I went to Akademy with two notebooks and a plan. They should both be filled by KDE contributors with writing and sketching about one thing they think would make KDE better. Have a look at the result:
The complete set is in this Flickr album. Check it out! What’s your favorite? What’s your one thing – big or small – that would make KDE better?
(Thanks to Fabrice for the idea.)
As predicted conf.kde.in was indeed pretty damn amazing – great people, conference, country and food (even if my stomach kinda disagreed with the last part but whatever). Pradeepto and his team did an amazing job in making sure everyone had a great time starting with picking us up at the airport. Many people were interested in GSoC and I hope we get a lot of top-notch proposals.
If you ever go to Bangalore you must not miss two things: the city market (especially the amazing flowers in the lower parts of the main hall – see pictures above – thanks Lennart for the tip) and a ricksha ride with at least 3 other people + the driver.
I’m thinking a lot lately about how we can get away from what is happening to a lot of Free Software projects: You recruit who you are unless you actively do something about it. Meaning whatever people you already have you will get more of them if you don’t actively reach out to other groups in some form or another. In this regard conf.kde.in was a huge success. There were a lot of people who were really not your average Free Software hacker (yay!) and comparatively many who were not very familiar with KDE and its software yet but still traveled quite far for the conference. I will have to pick Pradeepto’s brain a bit for all the reasons for this. Whatever the reasons were: It was really really cool and we should have more of it. We need more events where new people can get a feeling for our community. Akademy definitely isn’t it at the moment since the talks are not entry-level and we don’t advertise it much as an event where people can come to who don’t contribute to KDE yet but are thinking about it. The release parties could be it but my feeling is that only some of them really draw in new people (well ok Step has a new maintainer since the last release party here in Karlsruhe – how cool is that?). So dear reader: Suggestions? Ideas for world domination? Silly jokes? Keep it coming.
PS: Thanks a lot to KDE e.V. for sponsoring my travel. Want to see more of that happen? Join the Game!
I’m back at home from the multimedia and edu sprint in Switzerland (yea the one some people call cheeseland and others chocolateland) and things are finally getting back to normal so time for a bit of blogging. It was productive, fluffy and awesome! Those three pictures sum it up pretty well 😉
Check out my Flickr page for more pics.
Having a lot of projects at the sprint was really great. For example I’ve worked with j-b of VideoLan fame on some announcements and website restructuring and helped the edu team with promo and community building advice. A lot of progress has been made on the VLC backend for Phonon which will hopefully solve a lot of the small pain points we still have in Amarok. Besides getting the VLC backend in shape the next weeks in Amarok land will be spend on improving startup time for example. New script bindings by Ian and Richard should help quite a bit with that hopefully. Colin did not have an easy job being the PulseAudio guy but he was a really good sport in not-so-friendly territory ;-). We also had a telephone meeting with the QtMultimedia guys in Brisbane which cleared up quite a few things even though the setup of the meeting was a bit adventurous. Sharing knowledge not only inside the KDE teams but also meeting with other free software teams like this is invaluable and should be done more often.
A big thank you to everyone who helped make it possible. You’re fluffy.
Oh and btw: Car trains rock.
Due to lucky coincidences I got to spend one week in Greece together with my stepsister on a lovely island named Paros. It was great! Weather was nice enough to go swimming and get a sunburn. We got to see most of the island thanks to having rented a small car. Driving through the hills looking down on the water was fun. I can only recommend going to Paros in the last week of the tourist season like we did. Most of the time we only had to share hotel, beaches and restaurants with 2 or 3 people and often we even were on our own.
Best salad ever. (I am still trying to recreate it.)
The only bad thing about being on Paros so late in the year: You don’t get to see butterflies :/
More fotos in my flickr stream.
I hope you never lose your sense of wonder,
You get your fill to eat but always keep that hunger,
May you never take one single breath for granted,
God forbid love ever leave you empty handed,
I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean,
Whenever one door closes I hope one more opens,
Promise me that you’ll give faith a fighting chance,
And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance,
I hope you dance.
— I hope you dance – Lee Ann Womack