3 Levels of exhibitors and stands and over 7.000 visitors from all over the world who all have one thing in common, their love for ubuntu. It is an exciting feeling to know that, as a UBports contributor/marketeer, we are going to shock the convention with the huge amount of progress that we've been able to acquire in the last couple of months.
Ever since Canonical decided to pull the plug, last april, we as a community had this burning desire to overwhelm the crowd with the ability to flash a stable version of ubuntu touch 15.04 on your smartphone as well as demonstrating one of the core values of ubuntu touch, the ability to show true convergence.
And we are going to do exactly that this weekend.
Shaking hands and performing with online teammates, offline
When attending a big international event like this, you will have a unique chance seeing online community management in an offline status. On one side you normally have contact with the respectable development teams who are building away a specific segment, and on the other side brainstorming with marketeers on how to create as much awareness as possible. Now you can finally see both of these worlds combined. A rare occasion wherein you see people from different branches come together to promote the same cause; the very existence of UBports, porting and maintaining ubuntu touch on as many devices as possible and establishing convergence.
It is nice to see that the board members and developers are using the podium that the marketeers provided for them. It makes me proud to see a well-oiled-machine that is our community, perform on such a high level. All this accumulated work had to be presented during the ubuntu touch talk by Marius and Jan.
The convergence keynote speech
Unfortunately, we were slaughtered by the cable monster, who had decided to provide us with such bad cables and no HDMI cable that smooth convergence sailing was made impossible. Was this then, the end of UBports? Would we be stabbed-down by critics, no! Marius Gripsgard did what he does best. Grabbing a clean Nexus 5, a random laptop from the audience (thanks Alan!) and a USB-Stick which contained a brand sparkling new version of the, yet to be launched UBports Installer , he started flashing in front of a curious crowd.
After a few seconds of initializing the flashing process, Marius surprised the room by leaving the stage by saying that he didn't have to do anything more and that the Installer will install, reboot and flash ubuntu touch all by itself.
It took the crowd by storm.
Day 1 is in the pocket, people are getting to know us. The ubuntu touch installer guys are in town!
Brace yourselves for tomorrow, convergence is coming.