On January 17-19, the KDE community will present KDE 4.0 with a Release Event at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. The purpose of this event is to celebrate the anticipated release of KDE's new desktop environment and development platform. In addition to the KDE community, representatives from businesses, press and other Free Software groups will attend. We hope this event will help spread the word about KDE's new release and how it impacts the future of the Free Desktop. Read further for more information about this event.

Because this event aims both to be informative and productive, we have created an ambitious schedule. There will be plenty of time and opportunity for interaction between all attendees; but there will also be many interesting presentations, involving both technical and non-technical topics. We have invited over 200 members of the media, I.T. business, distributions and other Free Software groups, completed of course with many members from the North-American KDE community. Further, several international KDE hackers will attend to give talks or help organise the event. The major keynotes and talks will be available live over the Internet thanks to support from Fluendo.

Due to financial and space constraints we were unable to invite all KDE developers, so we encourage local and regional KDE 4.0 release parties all over the world. We have tried to ensure the main Keynote by Aaron Seigo, which will of course have a live stream, is scheduled at such a time the international community meetings can see and listen to it.

We hope this event will both strengthen the KDE community in the United States and increase awareness about KDE and what we have to offer. The KDE community should be proud of both the upcoming KDE 4.0 release and the foundation prepared for the life of the KDE 4 series; we hope that this release event will introduce and educate those not familiar with KDE, and strengthen relationships with those that are.