Slightly over a week ago, I joined my first KDE Promo sprint! My only previous experience was the KDE Plasma sprint, which was very different: lots of developers, and much more development time. This sprint was more intimate and only lasted two days; I nonetheless enjoyed it quite a bit.
You can see me here working hard on promoting all, ehm,
Jokes aside, the first day we talked a lot about the promotion of Plasma 6, which is the topic I was most interested in. Firstly, the donation campaign! It started just the day after / few days after the Sprint, and you can find it here:
I tried to keep the following text as spoiler-free as possible but still quite informative!
We talked about the donation system and the issues we found with Donorbox; we also considered what perks we could offer to those who join as members. A nice example of that is adding their name - optionally - in the KDE Plasma launcher. I also proposed to create some sort of members-only newsletter or release news, but my idea wasn't that popular, given the open & transparent nature of KDE. I also proposed to replace Donorbox with ko-fi, which has the benefit of not taking any cut of the donations. This would require a lil' bit of work to make it a drop-in replacement, and further discussion with the fundraiser group, but it's a possibility.
Also, the hashtag we will use for Plasma 6 from now on is, unsurprisingly, #Plasma6. We were curious about whether some live-streams could be set up on YT and Peertube doing a bit of Q&A about this new release; I also wanted to make an experiment directly during the Promo sprint, but I had forgotten my HDMI capture card (ops).
Another task that's partially on me is Plasma 6 teaser videos. In order to do that, I need to finish up the animation application I worked on a bit of time ago; it integrates animations directly within Inkscape and it's quite easy to learn and use. However, it still has dealbreaker bugs (e.g. not saving some animations) which will require more development time to fully address. Soon, I promise!
All the short teasers should then be joined together in longer, more "promotional" videos, when we are actually closer to release.
There will also be online events about the release of Plasma 6; I don't know as much about them, since the organization is out of my hands, but they'll include a fireside and AMAs. It'll be pretty cool, and I think KDE's developer community is particularly open to feedback thanks to these events too.
And, of course, offline events will be organized for the release of Plasma 6! There's still a lot of time, but we'd like to have lots of cakes! Let's party ;)
We also discussed the organization of events, and how it's actually extremely useful to always have someone there doing promotional work and making connections; in particular, we discussed for quite some time Carl's proposal to make a standard slide template to make sure our design is both good and consistent whenever someone has to make a presentation about us.
During the second day, I also learned quite a lot about the management of the social network accounts. Paul collects a lot of data on what performs well and what doesn't, and what are the best day / times to post about KDE. I said that we should consider whether to pay for Twitter Blue / whatever the Instagram thing is called, and obviously, I was immediately shut down! (just kidding, we had a bit of conversation about that too, but it's clear that none of us would really like to do such a thing).
Finally, I took some time to fix something that I found extremely annoying with the current state of Plasma gestures, and I managed to implement 2D gestures. Basically, with this MR applied (still needs some work), you can do gestures diagonally to e.g. switch to another virtual desktop diagonally instead of being limited to horizontal / vertical gestures only. It feels really good to use, but unluckily it requires further work to make sure it makes sense in different combinations of gestures too (we would like, eventually, to make gestures customizable after all!).
Thus: nice experience overall, I was happy to see all the familiar faces of the Promo team, and big thanks to KDE for actually covering the travel and hotel expenses (wow, Berlin is super expensive).