AmarokBlog – Page 4 – life at the end of the universe

only 2 days left for talk proposals for the Desktop Summit in Berlin

Just a quick reminder: There are only 2 days left to submit talk proposals for the Desktop Summit in Berlin. Do not count on a deadline extension. Submit your talk proposal now at http://desktopsummit.org/cfp. Make the program committee’s life miserable by submitting lots of awesome talks making it hard for us to chose from 😉

PS: While we list a number of topics we are especially interested in we are also very much interested in talks outside these topics if they fit the conference. If you are unsure if your talk would fit please find me on IRC or email me to talk about it.

halfway around the world and back

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!

KDE accepted for Google Summer of Code 2011

I’m thrilled to be able to announce that KDE once again will be taking part in GSoC this year. This is our 7th year in the program. Also check out the other 174 orgs – great projects! Let’s make this a rocking summer once again.

If you are a student now is the time to start working on your proposal. You can either come up with your own idea or get inspired by the ones on our ideas page. Once you know what you want to work on start investigating and write your proposal. Get feedback from the team you want to work with regularly. If you want to write a proposal for your own idea I urge you to get in contact with the team very soon to make sure it is something they want and to get input. If you have questions you can always come to our IRC channel #kde-soc on freenode or join the mailing list kde-soc@kde.org. For details about specific ideas try to contact the respective team directly first via their IRC channel or mailing list please. For more general information about GSoC please visit http://www.google-melange.com – pay special attention to the timeline.

If you are a mentor your next steps are: 1) subscribe to kde-soc-mentor@kde.org 2) sign up on http://www.google-melange.com and apply as a mentor for KDE 3) contact one of the admins to approve your requests. For questions you can reach the admin team in #kde-soc or email them at kde-soc-mentor-owner@kde.org. And of course you’ll have students approach you with questions about their proposals 😉 Below you can find a flowchart with the most important steps of the program. Please check the timeline of the program.

Desktop Summit 2011 CfP opens

The program committee of the Desktop Summit, the joint conference of GNOME and KDE, is happy to announce the Call for Participation. We are looking forward to your excellent submissions on a number of exciting topics, among them:

Closer collaboration between GNOME, KDE and related projects
GNOME, KDE and the mobile platform
The free desktops and social networks
Search, meta-data and the semantic desktop
The Desktop and the OS
Relationship with distributions and platforms
Optimizing power, memory and disk I/O usage
Designing and writing applications with strong user interfaces
Supporting non-technical contributions (e.g. documentation, visual design, marketing, project management, etc.) and attracting new community members
GNOME beyond the 3.0 release: the GNOME OS
Powerful foundations, elegant interfaces: Improvements in KDE applications
Government use of the free desktops; Free Software and non-governmental organization
Attention for Free Software software in education and participation of students

Find more details on the Desktop Summit website. Deadline for abstract submission is March 25th but submit today – don’t slack off – wow us! 😛

PS: I would offer cookies for the next 3 submissions but I still owe some to steveire for an Akademy 2010 submission. Better not make new offers before I gave him his well earned cookies 😀

conf.kde.in will be amazing

conf.kde.in will be amazing. I just know it. The local team is kicking ass and taking names. Really cool work so far. And the speakers they have lined up? Puuuurfect! Check them out.

I have the honor to give one of three keynotes. I will be talking about what makes KDE KDE and how you can become a part of it. Don’t miss it! In my other talk “Let me teach you how to fish!” I will be talking about KDE’s mentoring programs (Google Summer of Code, Season of KDE and Google Code-in) and what you need to know to run your own. Since Indian students are great contributors to these programs it might be a good idea to think about running more localized programs. Let’s talk about it. Besides that I will be around to answer any questions you might have about the KDE community. I will probably do a workshop where we can sit together individually and find the best place for you to contribute in KDE.

And one very important thing: Are you wondering if you should go? Are you wondering if you should go even if you don’t write code? Yes you definitely should. There is so much to do that does not need a single line of code from you: translations, artwork, promotion, organizing stuff and so much more. All of it will be talked about at the conference. And if you want I am sure we can convince some of the developers around to help you with your first lines of code 🙂

Oh one more thing: There will be KDE stickers! Come and talk to me at the conference.

(Did you notice that two of the three keynote speakers are female? And that there are more in the rest of the program? Gotta <3 this community.)

CWG: call for nominations and next office hour

The Community Working Group was set up at Akademy 2008 in Belgium with the mission of taking care of KDE’s community. The charter says: “The long-term goal of the Community Working Group is to help to maintain a friendly and welcoming KDE community, thereby ensuring KDE remains a great project enjoyed by all contributors and users.” Since then a lot has happened and we have worked with a lot of people in the community – sometimes giving advice, sometimes stepping in to help resolve a conflict, and sometimes just listening. KDE now has a Code of Conduct and a clear point of contact for advice and help on all things inside the community. However, this is not enough.

Two of the five members of the Community Working Group are stepping back and we are looking for nominations as to who should fill these seats. We are looking for people who are trustworthy, dependable, fair-minded, and above all are able to set aside personal opinions and look at the situation before them objectively and without bias. What we’d like from members of the community is to send suggestions for new CWG members to community-wg at kde org. Include the name and contact information for the person (which can be yourself!), references to their work with communities and/or within KDE, and an explanation of why they’d be an awesome CWG member. We’ll collect suggestions from now until Friday, March 4rd. Soon after, we will pick two nominations from among the suggestions that we feel will be the best match for the CWG and its tasks. Thanks for your help with this 🙂

If you have any questions about this, we will hold a CWG office hour on Monday, February 21st at 7PM UTC on IRC in #kde-cwg on freenode.

4.6 release party in Karlsruhe, Germany

The release is getting really close so it’s about time we have some parties 🙂
We’ll have a get-together at Vogelbräu in Karlsruhe next Saturday at 18:00. Let me know if you want to come and meet cool people.

If you are not anywhere near Karlsruhe you can check the wiki to see if there is a party near you. No party near you? Organize one!

how making ads for KDE can change everything

This is a guest post from one of our Google Code-in students. Enjoy and watch the video! 🙂

Hello everyone! My name is Claudio Desideri (snizzo) and since the 22nd of November I took part in Google Code-in 2010. I did 6 tasks and worked only with the KDE Community, with promo people in particular. It was kind of a surprise for me to work with videos and multimedia because I’m a quite skilled php coder and so my original idea was to help kde-www. Unfortunately www tasks weren’t available at the time the contest started so I claimed one for a Konqueror screencast. While working on that I felt inspired and for the next task I chose one called “KDE Ad”.

In that particular moment I got the real point of Google Code-in. I decided not to take care of points and timing but I focused only on my work. That decision leads me to spend about 3 weeks just to realize an ad video for KDE in general with my mentor’s help. Then I really started talking with the KDE community and I got in touch with everyone for opinions on my work and I tried to improve myself through that. I’m writing this as my last task too and have to thanks really all the KDE community for what it gave me.

Actually I found any member very helpful and nice with me also when I became a little too pedantic. I did things I’ve never done before, I met very nice peope (especially one girl) during this and I really enjoyed myself. I also undestood the real meaning of “open source project” and gained experience in team work.

Also the main thing I learnt here is: when there is a problem, maybe YOU could fix it, and anyway you’re not alone doing it. And from now, I’ll never leave this community and will work again for KDE because it has been the most amazing experience I’ve ever had in my entire life.

Code-in 2010 – amazingly useful and stressful

For the last 1,5 months I’ve been herding cats for Google Code-in as the KDE admin. For those who are unfamiliar with Code-in: It’s a contest for 13 to 18 year olds to get involved in free software projects, one of them KDE. Today Code-in ended and the students (and mentors and me!) can get some rest 😉 And for me it’s time to write a wrap-up.

Boy, did the students rock! 300 closed tasks was my personal goal and in the end 338 where closed for KDE. Among them things like handbook writing for Amarok, bug triage for KHTML, coding on Marble, Rekonq and others, doing cool video clips for promo and edu and much much more. You might already have seen some of the work on PlanetKDE and more posts will follow. It’s been an amazing ride.

Let me write a bit about KDE’s experience. I’ve asked the mentors to tell me what they liked and didn’t like about the contest. First of all nearly everyone agreed that this is a really cool program. I don’t think we’ve had one before where we got so much done in such a short time with such a largely high-quality output. It’s a great opportunity for students to get to know high-profile free software projects with clear tasks for them to work on. It is great to see how some of the students gain confidence with each task they do and are proud of what they achieved. For me personally the hardest part was having to tell some students that their work wasn’t good enough yet – that they should push themselves a bit more (which they always could). Code-in being a contest encourages students to rush. This is great because it gets so much done but it needs mentors to keep an eye on quality with some students. That being said I was thrilled to see the first very good patch come in only a few hours after the contest had opened.
The other thing that made this a very demanding time for me is the fact that both students and mentors needed an enormous amount of hand-holding with the web app. It’s the same application that is being used for Google Summer of Code and I know it’s quirks and can probably navigate people through it while sleeping by now but new mentors and students had a lot of problems with it and needed help.

For future versions of the contest I’d like to see a few improvements that would make the life of mentors, admin and students a lot easier. Currently a student could only work on one task at a time and needs to wait for his mentor to approve the task before he could claim the next task. Then he has to wait again until the mentor of that next task approves his request and he can start working. This system is very demanding for a contest. It could be improved by allowing students to claim their next task once they have submitted the result of their current task. But as we’ve already learned with GSoC and Season of KDE: mentoring takes time and is demanding – in Code-in doubly so. The other major bottle-neck (which I think/hope I managed pretty well) is the admin. He/she needs to approve every single task the mentors suggest in the web app before students get to see them. This is good to make sure the tasks are ok, are not too easy or too hard and have enough details for the students to start working on them. However it also means that I’ve constantly had mentors and students pinging me to approve tasks. If you don’t have a very attentive admin this is not ideal – given that the contest ran over Christmas this probably happened in a few orgs. Next time I should probably try to get more people for screening tasks.

Oh and one last thing: the naming is a bit unfortunate. I’ve had to explain multiple times that Code-in isn’t actually just about code but also artwork, translations, promotion, testing and much more.

To sum it up Code-in has been an amazingly useful and stressful experience. We’ve gotten a lot of those things done that everyone of us has on their todo list but just doesn’t get around to but that make a huge difference for the project. And of course we gotten an opportunity to introduce a lot of new people to our community. I hope each of them stays around and continues to do awesome.

I’ve been admin for GSoC and SoK (with great help from Leo, Jeff and Ian) for 4 years now and this time also for Code-in. We’ve improved it together with pretty damn amazing mentors and students and I think we’ve reached the point where we can be really proud of our mentoring programs. I’m convinced that they are among the best out there. However I’m also convinced that we can still do better. Two days ago I had a long call with Jos. During that call I realized that we’ve reached a point where I think to make them any better it needs new eyes and fresh ideas. In addition I have the feeling these programs depend way too much on me being around which is always a bad sign. So in order to get some help and fresh ideas I’m looking for someone to help with running the next GSoC and SoK. If you’re interested let me know. I’d be delighted.

next Community Working Group office hour

The Community Working Group will be around to discuss all kinds of community-related questions again on January 14th at 8pm UTC. Come to #kde-cwg on freenode for a chat. Want to find out how to make your release party rock? Trying to find ways to get more diversity into your team? Unsure how to handle a situation? Anything else? We’ll try to figure it out together. It would be great if you could add your topic to the agenda. See you on Friday.