Two upcoming events, not directly KDE related but definitely opportunities for get-togethers of KDE folks under the umbrella of some other Free Software event. One close in time, another far away:

BSD Day - December 13th 2008. The NLUUG (formerly the Dutch national UNIX users group) and the NLLGG (Dutch national Linux users group) are organizing a BSD-Linux twofer. Robert Watson, one of the core members of the FreeBSD community, will be there along with the core of the Dutch BSD communities. [[ KDE angle: KDE4 works quite nicely on FreeBSD, except apparently for Kopete ]] The BSD tracks are geared towards the technical. On the Linux side of the fence, a mix of CMS, OpenOffice and other more user-oriented topics will be presented. Same place, same time; one’s red, one’s black and white. Admission is cheap (as in beer and most likely free).

Spring Conference - May 7th 2009. This one’s a long way off, but the call for abstracts is only six weeks away. The NLUUG Spring Conference 2009 has “File Systems and Storage” as a title, which is pretty broad. At StorageExpo I was canvassing the storage companies (think EMC, but also Hitachi and also virtualized off-site backup and replication services) for the Storage part, but for File Systems I’m turning more to the Free Software world. Topics would include VFS type things, interesting specialized File Systems, metadata and search within filesystems, visualizations, metaphors, etc. If needed, I will wield the pink whip of Akademy to make KDE contributors feel right at home. The conference programme is put together by a vendor-neutral independent technical committee, which will construct the strongest tracks it can from the submissions (the first submission is already in, BTW). Acceptance notes will be sent out January 12th and then you’ve got nearly another five months to get the content of your talk all squared away.