Report from FOSDEM

While the train drives me to Arnhem, let me write a little report from FOSDEM 2011.
Short version: it was a really good weekend :-)
Bit longer: as usual the booth at this great European free and open source software event, is an extreme mixture of meeting new people, discussing the work and product, enjoying the opportunity to better learn people from the community.
You may notice that I do not mention the chance for gathering knowledge and improving technical skills, by visiting presentations and workshops. Well, that obviously was hardly relevant for me, since I was at the booth the most of the time.
Another special thing in this weekend was meeting some friends from OpenOffice.org that were at the same place ;-)

For LibreOffice we had a nice booth in the main building of the event, where we could sell shirts and hand over stickers. Both developers and people working on less technical stuff, talked all Saturday with so many people, explaining more about the history of The Document Foundation and LibreOffice, showing the ambition, listening to wishes and ideas, telling about the people joining.
So that might well have made many of them enthusiastic to come to a developers-presentation on Sunday. And at the end of that day some of them even came to the booth for their first 'easy hack' (from our famous list at the wiki).

FOSDEM is in the hart of the open source movement, and - listening to how the visitors reacted with all the understanding and support - LibreOffice is moving in that direction fast.
Of course, it's hardly possible to wave too many thanks to the staff of FOSDEM that makes this all possible, already since 2000!

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