To be honest, this was more than I expect. Despite pushing it quite a bit, I was expecting between 0 and 1 participants. Another interesting aspect is that the installation process had an audiences: some event attendees wandered in and were intrigued by what was going on, especially as at one point there were two machines being dismantled because they had faulty disks. At the booth some visitors were annoyed they had not found out about the installfest until they reached the venue and had not bought their machines.

Lesson learnt

• We must try and push for better locations at events we partner with.
• We must ensure we have better signage: I was assuming the folks from KDE España would bring a stand up banner. This was not the case.
• We also lacked printed signs to indicate the way to the talks and installfest and had to improvise.
• We must order stickers with plenty of time. Although we managed to scrape together enough leftovers from other years, many were old.
• We still fail reaching out of our bubble. The installfest could have been much more successful.
• Demoing fun apps for creative endeavours definitely works. We must ensure that we can easily demo stuff like Kdenlive and Krita and facilitate allowing visitors have a go on them.

TODOs

• Put Deep Computing in touch with Akademy organisers to see if they can sponsor
• Send images to the artists that used Krita to tempt them into using it on a regular basis
• Email "Yes We Tech" to set up collaborations
• Email "Hackerspace.es" to set up collaborations
• Make a modern design (in Spanish) for KDE España promotional material (banner, flag, what have you)