Month: April 2012

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.