As the Free and Open Source Software Nigeria conference is set to start on the sixth of March – Friday, that is – I’m in the last stages of packing. Travel advisories say lots of anti mosquito gear, if only because visiting near areas with malaria, dengue and yellow fever makes me think “I want to return home healthy.” I’m also packing the last box of KDE booklets that the KDE-India team produced; this means that Pradeepto, Piyush, Sharan, Shashank, Ramki (and whomever I have forgotten) will have reached four continents with their work.

As a bonus, Jonathan Riddell’s visa came through at the 11th hour, so he will be attending as well and we can make a unified KDE stand.

Stormy Peters of the GNOME Foundation was kind enough to send me some of her recent materials on business cooperation and community, so I will be presenting that as well (if Mustapha and the organizers let me do so). Many thanks to her for sharing like that – people from GNOME could not make it to this particular conference, and I’m happy to show the breadth and depth of the Free Software desktop community. There is one talk of hers I won’t be doing (at least not verbatim). “GNOME as the computing platform for the future” is, well … not something I can wholeheartedly present, eh. As a platform, sure. Given my place in the Free Software world, I hope that’s an understandable modification of the message :-)