Collaboration’s Rise: New Host for KDE Promo Sprint
It’s always nice when you find people a whole lot more enthusiastic about working with you than you expect. You know, when you mention KDE and free software to someone and they not only know what you are talking about, but love it too.
Something similar to that happened recently when I contacted the University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) to see whether they could help out with hosting the upcoming KDE Promotion Team sprint.
I only contacted ECS as I am currently working on my PhD thesis at another campus of the same university and was not at all sure whether they would have heard of us at all – compared to many places, the UK always seems to me a bit backward when it comes to embracing free software. So an enthusiastic response offering some of their facilities (very nice seminar rooms in addition to break out areas) and the assurance that “as a School we are very big supporters of Open Source” was a very pleasant surprise. ECS even want to hold a joint event with us, giving us an opportunity to present KDE to some of their students.
ECS will also be a nice place to be working as researchers from the school have worked hard on freeing data and ECS is also one of the current homes of Tim Berners-Lee.
The sprint will be held from 6-8 May. It’s great to have KDE coming to my home city and hopefully by the time we’ve finished KDE’s profile around here will be a bit higher than it was before.
Interesting! ECS is (or was) the home of Thomas Leonard, the creator of the Rox desktop, so they’re no stranger to open source Desktop projects, I suppose 🙂
Nice 🙂 Seems he is still there, according to the ECS website staff pages at least, so perhaps he will drop by.
Cool, a sprint in the UK and only a couple hours away from me in London as well. I won’t attend the sprint itself, but if you need any admin help or a tame developer for talking to students give me a yell and I can pop down for the day.
If I’d realised you were in Southampton I would have looked you up when I was working down there last year.
Yeah, it’s even more convenient for me 🙂 Ok, I’ll let you know when we have the schedule sorted out. It seems like a big pool of potential developer talent so having someone around who can talk to them about the more technical side of things could be very useful.
It was interesting at Akademy last year to find there are a few people around KDE that live in the south of England – I had no idea you were down this way either…