This year we went to FOSDEM with Kopano for the first time, with the goal to especially extend our community efforts and to get in touch with the vibrant Open Source community. We came to FOSDEM, prepared with a setup of our complete communication stack to present our recent product stack to visitors. Additionally my colleague, Jelle van der Waa, developer at Kopano, had an introduction talk about what Kopano is. Being at the heart of the event in hall K – directly next to CiviCRM & Libreoffice and other well-known Open Source projects such as ownCloud, Nextcloud, KDE, Gnome, openSUSE, Fedora, Debian, Gentoo, FSFE and many, many others – we were a magnet to many interesting discussions.
To summarize the event in one word: Overwhelming! We were quite prepared with all kinds of brochures and the usual branded swag, plus some nice little extras such as chocolate (yes, Kopano Chocolate(!)), but the reality is: We ran out of all our material already on Saturday, 14:00h with the event lasting until Sunday, 17:00h. With my colleagues Joost Hopmans and Pom Balledux, I have been standing at the booth, showing demos, ready to answer questions and having really interesting talks, ranging from interested visitors from Cuba and Portugal to far-east Asia – with of course a lot of European visitors in between as well. I also had an interview with the Hacker Public Radio, which you can check out here: http://video.fosdem.org/2017/stands/K1A.4_Kopano.flac
Our checklist already for our next year is:
- Take our own AP, the WiFi was quite overloaded.
- More stuff, really a lot more stuff, as in at least four times as much. ;)
All in all we can say: Kopano – the Open Source successor to Zarafa – is becoming way more popular way faster than we could’ve ever thought. Thanks to you, our community!
Lastly, I would like to take this chance to thank all the volunteers at FOSDEM! Without them, this great event would never be possible. Thanks a lot and see you next year!
– Mike
