Desktop Summit recap

Wow. I finally made it back home after over a week of Desktop Summit and visiting family on the way back. What a ride it was… Let me recap some of it:

• Meeting some of the best friends I have all in one spot is the best thing ever. It’s great to catch up on important things and also talk about non-sense for a week.
• I’ve spend quite a lot of time talking to people in GNOME about mentoring programs and community management. Very useful and not really possible to that extend outside the Desktop Summit unfortunately. The lower software stack isn’t the only place we can and should collaborate. The social stuff is just as important and maybe even easier to collaborate on sometimes.
• I got really really nice gifts from India and the US. Thank you so much folks!
• Seif Lotfy and I gave a talk about what GNOME and KDE can learn from each other. I’ll try to post a summary soon. It was well received and we got a lot of great questions from the audience.
• I chaired the intern showcase (which was a lightning talk session by students from GSoC, Season of KDE and the GNOME Outreach Program for Women). It was stunning. Each of the presenters did a really great job showing the work they’ve done. I was sad to not have been able to have more students present (time was limited). What made me really really happy is the fact that at least two of KDE’s GSoC students paid their trip to Berlin from India from their GSoC money. You have no idea how thrilled I was to hear that it means so much to them to meet the community they’ve worked with even without getting sponsored. The other thing that thrilled me was to see how many women we got on stage for the intern showcase. Rocking!
• KDE e.V. organized a professional mediation training for the members of the Community Working Group and a few others. Attending it was very useful for me. I hope I’ll not have to put my mad skills into practice soon of course.
• We held a few feedback sessions on the activities of the Community Working Group over the last year. This feedback was very useful and lead to proposing a few changes we’ll implement over the next weeks. Stay tuned for more info.
• I was elected into the board of KDE e.V.  and Cornelius was re-elected. This hasn’t really settled in just yet – probably will in the next days. The main thing I want to work on in the next weeks is making the work of the board even more transparent and getting a lot of the tasks that the board currently does into the e.V. membership and the community at large. This should allow the board to concentrate more on tasks that only the board can do. I need your help for that and I’ll ask for it every now and then.

So what’s up next for me? (Let me know if you want to meet up.)

• I might go to Paris for VideoLAN Dev Days to meet some of our friends from VLC and co and to go back to lovely Paris.
• I’ll be speaking at openSUSE conf about social skills for geeks (a session I’ve done before together with Hanne and Alexandra at the Qt Contributors’ Summit) and do a BoF about how to get more women (and diversity) into openSUSE.
• I might come to Oslo for a few days in the next months to visit friends and disconnect.
• We’re planning a KDE e.V. sprint to work on things like Join the Game. I’ll help with getting that rolling.

PS: I’m likely looking for a full-time job soon – preferably related to community management/engagement or project management. Check my CV and get in touch if this sounds interesting.