FOSSCOMM 2026: A postmortem

This year's FOSSCOMM was quite interesting. At the booth it was me and my friend Christos Miniotis who is new to the community. We met many interesting people, some of them were past contributors and some others have never heard of KDE. Many a-joke were made due to being next to the GNOME booth which was quite fun. Personally, I am very grateful to have met such wonderful people from GNOME. Ada and GeopJr, you made my day with your company.

So let's begin the postmortem.

What did we want to achieve

We wanted to bring more people to develop for KDE and extend the Greek translation team as well as make it more active.

What did we do

We ran a booth as well as a workshop for contributing new code to a KDE project.

What went well

The booth was quite interesting. Contributors and non-contributors had various questions that we managed to answer (thankfully not any controversial ones). The workshop managed to show most of the curiculum it was supposed to show. There was discussion after the workshop but at this point in time I don't remember the exact topics. I also got suggestions from people who wanted to be with me at the booth next time.

What didn't go so well

I learned I am not good at public speaking 😅. I was very anxious when I was doing the workshop. Also we couldn't login on GitLab which made some steps (like setting up an ssh key) unable to be completed. The stickers ran out by the first day and the print quality was not the best. Also after the workshop I was asked where to direct people for translations and that way I learned most of them are still on Telegram. Specifically, I was corrected when I suggested the Greek Matrix channel to instead direct to Telegram. I remember saying that the correct way is Matrix but I am not sure if I remember correctly.

What would we have done differently

I would have tried to coordinate more stuff like shirts like the GNOME people did, and I would also bring more stickers. As per the workshop, I would try to prepare more or ask another person to do it or not do it at all.

What did we learn

We learned that most Greek translators are still on Telegram and that needs to change. We learned that I am not a good public speaker. I learned that I should prepare myself more when I am about to do something that includes public speaking. Workshops are good for discussion afterwards. And at last more people want to do these activities than they seem.

How to improve KDE with this information

First off, we need to take people off of Telegram as it is considered a hostile platform for KDE. We may need a better way to communicate KDE's presense in conferences so that we can get more KDE people to participate. Lastly, if we do that, we should prepare the roles beforehand. For example, "we will have 2 people at the booth - which one of them will do public speaking, who is up for that".