CeBIT 2014: the community presenting itself in Hannover
March is usually one of the busiest months of the year, at least for those of us located in Germany. Quite a chunk of events in parallel - CeBIT in Hannover, Linux-Infotag in Augsburg, and Chemnitzer Linux-Tage, to name a few - mark the beginning of the trade show season.
While it has agreeably sized down the past years, CeBIT still is the major event to attend and to present ourselves. Thanks to the organization of especially Thomas Krumbein from Freies Office Deutschland e.V., we once again had a beautiful, shared booth, about 16 m² in size, where also FrODeV and Collabora presented themselves.
Thanks to Thomas' experience, everything was extremely well prepared - flyers, brochures, flags, we even had a green floor and green LibreOffice balloons!
CeBIT hash a rather mixed audience. While every year the trade show organizers claim "more business people" - it feels as it should be about 180% already... - there are also quite a few private end-users, students and students around. Talks at CeBIT are usually very worthy, and we even got to know about one rather large migration project going on at a pretty known corporation, which has not been made public yet. Plus, not to forget, many people stop by to congratulate and thank us for all the work we do, and showing us their appreciation for LibreOffice.
LibreOffice was also represented at the "Special Conference Open Source", as they call it, a public forum with talks and lectures around open source, open standards and free software, which is organized by Medialinx (formerly Linux New Media). Italo gave a talk about "Migrating to LibreOffice: a Reference Protocol", and I explained the legal setup of TDF, with its boards and bodies, which was received very well.
As usual, we shared a private appartment - something that is quite common at CeBIT, where regular hotels can easily cost a few hundred € per night (!), as essentially all Hannover is prepared for the major event of the year.
Even if that saved us a lot of costs, CeBIT still is one of the more expensive trade shows, not only owed due to its length (it lasts from Monday to Friday, used to be even longer in the past), but also due to the high costs of building a booth, renting a space, and of course getting people in to Hannover. In comparison to other events, there are only a few free project spaces available, and those are too small for us, so I am happy Thomas took over the burden to plan and organize the booth for us.
Still, being there is a must, to see others, and of course, to be seen. Talks to potential adopters yield a wide interest in LibreOffice, with rather concrete questions asked, and good contacts are made - so I am very much looking forward to CeBIT 2015!
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