Let love light your way

Happy holidays and a happy new year to all of you. I hope you get to spend it with people you love and care about. May the next year bring many exciting things and great opportunities.

The Amarok team will begin the new year with the release of Amarok 2.2.2 at the beginning of January and KDE will follow with KDE SC 4.4.0 in early February. Exciting times ahead …

Let’s take it to the next level!

2 weeks ago I asked people to help with getting our Junior Jobs list above 100. That worked out nicely. We’re at 140 right now and reached 148 at some point in the last week \o/  200 in 2 weeks from now? 😉

Keep adding Junior Jobs. As some people were unsure how to do it, here’s a screenshot:

Junior Jobs

Interested in getting involved in KDE by writing code? There are 140 bugs waiting for you 😉

Let’s make identi.ca and Twitter a little more KDE!

It’s been bugging me for a while that most sites on identi.ca and Twitter look rather boring and I thought it would be nice to give them a little KDE touch. cosmonautirussi was so kind to do some cool backgrounds for KDE contributors, developers, translators and users as well as a generic one. You can just upload them to identi.ca (or any other StatusNet site) and Twitter, adjust the page background color a little to fit your taste and voila!

You can grab them on community.kde.org.

Wanna see what it looks like in action? Check out this, this, this and this.

What is KDE for you?

For me KDE is:

  • working with great people
  • good friends
  • people to depend on
  • a community that helps me do things I would never have imagined I would be able to do
  • me going to random places around the world and having a couch to sleep on
  • a team that gets stuff done
  • having someone to share good and bad things with
  • people who are so far away and yet so close
  • a team that brings me to my limits
  • a crowd that has seemingly endless energy to make better software
  • so much more than just a desktop environment.

Let’s start small, Junior!

When a new contributor comes to you and wants to start coding on KDE do you have a small task to hand him or her immediately? The moment they show up in your IRC channel, email inbox, identi.ca or wherever else they find you is the moment their motivation is incredibly high. They are willing to invest time and energy right there and they likely have a few free hours to dive into a simple task. This is the moment we need to get them hooked. If they have to wait a few days, a week or even longer for a task they might well have lost that initial motivation and will be gone never to be seen again.

Now we all know that our time is limited and we can’t be there 24/7 and give out tasks to newbies. Thankfully we have a solution: Junior Jobs on bugs.kde.org. The sad thing: There are less than 50 of them at the time of writing this posting. Let’s improve this. Have a simple task you don’t have time for right now? File a bug right now (you can even skip the wizard), tag it with the keyword “junior-jobs” and be happy to have a list to give to a potential new coder next time someone approaches you.

But having this list to point to is not the only benefit. It will also be used by people looking for something to do on their own. They might be too shy to approach you for the time being, but looking at a task-list on their own and maybe trying to fix one of the bugs is possible for them.

Let’s get this list above 100 within the next two weeks together!

Now say you don’t have a suitable Junior Job for someone. There are a few things you can do to keep them involved until you have something:

  • let them set up their devel environment
  • ask them to test something for you
  • ask them to help a little with bug triage
  • ask them to go trough your websites and see where they are out-of-date and maybe get them updated
  • have them check if someone needs help in the forum
  • let them organize a meeting for your team if needed

While Junior Jobs are used for coding tasks mainly it would be nice to have a similar system for promo for example. I am not sure Bugzilla is the best tool for that though. Are there better tools we could use for promo task scheduling?

KDE Education Survey

We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free. – Epictetus

The KDE-Edu team is looking for feedback from their users to improve their applications and to find out where to invest the limited time they have. If you are a student, teacher or just casual user of any of these applications we are looking for your feedback:

  • Kanagram
  • KHangMan
  • Kiten
  • KLettres
  • KWordQuiz
  • Parley
  • KAlgebra
  • KBruch
  • Kig
  • KmPlot
  • Blinken
  • KGeography
  • KTouch
  • KTurtle
  • Kalzium
  • KStars
  • Marble
  • Step
  • Cantor
  • Rocs

We created a short survey (1 page – about 5 minutes) where you can tell us about the 3 problems you have with any of the applications listed above as well as give some general feedback. Those 3 problems can be small or big. We want to know about them. This feedback is incredibly valuable to the team so if you know anyone who should take this survey but doesn’t read this blog please send them a link.

Make KDE-Edu rock even more!

PS: If you want to help with any of the programs listed above (by writing code, creating example content, documentation, promotion or anything else) please get in touch with me.

Busy Bees

As you might have noticed from other blogs on PlanetKDE the KDE promo people have been quite the busy bees this weekend in Stuttgart. Getting together with great people, getting stuff done, having good beer and food -> great sprint. And of course a sprint with Jos and me has to include at least one proper group hug 😀
group hug

(fltr: Valerie, Kenny, Martin, Claudia, me, Rainer, Justin, Jos, Eckhart, Ingo, Stuart, Daniel, Luca, Cornelius, Frank, Troy, Frederik)

It was a great weekend which got us a lot further to the 4.4 release announcement, the rebranding of KDE, a new KDE booklet to give out at events, a redesign of www.kde.org and more. It is amazing what you can get done if you get the right people together for 3 days.

Most important for me though was finally getting to know Ingo, Stuart and Luca. It was their first KDE meeting. I hope we introduced them properly (including group hugs and old stories about KDE) 😀 It feels good to know that that part of the forum team got even closer to our community now after doing an incredible job for a while already.

Getting feedback on stuff like the rebranding discussion or the move to Git from the people who helped start KDE was very valuable. We should definitely make sure to keep this connection as long as possible. A simple “been there – done that – it was an incredibly stupid idea” can save everyone from quite some headache and bike shedding.

I miss you all already… Damn.

But the promo people were not the only busy bees. No the Amarokers decided it is time to release 2.2.1. It includes improvements to podcasts, collection scanning, automatic script updating and much more. Read the release notes and download it. Of course don’t forget it is Rokvember 😉

Amarok 2.2.1