ervin's piece of web

Last week-end we had the release event in Toulouse, it has been the only french event and that’s why I decided not to go to Mountain View. On friday evening we had a long user oriented talk with some bits of Aaron’s keynote, followed by a cocktail and a merchandising booth. It’s been a real success, I expected not more than 20 or 30 people… but it turned out that the room was full, some people had to stay outside. Also I was the one giving the talk, and I think I didn’t screw up from the questions I had after the talk and people reactions. Of course, I played our first KDE Commercial, especially since it’s been secretly done by a couple of people in Toulouse. They really did a great job in my opinion.

On saturday, we had technical conferences for the whole day. We had a really nice bunch of speakers. Aurélien Gâteau, David Faure and Lauren Montel travelled in Toulouse just for this event and give talks. We also had our local gems: Anne-Marie Mahfouf and Alexis Ménard. I also gave a couple of talks. The atmosphere was quite nice, people had interesting questions and David even implemented a feature request almost in realtime (after screwing up his desktop).

We (the speakers) ended up the saturday evening in a restaurant, Aux Fils de l’Aligot, were we had an excellent regional food. Laurent and David didn’t knnow what aligot is so we had to help them discover it. Too bad Aurélien had to leave in the afternoon… next time Aurélien you’ll have your share of food too.

Finally, I’d like to thanks all the people who made this two days event possible:

• our sponsors, C&S and KDAB;
• all the speakers who made this event possible;
• all the people from Toulibre who were really supportive;
• Michel Saliba who spent hours coordinating the necessary work to subtitle Aaron’s keynote;
• and a special thanks to Alexis who really did a great job organizing this, he was so active I didn’t have much left to do.

It’s really nice to see how the Toulouse community pulled such an event almost from nothing… I think it was a good test run for us, maybe next time we can try something bigger. Akademy 2009 or 2010 anyone? :-p