I read some old threads and checked out the website of the LGM that happened in Spain this year. It looks like a great conference, but geared more towards people developing the tools and writing the code rather than the user side of things. Is there a similar thing for people that are not coders and never will be, but has workshops and meetups for designers, artists, photographers, filmmakers, etc??
I’d love to go to something like that.
We sort of had that at this year’s Southern California Linux Expo. I was able to coax @patdavid out to southern California where we helped man the inkscape/gimp booth, and we bad a whole day of talks about libre graphics applications. Not too many tutorials, but talks about workflow and other nifty things. That was our 1st year, I think it went well and I hope we will be able to do it again next march.
How was the attendance at your booths? Did you get a lot of interest from users?
I wonder if a conference / meetup were billed as “for users of open source graphics apps” if there would be much interest. Because a linux conference is sort of broad - most people attending have no interest in graphics applications.
We had between 30 and 40 people at every talk, which for a Friday, was pretty good. There was a lot of traffic at the booth. You’d think for a linux crowd, they’d know the GIMP, but there was a mix of people who knew and people who didn’t.
Also @patdavid is like a mini celebrity. 
It looks like a great conference, but geared more towards people developing the tools and writing the code rather than the user side of things.
That’s wrong, the LGM is a meeting for developer and users.
LGM is really geared more towards artists and other creatives (in the Free Software space). There’s been fantastic presentations in the past about peoples work and creative pursuits. There may be a few technically-oriented presentations as well, but overall it’s definitely a meeting of creatives and artists.
Highly recommend attending if it’s possible for you. I think next year is in Saarbrücken, Germany (is that right @houz or @heckflosse)? If it is, I’ll very likely be in attendance to catch up with some old friends, and we’ll always find a way to share/coordinate/photowalk together.
And drink.
And eat.
Yes, next LGM will be in Saarbrücken, Germany. And it’s also true that it’s for both users and developers. In recent years the workshop aspect has fallen a little short, but if people step up and offer to hold workshops I don’t see any reason why we can’t fix that. 