Year: 2012

Time for another party!

The 4.9 release is getting really close. This is surely the time to prepare a party. There will be many release parties all over the world. They’re being planned here: http://community.kde.org/Promo/Events/Release_Parties/4.9 One of them is in Berlin on August 4th. If you’re in Berlin you should come. Jos and Camila are kind enough to offer their home (again). Contributors, users and people from other free software projects are welcome. All you have to do is add your name to the wiki page. You can find more details on the wiki page. Looking forward to seeing you!

Oh and if you look at http://community.kde.org/Promo/Events/Release_Parties/4.9 and can’t find a party near you this is a sign you should start one yourself. It’s not hard. Tomaz has some tips.

Akademy and awards and stuff!

I’m back at home from Akademy and already getting ready to fly out again early tomorrow morning for Wikimania. This is a crazy month…

Akademy was great this year (again). A big thank you to everyone who helped make it happen. I was also very happy with all the talks I’ve seen this year. I especially liked the keynotes by Mathias Klang and Will Schroeder. If you didn’t attend them you should totally go and watch the videos once they’re up. Another important thing was of course the KDE e.V. board election of Agustin and Pradeepto. We have a great team now to navigate us through the next 12 months and more. Exciting times ahead.

Besides this one of the personal highlights for me was of course the Akademy Awards ceremony. Getting the non-application award this year means a lot to me – especially together with Camilla, Kevin, Nicolás and the local team. My award says it is for the huge amount of work I do in KDE and especially everything around Google Summer of Code and Season of KDE. It is awesome to see that this work is valued so much. I can’t do all the GSoC/SoK work on my own though. Over the last years I’ve had quite a bit of help from Thiago, Leo, Jeff, Ian, Valorie, Teo, Ingo, Camila and more.  This award is also for each of them! (However it’ll be hanging in my living room for a long time :P)

conquering Tallinn this summer

My very first Akademy was the one in Belgium. I have only missed one since then – Gran Canaria (a Desktop Summit to be correct). I could still kick myself today for missing out on Gran Canaria. I’ll try to not let that happen again – ever 😉 So obviously I have taken preventive measures and asked for vacation days and booked a hotel room to spend a week this summer in Tallinn before I fly to Washington DC to go to Wikimania. July will be an interesting month…

I have been to a lot of conferences so far but none of them were quite like Akademy. None of them were a family-reunion of such epic proportions. Each year since my very first Akademy I am looking forward to spending time with friends and making new ones, to getting stuff done, to listening to great talks and to seeing new places. Akademy is the time I get to chat with the people in KDE that I rarely work with day-to-day. But it is also the time I get to meet my best friends from all over the world.

New to KDE and don’t know anyone yet? Going to Akademy will change that quickly. Want to get more involved with KDE and don’t really know how? Show up at Akademy and listen to people for 5 minutes. Need input on your new amazing idea? Show it to people at Akademy and see what they have to say. Looking for a job? Talk to our sponsors and work for top-notch companies.

I hope to see you in Tallinn. Book your accommodation quickly and don’t forget to register.

things that make me happy today

I just checked and found that 8 of the 20 successful students who took part in Season of KDE last year have been accepted to Google Summer of Code with KDE this year. I have not checked other orgs and previous years but these 8 alone really made my day. Rock on folks!
For details about this year’s Season of KDE please check Teo’s blog.

I’ve also finally settled in in Berlin. It’s awesome here surrounded by so many of my free software and free knowledge friends. I hardly had an evening over the last week without some kind of get-together. Oh and the sun is shining. Wohoooooo! 😀

new adventures: Wikidata

As some of you might have heard I started working for Wikimedia Deutschland last month. I have finally settled in my new apartment and found some time to blog.

I am working on an exciting new project called Wikidata and am doing community communications for it. Wikidata will be a free and open knowledgebase that anyone can edit. It will be a place where people can collect statements like that the river Rhine is 1.233 km long. These can then be accessed by all the Wikipedias and can be accessed and used by 3rd party applications as well. For Wikipedia editors it means they will no longer have to update information in all language editions but just in one central place. This should help smaller Wikipedias immensely. If you want to find out more about the project head over to http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata. There has been a lot of press coverage last week (techcrunch for example). You can also read the press release and check out the awesome team I’m working with.

What does this mean for KDE? I will still be around and doing board, mentoring programs and community working group work. However I will not be able to work more or less full-time on them any longer. I moved to Berlin so I am at the center of the KDE world and will show up at local meetings 😉 Getting to know the Wikimedia world is great and I’m sure I’ll have some lessons to share soon.

Nearly 100 GSoC ideas are waiting for you!


Last Saturday Teo and I filled out KDE’s application for Google Summer of Code. I hope we will once again be selected as a mentoring organisation for many excellent students.

If you plan to apply as a student with KDE we have nearly 100 ideas for you to chose from on our ideas page already and I’m sure some more will be added in the next days. And you can of course come up with your own idea, too. (You really should talk to a potential mentor in that case though. But you should do that anyway ;-)) Don’t wait, start now! Oh and don’t forget to read Teo’s advice. As a former student, mentor and now admin he knows what’s ahead of you.

But most importantly: Believe in yourself. You can do awesome, I’m sure 😉 Go pick an idea!

 

Oh and don’t forget that we’ll be focusing this year’s GSoC and/or Season of KDE on accessibility. Applications in this area are especially welcome.

Akademy sponsorship request deadlines

Some of you need sponsoring from KDE e.V. to attend Akademy. The board will handle sponsorship requests for travel and/or accommodation in 3 rounds. The budget is limited and only the funds not spend in a round will be transferred to the next round. (So you want to be in the first round.) The deadlines for sending requests to the board are:

  • round 1: 1st of April
  • round 2: 1st of May
  • round 3: 1st of June

We try to handle requests within one week after these deadlines.
For more information about reimbursement rules please check KDE e.V.’s reimbursement policy.