If you don’t read this entire post, or if you take nothing else away from it, then just remember these points:

• When you learn something, write about it, and don’t do it just to make money off it.
• Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.
• Teaching others will help you learn.
• Encourage collaboration by allowing a free flow of constructive comments.
• If you make a mistake, fix it.

I think this is a winning strategy for all those who are involved in design or development blogging, as well as tutorial writing.

– Publish What You Learn by Louis Lazaris on Smashing Magazine.

My first reaction was “duh!”. But then I thought again and asked myself if I really do write about the things I learn. Obviously, I dont.

Since it’s so obvious to me, the question is “why not?”

It seems to boil down to a couple of reasons:

First, I’m lazy. Blogging is a lot of work and I don’t always have the energy, or patience, to sit down after work and write. I also have other interests, so the lack of time doesn’t really help either.

Then, I tend to over-think it. Writing a blog appears to be a major undertaking: I hardly ever manage to think of a blog as a relatively limited task, even if I don’t plan to write a comprehensive project report. Which is a bit silly because I am happily using Twitter and Posterous to capture all my not so very brilliant thoughts and comments. I could as well use it for other things.

I also constantly battle my inner critic* that keeps telling me that everything has been said about a topic already, and most likely by more qualified or experienced people than me. Chances are, they are better writers, too. Of course, I know it’s stupid, it still sets the bar for myself too high to even get started.

Finally, and that is the most interesting part, I don’t necessarily see the things I have learned. How could I publish them? I am constantly learning. If I should make a list of the top 5 things I have learnt during the last week, for example, I would be at a loss. Fine, I learnt some useful tricks in spreadsheets but that is probably not very exciting.

Speaking of it, the actual insight I took away from this week was probably that they cannot be avoided for certain tasks, no matter how hard you try. In this particular case, I was — and still am — working on a content inventory of qt.nokia.com, and after trying to squeeze it all into a mind map I carved in, and put all the pages into a spreadsheet.

The bigger thing I learnt however, was how to compile a content inventory that actually makes sense. To blog about this would surely be a major undertaking, and I am certain someone has written extensively about it already…

*) Wonderful article by Denise Jacobs on the topic: Banishing Your Inner Critic on A List Apart.

The mind map is huge. In an ideal world, a new release would be supported by a whole team pushing buttons on all sorts of social networks. The world is unfortunately rarely ideal, so the team will have to prioritize depending on its size, audience and preference. The good news is that it will work just fine.

This is a humongous amount of work that will pay off nicely if done right but you certainly don’t want to plan with all of this for a patch release.

Supporting Software Product Releases with Social Media Tools (click for full size)

The social networking sites mentioned can of course be exchanged with sites that best meet your needs and your audience.

An important part of every release is obviously the announcement itself. Preparing and writing a release announcement – depending on the size of the project and the number of people involved – warrants a mind map of its own. However, some of the tasks outlined here overlap with preparations for the announcement. Coordination does make sense, as usual.

You can download the original XMind file here. If you’re looking for some best practices, check out this document written for the KDE 4.2 release.

It all started with an anniversary

One of my all-time favourite children’s TV show went into it’s 25th year at the time. I still watched it on a regular basis and so I had an idea. Why not send a special greeting card? One that would be fun to make and a bit different?

There was the plan

I had been playing with HTML and spent a decent amount of time on mailing-lists and in usenet groups. So I sent out a call to action to some German groups and asked for small text contributions to the greeting card . And I asked people to spread the idea. I don’t remember how many people replied but in the end I had a nice collection. I charmed a friend to upload my orange page to the tiny webspace he had available at university.

Lesson learned

Looking back it appears to be a small thing but it taught me something important: if you have an idea, run with it. If others like it, run the whole way. The tools have changed and my approach to community has matured but at the heart of it, this lesson still stands.

(Thank you, Birte, for reminding me today!)

The slides are quite visible in the video but I thought embedding them here wouldn’t hurt.

If you are interested in the rest of the talks, head over to the KDE Promo channel on YouTube and take a look. Slides are available from here.

While writing down all those steps I realized that organizing a booth is more complex than I thought. Chances are high that I have forgotten something more or less important. The comment section is yours!

KDE gives you light by funadium on Flickr

Let’s say you come across an interesting event in your area or elsewhere and you think KDE should be present and have a stand in whatever shape and size. How do you proceed?

Register a booth

This is obviously the first step. Usually, the call for projects closes several weeks before the event takes place. As soon as it is open and you have decided that you’d like to be there send an email to the kde-promo list. Ask if anybody has already registered a booth and/or would be interested to organize one together with yourself.

Go to kde.org and copy and paste the usual about blurb on the front page for the registration or look for one of the translated versions. It keeps things consistent and saves you a lot of thinking.

Find staff

Don’t be afraid if noone speaks up when you ask for physical presence. The usual reaction is something along the lines of “what do I know today about what is going to happen in 6 weeks?”. In most cases you will find someone coming along and do booth duty. Don’t be afraid to get on people’s nerves.

Set up a wiki page on community.kde.org (which is currently a building ground, but fear not!) to collect all information regarding the event and the staff. This will help you to organize accomodation and keep an overview. Keep nagging people to put themselves onto a list there and set a deadline!

Order material

An empty booth does not really make sense, you will need something to show. Good news is that the KDE e.V. has an awsome booth box that can be sent around for events. Ask for it on the kde-promo list and Claudia will let you know if it is possible. She might also just send you t-shirts and stickers and other things via mail if shipping the whole box is not feasible.

For any place outside Europe, we are still looking into the options we have for booths. Ask on the list if you are planning to organize one and need anything.

If you have to manage without the booth box you will need to think about hardware, too. Usually one or two laptops with a recent KDE installation including some demo data like images, music, movies, office files etc. The upcoming marketing sprint in Stuttgart is supposed to come up with a clever solution to the problem of demo data, watch out for updates from that front.

Make a budget and collect travel details

You may have to rely on non-locals for your booth who need funding for their travels. Find a room for them and ask them to add their travel costs to the wiki. Again, set a deadline! Some weeks prior to the event you should have all the costs collected on the wiki and send an email to kde-ev-board [at] kde.org and ask for funding. You should get a positive reply in a timely fashion and then you can push people to book their travel.

Everybody staffing the booth should put their arrival and departure times into the wiki and provide the mobile phone number. That way you will have all the information you need at hand and can reach everybody if anything goes wrong. If you are collecting mobile numbers privately I recommend making a list and sending that to everybody helping out at the event.

Set times

Someone will have to take care of setting up things before the event starts and packing up after the end. That does not necessarily have to be you. Make sure that this is clarified beforehand so you don’t get stressed when the event starts. Then let everybody know where they have to be and at what time. If the event is big and you have enough staff it may be a good idea to make a schedule for booth duty.

Relax!

As soon as the event has started the worst things are over. Now it is time to enjoy what you are doing. Show those great technologies to interested people, answer user questions and look for the “Aha!” expression on their faces, talk to the folks at the other booths and all in all have a good time!

Post-event activities

Sometimes you receive questions you didn’t know how to answer or a concrete request. Remember to follow up on them when you’re back and get the right people in touch with each other. If you have the time write a short report on the event with all the things that both went well and that didn’t to the kde-promo list. We’re always interested in things like that. Oh, and what about a blog? Or a story for the dot?

The program is open to everybody and and joining is not needed to test the beta.

One of my alltime favourite online companies is moo.com. I bet you heard me talking about it already. They make those lovely mini cards, post cards, shiny little stickers, and cleverly use a lot of 3rd party services on the web both for their products and their marketing. Let’s have a look.

MOO Card Storage by visualdensity on flickr

I first heard about MOO – surprise – on a blog. WWD had an article about business cards which hit me exactly in the right moment, so to speak. I needed cards to give out to conductors and colleagues I met at concerts that needed to be easily connected back to that soprano at that concert. So I headed over to MOO and was thrilled.

Apart from the clever product portfolio MOO is interesting to look at from a community perspective too.

MOO knows where their customers are.

If you choose a product on the MOO website you are given the option to import your photos from flickr, bebo, facebook or etsy. Since many people upload polished images to those sites it makes total sense to use those 3rd party APIs and make it as easy as possible to use those photos. But that is only the product site of things.

MOO is present on all of the services they integrate into their website. A quick flickr search gave me 185.545 image results and 2 groups dedicated to MOO products. One of them started by MOO fans dedicated to trading MOO cards.

Why is that interesting?

MOO’s customers apparently already use a service like flickr to store their photos and have them printed onto the products they order. As they are custom made and unique in style they come with that special excitement about individualism that then motivates us to show them around. What would be more natural than uploading photos of them to flickr and blog about it?

By smartly integrating a service like flickr into the product MOO builds a community as their main differentiator and gains an enourmous amount of visibility. It is no surprise that bloggers picked up on the small British business quickly after they launched their website.

People make the difference.

There is a zillion online printing services out there, you can order business cards everywhere. Just like you can download software everywhere on the net. The difference is the community around it. People form groups around things they like, be it cards or software, and team up to help each other or simply exchange thoughts and ideas. Members of these groups will then tell their friends and the groups will grow by themselves making the product more visible and in the long-term more successful.

Social Network by Luc Legay

I have been thinking. This is not quite unusual but this time it had a reason: Augustín’s blog about Social Networks and Lydia’s identi.ca review.

With the introduction of so called Social Networks and Social Features on a lot of websites, the way we see and use the internet has changed from broadcasting to joining conversations.

The good news is that KDE – like most FLOSS communities – is very well set.

“Markets are conversations”

When the Cluetrain Manifesto hit the public 10 years ago, it proclaimed a radical change in marketing with their 95 theses. The times of corporate controlled messages being broadcasted to an attentive audience are over, people want to be involved into how a product is developped and marketed, they want to see the human face behind the corporate walls, they want to be able to get in touch with those working on the product unfiltered by boring customer support. And they want the ability to spread the word about products they like.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

The big corporations have been adopting to this new reality for a while now and it seems that they finally understand that building a relation with their customers is what they need instead of huge and expensive ad campaigns. To build those they have to be part of their audiences’ lives.

Community is the key

What sounds revolutionary in a world of corporate PR is business as usual for KDE:

• the development of a product happens in the open
• there is no wall between internal and external
• developers working on the project are known and reachable via mailing lists and IRC
• developers take part in events and listen to feedback
• many people in the wider circle spread the word and evangelize our products

We have been building relations to users for ages, it is our biggest advantage. We have established a big and healthy community by being part of it for years. We understand what users want because we use our software and listen to what they ask for. And we are honest.

Corporations start playing to our rules

With the adoption of social media techniques in business, those basic rules of community building and user interaction make it into mainstream. Seen from our cozy corner of niche this might indeed be a scary process: with new tools like microblogging new people join the conversation and our old patterns of communication do not necessarily work any longer.

But we do have a solid basis of community work and years of experience to build upon.

Some might be worried about losing control over what is said to whom combined with an unmanageable amount of people who might read and spread the information. But is this really a new situation? I believe it is not. It has never been possible to control what users tell their friends, their bosses or during talks at events. It was just less obvious. We have to believe that everyone acts to their best knowledge, all we can do is prepare those who talk about KDE in the best possible way.

Don’t be scared, embrace the chaos. What do you think?

During the four days in Berlin I spent mostly in the halls of LinuxTag, I had the energy and ease to walk around and talk to people although the preparation of the whole event had taken quite some effort from my side. Luckily, all went smoothly, including our Friends of Qt dinner. It was unfortunate that it collided with the Social Event the LinuxTag organized, but I could no longer wait for the date at one point and had to fix the restaurant.

Trolls in Berlin

I had good conversations with colleagues, friends and new contacts. Especially, the folk at the VLC booth was fun and good to talk to. And there were all those who manned the stands of the French OSS startup scene. France was this year’s focus or partner or whatever initiative at LinuxTag. Together with Till Adam I joined a semi-boring networking dinner where I learned very interesting things about French radio broadcasting.

But that was by far not all I learned. During those events I usually act like a sponge: I absorb everything that might be interesting or worth knowing if not right now then maybe at one point. I can’t put my finger on anything specific but it will be useful.

Of course, I did not get half as much sleep as I would have needed (discipline, dear!) and I was really really happy about the bathtub in my room when my back had passed the point of the usual strain.

To sum it up, I was pretty tired when I returned to Oslo where Chani joined me and I tried to clean up my work before leaving for Gran Canaria. I hoped to have more time for sight seeing or other fun things with her but that was just an illusion (next time, Chani, promise).

Before the conference started, I had two days off for recovery I spent on Gran Canaria passing my first diving license. It was a brilliant thing to do and I had most of my strengths back for the Desktop Summit.

Simon Wearing Green

Which then hit me harder than expected. There was still something to organize left, roll ups had to be placed in the conference hall and the party details needed some checking too. And I was still feeling my presentation could need some more preparation (will I ever get over that?). All in all it went well and I am happy with the reactions I received after my talk.

My feeling about the conference is mixed. There were a lot of very technical talks I simply didn’t have the brains for and there were quite some that were interesting for me but collided with each other. I put all my hopes on the videos. When the BoF sessions started I was no longer perceptive at all.

Unfortunately, the sponge approach has limitations. I did not have enough time to move all the new things from temporary storage to more permanent areas of my brain which inevitably led to a loss of concentration and more confusion (I do remember talking about our year of birth before now, Marius, it was not a déjà-vu). In case you wanted to talk to me about anything but didn’t manage — or worse: had the impression I was not interested — please, bear with me and ping me on IRC or so…

Exhausted after long days of conference

I really had a hard time meeting a critical amount of new people due to my personal state and the non-optimal conditions of the summit. It would have helped me personally a lot if the area of the summit was more limited so I could have run into random people more easily.

Altogether I do believe that a summit like this is beneficial and that the organizers did a hell of a job. Chapeau! Still there is some room for improvement. Maybe a bunch of geeks does better with a less elegant place than a conference center? Or maybe it was just me being slightly overworked?

Time for holidays finally.

In other news, I have a fresh openSUSE install on my desktop now (all for you, Will!) and am surprised by how quickly I had it up and running.

Image via Wikipedia

… the driver recognizes you when you get onto the bus to your local airport.

… you don’t even look up the number of the check-in counter anymore.

… you have all your make-up in a little bag you don’t even unpack anymore.

… you have various cosmetic products that are labeled in foreign languages.

… you find yourself postponing the visit to the duty free shop because you will visit a bigger or better one soon.

… you know how to say “To the airport, please” in at least one more language than you actually speak.

… you regularly schedule tasks for the time on a plane.

… you always carry your passport in your bag.

… you seriously consider buying a share of your favourite airline that doesn’t have a frequent traveler programme.