It’s always nice when you find people a whole lot more enthusiastic about working with you than you expect. You know, when you mention KDE and free software to someone and they not only know what you are talking about, but love it too.

Something similar to that happened recently when I contacted the University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) to see whether they could help out with hosting the upcoming KDE Promotion Team sprint.

I only contacted ECS as I am currently working on my PhD thesis at another campus of the same university and was not at all sure whether they would have heard of us at all – compared to many places, the UK always seems to me a bit backward when it comes to embracing free software. So an enthusiastic response offering some of their facilities (very nice seminar rooms in addition to break out areas) and the assurance that “as a School we are very big supporters of Open Source” was a very pleasant surprise. ECS even want to hold a joint event with us, giving us an opportunity to present KDE to some of their students.

ECS will also be a nice place to be working as researchers from the school have worked hard on freeing data and ECS is also one of the current homes of Tim Berners-Lee.

The sprint will be held from 6-8 May. It’s great to have KDE coming to my home city and hopefully by the time we’ve finished KDE’s profile around here will be a bit higher than it was before.