News

Attendees in charcoal and Team in red

After much thought the Desktop Summit Team chose a design by Nuno Pinheiro for the official conference T-Shirt.

We greatly appreciate the amount of work put into their designs by everyone who submitted a design.

The T-Shirts will be on sale at the info desk during the conference.

What is the outcome of a creative idea that does not get shared? Silent innovations might be good on paper, but unless people know about them they might become nothing, projects remaining unrealized. All successful products need promotion; FOSS is no exception.

That's what Stuart Jarvis does for free software: he helps make it something. An editor for The Dot and a member of the KDE promotion team, Stuart devotes time to making sure developments in the KDE community are not just public, but news. Free software collaboration doesn't just need coders for technical nuts and bolts; it also needs people marketing and communicating effectively so that potential users can learn about it.

Stuart has been supplying editorial support and an active face for KDE through various outlets. However keeping up with the flow of information can be tough, especially when at the same time you're working on a PhD in geochemistry.

Stuart told William Carlson a little about how he does it, and gave his views from inside the FOSS world.

Continuing in a series of interviews with the Desktop Summit 2011's keynote speakers, this past week William Carlson traded emails with Dirk Hohndel of Intel, who will give the Summit's August 6 opening keynote address.

As a hacker-turned-businessman, Hohndel brings a business perspective of free software to the Desktop Summit. Currently Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist at Intel, Hohndel will talk about the role that large companies play in open source, and how the open source community can work effectively with them.

Hohndel has been an active developer and contributor in the Linux space since its earliest days, and has worked professionally in the SuSE and XFree86 projects. Still an active contributor in many open source projects and organizations, Hohndel joined Intel in 2001.

Claire Rowland, user experience guru, will be a featured keynote speaker at this summer's Desktop Summit 2011 in Berlin.

Claire is Head of Research for Fjord London, an international digital service design agency and has worked extensively in user experience research and design. Recently her focus has been on a shift in user experience from the desktop toward services delivered through multiple platforms of widely differing form factors and the cloud. Her research and recommendations relate to what this shift means for what users expect from their devices, and what effective design, across platforms and the cloud, looks like. It also addresses what users increasingly care about the most, and what this might mean for Operating System design.