Category: PlanetKDE

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.


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next Community Working Group office hour

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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.


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call for 4.6 release parties

A new major release is around the corner and it’s time for all of you to help with KDE release parties around the globe. This is a guest blog by my Google Code-in student Sasu.

It’s been over four months now from previous major release by KDE and it’s time for a new one. 4.6 is about to be released on 26th of January and it is party time again! Release parties are very fun and educational for visitors. If your party has represented KDE well you can even get new local KDE community members.

Although organizing KDE release parties costs some time, it can be a very good experience. Release parties bring the local community together. With a stronger community, organizing the next event will be a lot easier.

release parties, basic info

If your local community is not very big the release party can be just having a beer at a local pub (the writer doesn’t have any experience on that… obviously) with friends. However, if you do have a large local KDE community, you can go as big as you want… and can.

If there are people new to KDE, remember to explain and introduce KDE to them first. Release parties should be fun, that’s the main purpose of them. Parties ain’t parties if you just sit and talk seriously. Participating in parties should be a great experience and worth everyone’s time.

To put it simply, all you need for a party is people at same place at same time. However, you most likely need someone to organize the whole thing. The place depends on party size and program. For smaller events a local bar or restaurant is fine. If you are coming with a bigger group, remember to contact the place and reserve a table. You can also advertise the event at IRC channel topics, microblogging services, blogs and even at Facebook. Most importantly, add your party to the KDE 4.6 Release Parties information page: http://community.kde.org/Promo/ReleaseParties/4.6

You can start by everyone introducing and tagging themself for example. After that you can have a preselected topic to talk about at first. If the event is bigger, you need to have a little more specific program to follow. Talks maybe? Games?

Release parties indicate how strong and active the local community is. According to the KDE Community Wiki, there were 26 release parties for 4.5 in twelve countries including Argentina, Austria, Brazil, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Romania, Spain, Switzerland and the United States. If your country isn’t listed here, like mine isn’t, you can change the situation for this release!

Have nice parties! Organize one now!

Experiences

Like in the software development, user experience (What now? Visitor equals user for me :P) is the most important part of release parties. At this point, you may want to hear a few words from people who participated in one of many 4.5 Release Parties.

Michael Leupold, where and when did the release party that you participated in take place?
– It was held in Stuttgart, Germany. The place is called “Letzte Instanz” and it’s located in Untertürkheim.
How many people took part in the party?
– 13 developers, translators and users. They came from all over southern Germany.
What did you do at the party?
– We enjoyed food, drinks and ourselves. Actual release was unexpectedly delayed till after our event (effectively making our event a pre-release event), we still had a great time talking about KDE and getting to know each other.

Valorie Zimmerman, where you had your party and in what group?
– I met with the LinuxChix Seattle, at the Caffé Vita Coffee Roasting Co. on Capitol Hill in Seattle.
How many of you were there? How many of them was a KDE user already?
– We had three women attending. I was the only Kubuntu/KDE user.
What did you do there?
– We worked on creating a bootable USB key, sipped delicious coffee and nibbled wonderful mini-cupcakes.
Pics or it didn’t happen.
– Sorry, I forgot to take a picture.

in the middle of Code-in…

Google Code-in has been running for nearly 3 weeks now and we have another 4 weeks to go. I wanted to give a short status report.

First of all: The students are amazing! They’ve produced really really cool stuff in a very short time.  Let me highlight a few of the things that students did so far:

  • Translations: lots of them. Two of the translation teams came to me and said their team was not active recently and Code-in has brought back life into the team. Especially the Russian, Romanian and Polish translations will be a lot more complete for the next release.
  • Short movies: a particularly inspiring ad for KDE was posted to the promo list. It will be improved in the next days and then published. Check it out when it hits PlanetKDE!
  • Screencasts: lots of them. Really cool short intros to features of KDevelop, Konqueror and more.
  • Posters and hand-outs: Amarok finally has a nifty poster for the booth at conferences. KDE-edu will get a nice hand-out soon.
  • Documentation: We’ve been meaning to write Amarok’s handbook for ages and slowly been getting there. In the last 3 weeks 5 or 6 students have nearly finished it. Parley got a step-by-step guide showing you how to prepare for an exam with it.
  • Code: Students have been coding all over the place. Check out the Marble earthquake online-service for example or the moodbar generator. You’ll also be able to enjoy new ready-made Plasma activity templates that you can download via GetHotNewStuff.
  • Podcast news: a student will be reading the news segment of the next episode of KDEMU with Guillermo.

There’s a lot more but I can only list so many. Right now we have 113 finished tasks. 32 tasks are being worked on and 50 tasks are up for students to claim and start working on. Rock on!

Google Code-in runs until January 10th. I can still accept tasks. Let me know if you want to mentor or take part as a student. I expect an influx of students over the holidays. Help me not run out of tasks – those 50 will be gone fast 😉

Join KDE for Google Code-in!

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Google Code-in is a program for 13 to 18 year old students to get involved in a number of Free Software projects, among them KDE. You will get a cool mentor from the KDE community and work with him or her on exciting tasks. Check out the over 100 tasks that are available currently. We will be adding some more in the next days. There are tasks for nearly every area of KDE. You can find translations, coding, artwork, outreach, research and more among them. Some examples: Help Guillermo prepare a news section for his KDE podcast, help Frederik solve a tricky code problem in Parley, help me figure out how to better present KDE on OpenHatch and much more. Found a task you like? Claim it and wait for your mentor to approve it. And then you can start being part of a team that changes the world one step at a time. Get started walking! 😉 If you have questions join our IRC channel #kde-soc on freenode or ask on the mailinglist kde-soc at kde.org.

There are prizes involved as well. Students get 100$ for each 3 tasks they finish successfully up to 500$ and the 10 best participants get to go to Google’s headquarter in Mountain View. (It is pretty damn awesome there I can tell you.) A little birdie tells me there are t-shirts involved as well. Go go go!