aKademy 2007: The First Impression

aKademy 2007 has started! Saturday, the first day of the conference, brought us many talks about various topics, ranging from very technical to more practically oriented. These talks are so content-rich that our coverage of the user conference will require several consecutive articles. Read on for the first aKademy 2007 Report, the First Impression.

Kickoff

The conference was kicked off by Adriaan de Groot, who introduced Lars Knoll of Trolltech and our shiny new KDE-branded coffee mugs, which we received in our 'aKademy bag'. The bag was filled with other goodies as well, like a 2 GB bootable USB stick courtesy of Mandriva, and some live CD's.

Click to join names to faces (full size version)

Organisation

During the talks, it was discovered that there was no internet. Indeed, 200+ geeks at a university, without network access. The organisation has quite some trouble getting us online. So this report is fairly late, and you probably noticed the almost-full radio silence. But the network is already up in one of the buildings, and we're expecting connection any time now. Besides, the lack of network has some upsides. It ensures most hackers spend their time actually listening to the talks. Aside from this one glitch, the organisation has been excellent so far. They even arranged food and beer last night, organising a social event which we enjoyed greatly. Most hackers spend their evening time in pubs and clubs, but some were already up-and-running before 8 in the morning on Sunday. On Monday, the group will attend another social event, where we will meet the Lord Provost of Glasgow in the rather fancy setting of the public chambers.

Arrangements

The t-shirts this year - which are fair trade produced! - are just amazing, and have been selling like crazy. Now more and more people are wearing these new t-shirts, decorated with Konqi taking the form of the infamous Loch Ness Monster. All in all, the arrangements are very nice here. Glasgow is a great city, and our hosts make sure things run smoothly.

Sunday will bring some more talks, which we will report to you soon. Then the hackers will start doing what they do best: code, from dawn to dusk. We will bug them about the things they are working on, and conduct some interviews, so expect more news from aKademy 2007!

Read our reports from the Keynotes and the Tracks (KDE 4 Pillars and Bindings)