For quite a while now, KDE has gotten a reputation for being somewhat euro-centric. While we have contributing members everywhere, the project was borne in Europe. As KDE has grown and our contributors have become more distributed, it has been increasing difficult to shake this reputation, even within our own project.
So while we have a strong user community in certain South American countries (Brazil comes to mind), we have no sense of unity between these geographic regions since most KDE events have been held in distant Europe.
After a successful, well attended release event held in Mountainview last January, it has become apparent that there are enough people in the Americas to warrant holding KDE events on this side of the pond. So I present the plan: one sanctioned KDE contributor/user event in the Americas every year.
In order to ensure that we do not conflict with the well-established and well-attended Akademy, this event will be held roughly 6-months opposite of Akademy: this means if Akademy is late July or early August, then we use late January or early February.
Additionally, since the release event was in California, and we don't want the event to seem US-centric, we will move it around to proposed locations in much the same way that Akademy is...
Our first KDE Americas event will be held in Jamaica next January. This location was chosen by consensus based on a number of reasons: flight availability, cost of accommodations, a strong team of users on the ground to help with the event, a good internet connection, and a local business/government environment that is warming to open source.
Now, just to clarify, this will be a developer meeting with talks, hacking, etc. Just because it's in Jamaica in January does not mean that it's an excuse to take a vacation... although having a conference in Canada in January is definitely less appealing.
We will keep mostly quiet about this event until after Akademy (since we want KDE to be able to focus on that event until then), but we will be looking for sponsors and volunteers to help make this event a success. Right now, if you need additional information, or would like to know how to help, please contact either myself (troy) or Roger Pixley (daSkreech) on irc or via email. (we generally idle in irc.kde.org, #kde)
Cheers folks
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