Bilbao, I’m coming! (Oh and Taipei and Hongkong prepare yourself too.)

Akademy2013badge

Only 1 month left until I’m heading of to Bilbao for some vacation and my favorite conference of the year, Akademy. Akademy is shaping up to be a great event again for KDE – but not only for KDE! We’ll be hosting the Qt Contributor’s Summit as well and other projects like VideoLAN, RazorQt, Tomahawk are joining us again to create, discuss and maaaaybe also have a little fun 😉

I am personally looking forward to most:

  • Kevin’s keynote as well as the other two awesome keynotes that are waiting for their announcement
  • the student programs lightning talks that are by now a tradition at Akademy I’d say
  • all the chatter that will happen in the hallways between talks, over a beer late at night or while walking to the venue

Together with the fabulous Leslie Hawthorn I’ll be talking about negotiation theory for geeks and burnout. Don’t miss it! It’ll be fun. Besides that my major goal for this year’s Akademy is getting input from a lot of people for some fundamental questions about the future of KDE e.V.

But that’s not enough for a summer, right? No. No rest for the crazy people… After Akademy I’ll be heading over to Taipei for COSCUP to talk about what makes KDE tick as well as Wikidata. From there I’ll head over to HongKong for Wikimedia’s annual conference Wikimania to catch up with people on all things Wikidata and a whole bunch of other community and tech things around Wikimedia like the VisualEditor.

One serving of 53 amazing students please

The accepted students for Google Summer of Code and the Outreach Program for Women have just been announced. I am so happy that we were able to accept 50 students for GSoC. Thank you Google! I am also excited that we were able to accept 3 women for our first participation in the Outreach Program for Women. Thank you KDAB and the other OPFW sponsors who made it possible to accept 2 more than we initially planned! This is going to be a great summer for KDE for sure. You can see all accepted GSoC projects here and the OPFW projects here. They’ll all be adding status updates here so keep an eye on that page. Please give them a warm welcome!

If we could not accept your proposal for any of the programs this time please have a look at this email I just sent to the student mailinglist about this year’s Season of KDE.

Time to send in your GSoC application

Since a few minutes applications for Google Summer of Code 2013 are open. If you plan to apply it is time to get started writing that proposal. GSoC is an amazing opportunity to become a part of KDE and many other free software projects. To help you get going here are some very useful links:

Oh and don’t forget that KDE is also taking part in the Outreach Program for Women.

KDE is looking forward to an amazing summer with a bunch of great students. Will you be one of them? You totally could be!

Community Working Group office hour: recruiting for everything but coding

KDE is a huge project and to keep it running it needs all kinds of people with very different talents – be it artists, translators, promoters, community managers, documentation writers, bug triagers and much more. We’re relatively good with recruiting coders. We could do better for everyone else. The Community Working Group would like to invite you to its next office hour to talk about this topic. How can we make it easier for non-coders to get involved? How can we improve the help we give them? How can we reach more of them?

Join us in #kde-cwg on freenode IRC at 4PM UTC on 21st of April. I hope to see many of you there 🙂

Akademy 2013: submit your talk proposals and requests for financial assistance

Akademy is getting closer and it is time to submit proposals for talks. This is your chance to present your work and ideas to the KDE community in person. The call for papers is here. It has all the details. I’m sure there’s something interesting you could talk about in Bilbao. Don’t wait! If you have questions or are unsure I’m happy to help. Just send me an email.

Important: deadline for submissions is March 15th, 23:59:59 CEST. But please do your program committee a favor and don’t wait until the last minute 😉

 

KDE e.V. will once again provide travel and accommodation support to a number of people who need it to be able to attend Akademy. For details about this please see the reimbursement policy. The board will approve requests in 3 rounds. The budget is limited. You want to be in the first round! The deadlines for requests are:

  • first round: March 15
  • second round: April 15
  • third round: May 15

To post a request please register for Akademy on akademy.kde.org. During the registration process you’ll be able to indicate it.

KDE++ aka Polishing Existing Things

Google has announced that they’ll be running Google Summer of Code once again in 2013. This is splendid! KDE will once again apply as a mentoring organization to introduce many great students to Free Software and of course also get some important work done around KDE.

Last year KDE gave a focus to accessibility for its GSoC. This year (if we’re accepted again) we will do the same but with a different theme. This year’s theme is KDE++ aka polishing existing things. We’ll also accept projects outside this but this should be the main focus. I’m really looking forward to the results.

Here’s what needs to happen next:

For mentors:

  • Add ideas for projects to the ideas list. This needs to happen very soon.
  • Subscribe to the mentors mailing list (mentors only!).
  • Prepare some junior jobs for interested students and tag them with the keyword junior-jobs.
  • In case of questions come to #kde-soc on freenode IRC.

For students:

  • Have a look at the ideas list and see if there is anything interesting for you there.
  • Subscribe to the mailing list.
  • Get familiar with how to develop for KDE, what KDE is about and how Free Software works.
  • Have a look at the available junior jobs and see if you can fix one of them.
  • In case of questions come to #kde-soc on freenode IRC or send an email to the mailing list above.
  • One important thing to keep in mind: Start getting involved now! Don’t wait. This will give you a great advantage.