Year: 2010

Akademy is (not so) far away

Last year around this time everyone was getting ready for the Desktop Summit. I couldn’t make it and I could still kick myself for it tbh. Watching it remotely was rather painful as the information flow wasn’t as good as it could have been. So I promised myself two things for this year’s Akademy: 1) I’m soooooo going to be there. 2) I’m going to help make it easier on the people who can not go for whatever reason.

So here is the run-up of resources you will need to keep up-to-date on all things Akademy while it is happening in 2 weeks:

Most of them have RSS feeds you can subscribe to – use them 🙂

If there is anything else that would be helpful please leave a note in the comments.

Now if you are going to be in Tampere and going to make the world rock more, spread the coolness:

  • identi.ca: join the !akademy group (you can’t post without joining)  and post about what you’re doing
  • identi.ca: poke me, Claudia or Kenny to get useful stuff posted to @akademy
  • twitter: tweet about cool stuff and tag it with #akademy
  • twitter: poke me, Claudia or Kenny to get useful stuff posted to @akademy
  • flickr: upload photos and tag them with #akademy and #akademy2010
  • write blog posts and have it aggregated to planetKDE
  • ping jefferai to get etherpad set up for your team for live meeting notes if your team doesn’t have one yet (I know at least promo and edu do)
  • if you’re a speaker: get your slides to the program committee, the friendly folks who sent you your talk confirmation

And you might have guessed it already…

(Special thanks to my employer ontoprise and the KDE e.V. for paying travel and accommodation. It would not be possible without you. *hint* individual supporting membership *hint*)

Hmmm and while I’m at it I might as well create some buzz for my talks, right? So I’ll be doing 3 talks it seems:

Be there! You know you want to 😉  I’ll also be doing 3 BoF’s on git, community and wikis for those interested. Oh and I’m writing on a paper on mentoring to accompany my community talk. I’ll post it here when it’s published.

CU in Tampere! 😀

It’s been fluffy

I’m back at home from the multimedia and edu sprint in Switzerland (yea the one some people call cheeseland and others chocolateland) and things are finally getting back to normal so time for a bit of blogging. It was productive, fluffy and awesome! Those three pictures sum it up pretty well 😉
Rock!
Tomaz
view from my room
Check out my Flickr page for more pics.

Having a lot of projects at the sprint was really great. For example I’ve worked with j-b of VideoLan fame on some announcements and website restructuring and helped the edu team with promo and community building advice. A lot of progress has been made on the VLC backend for Phonon which will hopefully solve a lot of the small pain points we still have in Amarok. Besides getting the VLC backend in shape the next weeks in Amarok land will be spend on improving startup time for example. New script bindings by Ian and Richard should help quite a bit with that hopefully. Colin did not have an easy job being the PulseAudio guy but he was a really good sport in not-so-friendly territory ;-). We also had a telephone meeting with the QtMultimedia guys in Brisbane which cleared up quite a few things even though the setup of the meeting was a bit adventurous. Sharing knowledge not only inside the KDE teams but also meeting with other free software teams like this is invaluable and should be done more often.

A big thank you to everyone who helped make it possible. You’re fluffy.

Oh and btw: Car trains rock.

Season of KDE 2009 wrap-up

Stu is awesome and because he’s awesome he wrote a nice wrap-up of the successful SoK 2009 projects for Google’s Open Source blog. Go and read it and see the cool stuff that has been done last year.

This is the package our 4 successful students received:


Thanks a bunch to Giulia, ruphy and sheytan for designing the shirt and certificate and Claudia and Torsten for getting them printed and shipped.

Oh and btw: I’m still looking for more mentors – ping me! 😀

Need More Mentors!

Season of KDE is quite popular again this year. Yay! However we’re a bit short on mentors for ownCloud and digiKam projects at the moment. So in case you think you could mentor a student working on either of those 2 projects for the summer please get in touch with me asap.

PS: Mentors for other projects are also very welcome. Get in touch with me and I’ll make a list.

GSoC and Season of KDE 2010

The accepted students for Google Summer of Code 2010 have just been announced. Congratulations to all of you. Make us proud and rock KDE 🙂

While Google has been very very very generous this year we still had to reject very good applications again simply because there were no slots left for them. The decisions have been tough but we hope to have done the best we can. Now if you are one of the people we unfortunately couldn’t accept into GSoC for KDE we have an offer for you. Like in previous years we are running Season of KDE for you. You will work on your project with a mentor by your side and a timeline to stick to and you will get a certificate and t-shirt plus possibly some Google swag once you have successfully completed your project. We can’t pay you like Google does unfortunately but you’ll have a great experience and learn a lot. We’re aware that you might not be able to work on it full-time like during GSoC so your mentor will work with you to adjust the scope and timeline of the project.
If you are interested in this opportunity please send an email to kde-soc-mentor@kde.org and we’ll work the rest out together.