Month: July 2010

in need of some love and dedication

When walking in a big group of people you have to check every now and then for the slower ones so you don’t leave them behind and lose them. It’s the same in a community like KDE. Every now and then you have to check if everyone can still keep up and if not take the necessary steps. That’s why for the second time now I’ve asked KDE developers to tell me which parts of KDE they think really needs some new blood or more helping hands. This is the list of answers I got:

  • KDE bindings needs a maintainer for PHPQt and some helping hands for Qyoto/Kimono (the C# bindings). – contact kde-bindings@kde.org
  • KDEPIM looking for someone to work on Akgregator and the Kontact shell. – contact the kde-pim mailing list
  • Juk could benefit from a port to actual KDE Platform 4 technologies (away from KDE3 Support and possibly port Bangarang’s Nepomuk storage to Juk). – contact the kde-multimedia list
  • KOffice is in need of people poking Karbon and Kivio. – contact the koffice mailing list
  • KCalc, KFloppy, Kdf, KTimer and Sweeper from kdeutils do not have maintainers at the moment. Most of these applications are almost unused, but they haven’t been excluded from the module and might at least provide some fun to newcomers. – contact kde-utils-devel@kde.org
  • Okular could use some help fixing crashes and finishing features. – contact aacid@kde.org
  • UserBase is looking for people to help improve documentation. Tasks and guidelines are available on http://userbase.kde.org/Tasks_and_Tools. – contact annew@kde.org

Quite the mix – surely there’s something exciting in there for everyone. So if you are someone who wants to contribute to KDE and looking for a place to start or an experienced contributor looking for a new project, this is where your help would be really appreciated. Choose your direction and get your hands dirty 😉

street sign in china town

KDE SC 4.5 release parties – let’s get them started!

I’m back from conference touring (which was awesome btw – more about that later) and Tom reminded me that the release parties for 4.5 are not planned yet. And the release is planned for August 4th, so in a bit more than a week. OMG!

Clearly it is time to fix this situation and give the world a chance to meet some cool KDE people. So go to the 4.5 release party planning page and check if there is one near you already. If there is one then sign up for it and have fun. If there is none yet it’s time to start one. Pick a date and time (preferably within 3 weeks of release) and reserve a place in a local restaurant, bar, meeting room, university, whateverelsefits. Add it to the wiki page, spread the word and then have lots of fun.

Of course it’s my pleasure to announce the first of hopefully many release parties: Stuttgart, Germany on 7th of August. Exact place and time is still to be determined. Check the wiki page every now and then for updates.

For those who have never planned or attended a release party: You can do pretty much everything you want from simply getting together for a beer and chatting to full day event with talks, workshops and so on. It’s up to you. You can find a few tips on the community wiki. Everyone is welcome from active contributor to interested user. Just let the person organizing it know you’re coming so they can plan better.

teaching the KDE way

(more akademy blogs including write-up of my talks will follow later – just need to get this out before I leave to Portland to join Jeff, Valorie and Knut for the CLS and a bit of OSCON)

Not long before Akademy Tomaz told me about the awesome Qt/KDE courses he and his team are giving at Brazilian universities to a few hundred students each. (They seriously rock!) At the same time he was working with a student who wanted to do his internship that is required by university with KDE and I was in a similar situation looking for a topic for my diploma thesis. And I’m sure you’ve all heard about Kevin ruling French university students and giving them KDE projects to work on to help them learn how to work in a large distributed team and develop software in the open that is actually getting used by a lot of people. (Unlike a lot of the code I have written so far for university…)

So there we have a few KDE contributors doing awesome stuff – teaching students about KDE, KDE software and how we develop it. We sat down at Akademy with a few more people and talked about how we can adapt what Tomaz and Kevin are doing to other universities (and maybe schools?). And the first step in that direction is the creation of the kde-teaching mailing list. If you’re interested in helping out or are already doing something similar please subscribe. There is a lot of awesome waiting there (and maybe some cookies) 😉