Sponsoring

Call for Sponsors for the
2004 KDE Community World Summit

(in Ludwigsburg/Germany, Region of Stuttgart, 21st to 29th of August)

"aKademy" Program Overview

The KDE aKademy is an international meeting of KDE contributors, active KDE supporters and KDE power users from all over the world, scheduled for August 2004. It will feature...

• ... a two-day KDE Developers and Contributors Conference (21^st/22^nd of August) of primarily technical talks and tutorials;
• ... followed by a five day KDE Coding Marathon (23^rd--27^th) -- a big opportunity for interested groups of developers and contributors to gather together in computer labs for various organized and unorganized hacking sessions, spontaneous workshops, Birds-of-a-Feather meetings and KDE software design discussions until the following weekend;
• ... accompanied by five days of publically accessible general Linux- and KDE Tutorials (half- and full-day, 23^rd--27^th), held by some of the world's best instructors in their respective fields;
• ... followed by another weekend (28^th/29^th) for a public 2004 KDE Users and Administrators Conference at the same venue, where we will be showcasing all the exciting technologies and applications which make KDE the leading, most innovative and integrative Korporate Desktop Environment.
• ... integration of the celebrations for the First International Free SoftwareDay .

For a better overview, here is a table about the complete event:

Overview "aKademy": All Events during the 2004 KDE Community World Summit
Date of events: August 21st to 29th
Location: Filmakademie Ludwigsburg/Stuttgart Region, Germany
Event Module 1	Conference of KDE Developers and Contributors	2 Days (weekend)
Event Module 2	Coding Marathon for KDE Developers and Contributors	5 Days (week)
Event Module 3	Ten Tutorials for KDE and Linux Users and Administrators
Event Module 4	KDE Users and Administrators Conference	2 Days (weekend)
Event Module 5	Festival at "International Software FreedomDay"	1 Day (Saturday)

About KDE

KDE is the Free Software Project which was, nearly 7 years ago, the first to start the long march onto the corporate Linux and Unix desktop workstations -- a march hich is only now acquiring full steam.

KDE is one of the largest and most successful Open Source projects. With currently nearly 1000 active contributors from around the globe (including programmers, translators, artists, documentation writers and quality team members), we are managing a growing project with more than 3.000.000 lines of source code, 80 mailing lists, contributors from over 90 countries and translations into 49 different languages.

KDE is by all measurements the most popular and highest rated desktop environment for Linux. KDE ships as the default desktop with most Linux distributions. We manage to roll out one major release or upgrade per year, while meeting release dates (which are pre-announced 8 months in advance) to almost within 24 hours of target. This reliability is a big tribute to the Open Source software development model KDE follows as well as to the excellent Qt Development Toolkit (from Trolltech) which allow us to deliver such a large and high-quality product in good time.

KDE's desktop environment has now fully matured to be accepted onto many enterprise and mission critical desktop workplaces. KDE is now going into its next stage of development where we are tightly integrating "external" applications (such as OpenOffice and others) into our framework. In future, user experience will hardly recognize any usability difference between KDE- and non-KDE-applications. This includes the usage of one common "Print", and one "FileOpen" and "SaveAs" dialog across all integrated applications.

About the Sub-Events of the KDE Comminity World Summit

Here are a few details about our plans for our grand summer event.

Sub-Event 1: KDE Developers and Contributors Conference

We expect 200 of our more than 800 currently active contributors to participate at this (more or less developer-internal) conference. It will be organized in 2 parallel tracks of technical talks, tutorials and presentations dealing with KDE-related topics and desktop technologies.

A separate Call for Papers and invitations for the different sub-events which will be published in the coming weeks and reproduced on the aKademy website at http://conference2004.kde.org/.

Date: weekend of 21^st/22^nd of August.

Sub-Event 2: KDE Improvement Coding Marathon

Following the weekend conference, we expect 200 of our developers, artists, translators, quality team members and documentation writers to be present to stay for the week of the Coding Marathon.

The Coding Marathon will also be open for a limited number of interested KDE users and the general public who are curious to see how the laboratory of KDE development works out in real life.

Date: weekdays from 23^rd to 27^th of August.

Sub-Event 3: General Linux and KDE User and Administrator Tutorials

Tutorials are concurrent to the Coding Marathon and co-located in the same building. There will be a limitation of 30 participation seats per day (max. 15 per tutorial with 2 parallel tracks).

We will be offering at least 10 world class tutorials over the 5 days, covering general Linux server and KDE desktop knowledge topics. We have confirmations from some very well-known instructors on fields like...

• Samba,
• CUPS,
• Linux Security,
• Administration of large networks,
• Server and Desktop Migration to Linux,
• Web Application Development
• and more.

The tutorial seats will be available for about 500 Euro per day. (That income helps us to cover the overall conference expenses.)

Date: weekdays from 23^rd to 27^th of August.

Sub-Event 4: KDE Users and Administrators Conference

We expect around 500 international KDE enthusiasts to participate at the Users Conference conveyed at the concluding weekend.

Here we will be showcasing all the existing and forthcoming technologies and applications which make KDE the leading, most innovative and widely integrative Korporate Desktop Environment. Some very new and exciting developments will be shown here for the first time ever to the public, previewing the new features and applications going into KDE-4.0.

Date: weekend of 28^th/29^th of August.

Sub-Event 5: First International Software FreedomDay

We are glad that the organizers of the "First International Software FreedomDay" have chosen the time of our big aKademy event to celebrate with us the advance of Free and Open Source Software movement in the world. For general information see http://www.freesoftwareday.org/

Date: Saturday, August 28^th.

Worldwide and Local Publicity

A web site is in preparation at http://conference2004.kde.org/ to provide full info about the activities around the event.

The fact that KDE will be showcasing some of its most exciting new technologies in preparation of its next stable version 4.0 release will ensure a high level of attentiveness for the event and its sponsors. We expect the press, including TV teams and radio reporters visiting us as well as many community-based internet news sites to report about it.

For the publicly most exposed parts of the event we are concentrating on getting a strong presence from IT professionals, Windows or Unix network administrators, and responsible IT managers interested in Linux server or desktop migrations to come. The attractive program of our world-class tutorials, and the public KDE Users Conference are helping with that goal too.

Participants of the 2004 KDE Community World Summit

All KDE developers, documentation writers, translators, promoters, other contributors as well as KDE power users are invited to come to "aKademy". We expect to have 200 of our active contributors from around the globe present for the full 9 days. Up to 400 additional visitors will be attending at least a part of the events. This will make our event one of the largest gatherings of active contributors to the Free and Open Source Software movement worldwide.

There will also be time for socializing. During the second weekend (or the preceding days) of this exciting KDE gathering there will be various social activities organized in co-operation with the local tourism board. Especially pleasing is that you can join us at Saturday, 28th of August: here we celebrate the "First International Software FreedomDay" and have the big evening Social Event!

More info is available at http://events.kde.org/info/conference2004/ (Bookmark this page, because there will be more announcements and infos forthcoming!)

Location

The KDE Developers and Contributors Conference will take place in Ludwigsburg. Ludwigsburg is located in the south of Germany, very close (north) to Stuttgart. Facilities are hosted and sponsored by the "Filmakademie Ludwigsburg". The Filmakademie is the "Academy of Movies", an award-winning school in their field. Ludwigsburg can be reached fairly easily by public transport (Stuttgart Airport is close, and Frankfurt Airport is less than 2 hours on the train).

We have reserved 200 beds in the International Youth Hostels of Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg for the complete period. Accomodation which will be available for around 20 Euro/night (including breakfast) to all participants registering in time.

Financing the Event

KDE e.V. is soliciting donations from companies and individuals towards this conference. These donations will be used both for running the conference and for bursaries for participants from other continents and/or without income. Delegates with an accepted talk/presentation will be prioritized in the distribution of these bursaries.

The envisaged tutorial program in the week preceding the Users Conference is geared to also raise money for the same purpose. Here we will be offering excellent quality content delivered by world-class instructors on their respective fields, and we are asking for a competitive participation fee in exchange. We are aiming to get Linux power users and administrators as well as other IT professionals (from the Stuttgart Region as well as anywhere else in the world) into participating there, with their employers paying the tutorial fees. A first overview of planned tutorials will be published very soon.

Asking for Sponsors

KDE has some exciting new technologies in the pipeline which will mature over the next few months. 2004/2005 will really see the beginning of the march towards Linux desktop domination, and KDE will help a big part with that.

We expect the event to draw a lot of international attention. Also, we will have a lot of local press coverage and also expect some television teams there not just for one day.

But we need more sponsors. KDE is a large community project delivering high quality software for free. But we are not a company. We don't command a lot of cash flow. If our software helps to run your business more successfully now or in future -- isn't this a reason for you to consider our appeal to support us with money (or equivalent)? It will be put to good use: in organizing the KDE Community World Summit we are ensuring the future fast development of KDE as the leading Desktop for Linux and Unix systems.

Where Sponsors can help

The conference is already sponsored by the Wirtschaftsförderung Region Stuttgart GmbH (WRS). WRS are making the KDE Community World Summit a part of their all-year Open Source 2004 in the Stuttgart Region public Ad & PR campaign.

Here is a rough overview of expenses we expect to occur, and where sponsors could help us:

• We want to keep our developers together for the whole period and we want them to not need to pay anything for accommodation. That's why we are looking for a sponsor who receives the bills from the 2 International Youth Hostels we reserved for hosting 100 people each for 10 days (the bills are expected to be around 20,000 Euro each, with 20 Euro per person for 1 night+breakfast).
• We will have at least 20 active KDE developers coming from overseas (USA, Canada, Latin America, Asia and Australia), all of whom require full-sponsoring or at least partial subsidizing of their airfare by us. Sponsors may "Adopt a KDE Geeek" to help him come to our event and take up all the procedures to reserve and buy a plane ticket through their own corporate-internal channels.
• Renting the conference building for the whole period costs us 6,000 Euro.
• Paying a "Catering Service" for the whole event (providing lunch and dinner) is at least 15,000 Euro.
• We want to offer evening "Social Events" on both Saturdays, paid for by corporate sponsors, with dinner and music provided free for the visitors (> 200 people at each occasion). This might amount to anything above 4,000 Euro.
• We like to have as many developers and IT professionals as possible present from commercial corporations to take the opportunity to learn how to integrate their own programs with KDE (and who tell us what their needs are), paying the appropriate conference fees for participating (500 to 1,000 Euro ).
• We want to have at least 70 modern Laptop computers present with Linux/KDE pre-installed (sponsored by some hardware vendor), for use by our developers during local hacking (as well as for building a "compile cluster"), plus 24 Laptops for visitors who have booked to participate in "hands-on workshops" and tutorials.
• "Infrastructure hardware" such as 8 projectors for computer-based presentations, ethernet cables, switches, WLan access points, b+w and color printers, etc.) is also needed.
• Sponsors can also opt for "cash sponsorship", of course. We offer deals for one "Premium Sponsor" (30,000 Euro), one "Platinum Sponsor" (20,000 Euro), several "Gold" (10,000 Euro), "Silver" (5,000 Euro) and "Bronze" (1,000 Euro) sponsors.

What does a sponsor get in return?

• All sponsors will be duly mentioned on the conference website: The website will be up for the complete year 2004 (this includes banners of sponsoring companies with links from this high-traffic website to the sponsors' homepages).
• The Premium Sponsor will get the privilege of a special place: he may occupy the prominent right-hand "hotspot" at http://www.kde.org/ for 8 consecutive weeks including the conference (for size see current hotspot).
• The Premium Sponsor will be allowed to put up one banner in each of the conference and tutorial rooms and in the main entrance hall.
• Premium and Gold Sponsors will be mentioned on the portal site of the special Conference website (http://conference2004.kde.org/).
• Gold Sponsors will be allowed to put up 2 banners (one in a main conference room and one in the main entrance hall).
• The Laptop hardware sponsor will get a background wallpaper pre-configured as a default on all laptops as well as on the public slideshow presentations displayed by a projector showcasing KDE in the forum.

Premium and Gold Sponsors may choose to transfer their sponsorship contribution in cash only, or in 10.000.- Euro cash minimum with any additional hardware or other support evaluated according to marketable cost.

About the organizing parties

The "2004 KDE Community World Summit", is jointly organized and run by...

• ... KDE e.V.,
• ... Wirtschaftsförderung Region Stuttgart GmbH (WRS)
• ... and Linux New Media AG.

KDE e.V. is a non-profit organization of volunteering professionals and enthusiasts for free and open-source software, especially the "KDE Desktop for the Enterprise" (http://www.kde.org/areas/kde-ev/).

Wirtschaftsförderung Region Stuttgart (WRS) is the "Stuttgart Region Economic Development Corporation", a subsidiary of the administrative body of the Larger Stuttgart Region. WRS provides service to industry and municipalities in the field of economic development and is running in 2004 an all-year PR campaign to help the advance of Open Source Software deployment in the private and public entities in the Stuttgart region (http://opensource.region-stuttgart.de/).

Linux New Media AG is Europe's leading corporation to provide Linux- content on "new" and "classic" media, with printed publications in several countries and languages, currently expanding into new countries (http://www.linuxnewmedia.com/).

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For the KDE 2004 aKademy Organizing Committee:

• Dirk Müller
• Eva Brucherseifer
• Frank Karlitschek
• Kalle Matthias Dalheimer
• Kurt Pfeifle