Akademy 2019: new goals, new board, new president

Akademy 2019 has been over for a little more than 3 weeks now. It’s been a great and eventful Akademy. Let’s take a look at what happened.

New goals

In 2017 we chose 3 goals to work towards together as a community. Those were improved onboarding, usability and productivity of basic software and privacy. For all of them we’ve made great progress and I’m thrilled by the result. But the original idea behind the goals wasn’t just to get work done on some specific goals. The other reason was to give us something to work towards together as a community (as we were starting to lose that uniting factor that binds us all together as KDE grows) and to get in new people by making it clearer what we need help with and where to dive in. Looking back now my expectations were exceeded quite a bit for those. It makes me so happy to see a lot of new people joining and being enthusiastic about contributing to KDE in meaningful ways – even going so far as to proposing 2 of the 3 selected initial goals.

At the beginning of the year we decided it was time to shift our focus to new goals and started the process for proposing and voting on new goals. We started Akademy with a review of the initial goals and then I had the pleasure to announce the new ones:

  • Wayland: We will finalize the transition to Wayland and embrace the future of desktop. This is a necessary step towards a lot of new features and improvements our users want to see, like better touchscreen support.
  • Consistency: As KDE’s software evolved small and large inconsistencies creep in that make our software less pleasant to use. It also means having to maintain different implementations of essentially the same component like a scrollbar. We will identify and remove these inconsistencies in all of KDE’s software.
  • All about the Apps: We want to refocus on KDE’s applications and make them easier to discover and install for our users.

I’m looking forward to the progress on these goals over the next 2 to 3 years. To start helping out please have a look at the goals page and get in touch.

New board

As every year during Akademy we held the general assembly of KDE e.V. and elected new board members for the two open positions. I’m delighted to welcome Adriaan and Neofytos to the board.

After the election it was time to decide on the board positions. I have been on the board of KDE e.V. for 8 years now and the president for 5 years. Leading this organisation has been one of the most important things I have done so far and I believe I have made an impact. At the same time I am convinced that it is not healthy for an organisation to be lead by the same person for too long. That’s why at the start of my current term we discussed how we see the future of the organisation and our role in it. It was clear that Aleix has been doing invaluable work on the board as the vice president and would clearly be a good choice to lead the organisation in the future. We decided that we will have at least one year at the end of our current term where I will be on the board to support and advice and ensure a smooth transition for Aleix. This time has come now. I would like to ask you all welcome Aleix as the new president of KDE e.V. and provide him with all the support he needs. I am looking forward to working with our new Board and see where we will take KDE e.V. together in the next years.

The new board positions we agreed on are as follows:

  • Aleix Pol i Gonzalez: President
  • Lydia Pintscher: Vice President
  • Eike Hein: Vice President and Treasurer
  • Adriaan de Groot: Board Member
  • Neofytos Kolokotronis: Board Member

Next Akademy

We are still looking for a host for Akademy 2020. If you’d like to host the KDE community next year please have a look at the call for hosts which has all the details and reach out if you have any questions.

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