Category: PlanetKDE

GSoC 2011 finished

I can’t believe Summer of Code is over again already. But well, it is. It’s been a great few months with our students and they’ve done really amazing stuff. You’ll get to read about all the projects soon in an article series on dot.kde.org. I’m really happy to announce that of the 51 students that started with KDE 47 finished successfully and passed the final evaluation – 1 left us after midterm for a job he couldn’t say no to. Thanks for rocking! I hope  you’ll stick around and we’ll get to see more of you in the future 🙂  A huge thank you of course also goes out to our mentors without whom this would not have been possible and who I am sure had a few sleepless nights every now and then. And last but not least thank you to my co-admins Valorie, Leo and Jeff.

Season of KDE students have just been sent a link to their final evaluation form. I’ll tell you more about that next week. So far it looks like the Season of KDE students rock just as much. (Not that I ever had a doubt about that ;-))

Akademy 2012 – looking for hosts

The Desktop Summit is barely over (said bye to my last DS guests last night *sob*) and KDE e.V. is already working hard on the next conference. It never stops 😉 We’re looking for proposals for Akademy 2012, KDE’s annual gathering. If you’d like to do an amazing service to the community and your city consider sending in a proposal. We’re collecting them until October 1st, 2011. Check the dot and this pdf for more information. If you have questions feel free to contact the board at kde-ev-board@kde.org.

Desktop Summit recap

Wow. I finally made it back home after over a week of Desktop Summit and visiting family on the way back. What a ride it was… Let me recap some of it:

  • Meeting some of the best friends I have all in one spot is the best thing ever. It’s great to catch up on important things and also talk about non-sense for a week.
  • I’ve spend quite a lot of time talking to people in GNOME about mentoring programs and community management. Very useful and not really possible to that extend outside the Desktop Summit unfortunately. The lower software stack isn’t the only place we can and should collaborate. The social stuff is just as important and maybe even easier to collaborate on sometimes.
  • I got really really nice gifts from India and the US. Thank you so much folks!
  • Seif Lotfy and I gave a talk about what GNOME and KDE can learn from each other. I’ll try to post a summary soon. It was well received and we got a lot of great questions from the audience.
  • I chaired the intern showcase (which was a lightning talk session by students from GSoC, Season of KDE and the GNOME Outreach Program for Women). It was stunning. Each of the presenters did a really great job showing the work they’ve done. I was sad to not have been able to have more students present (time was limited). What made me really really happy is the fact that at least two of KDE’s GSoC students paid their trip to Berlin from India from their GSoC money. You have no idea how thrilled I was to hear that it means so much to them to meet the community they’ve worked with even without getting sponsored. The other thing that thrilled me was to see how many women we got on stage for the intern showcase. Rocking!
  • KDE e.V. organized a professional mediation training for the members of the Community Working Group and a few others. Attending it was very useful for me. I hope I’ll not have to put my mad skills into practice soon of course.
  • We held a few feedback sessions on the activities of the Community Working Group over the last year. This feedback was very useful and lead to proposing a few changes we’ll implement over the next weeks. Stay tuned for more info.
  • I was elected into the board of KDE e.V.  and Cornelius was re-elected. This hasn’t really settled in just yet – probably will in the next days. The main thing I want to work on in the next weeks is making the work of the board even more transparent and getting a lot of the tasks that the board currently does into the e.V. membership and the community at large. This should allow the board to concentrate more on tasks that only the board can do. I need your help for that and I’ll ask for it every now and then.
All in all I consider the Desktop Summit a huge success and am looking forward to the next one (after an Akademy ;-)). Mad props to everyone who helped organize it.

So what’s up next for me? (Let me know if you want to meet up.)

  • I might go to Paris for VideoLAN Dev Days to meet some of our friends from VLC and co and to go back to lovely Paris.
  • I’ll be speaking at openSUSE conf about social skills for geeks (a session I’ve done before together with Hanne and Alexandra at the Qt Contributors’ Summit) and do a BoF about how to get more women (and diversity) into openSUSE.
  • I might come to Oslo for a few days in the next months to visit friends and disconnect.
  • We’re planning a KDE e.V. sprint to work on things like Join the Game. I’ll help with getting that rolling.

PS: I’m likely looking for a full-time job soon – preferably related to community management/engagement or project management. Check my CV and get in touch if this sounds interesting.

Woah – Desktop Summit is close!

Only one week left until the Desktop Summit. Man, I’m so excited. Unfortunately not everyone will be able to be with us in Berlin in person. If you’re one of them, here’s what you need to stay up-to-date on things happening at the Desktop Summit:

Most of these have RSS feeds you can subscribe to – use them 🙂

If otoh you’re going to be in Berlin it’d be awesome if you would help people who can’t be there. Let’s get as much information to them as possible and make them feel like they’re there. Here’s how to spread what’s happening:
  • join the !desktopsummit group and post about what you’re doing (you can’t post without joining first – it can also be posted to with !ds2011)
  • identi.ca and twitter: poke Kenny, Claudia or me to have useful stuff posted to @desktopsummit
  • identi.ca and twitter: tag your messages with #ds2011
  • flickr: upload your fotos and videos and tag them with #ds2011
  • write blog posts and have them aggregated on Planet KDE or GNOME
  • ping jefferai to have an etherpad set up for your workshops/BoF if your team doesn’t have one already – this way people can follow the notes remotely
See you in Berlin next week! 🙂

ESA Summer of Code in Space – apply now!

The European Space Agency is running their own Summer of Code-like program this year as a trial. It’s called ESA Summer of Code in Space. Wohooo for ESA! ESA selected KStars and Marble as two of 20 projects taking part this year. So if you want to hack on Marble or KStars and become famous here’s your chance. For more details check out Torsten’s blog post.

Oh and hurry: Application deadline for students is on July 27th, 11:00 AM (UTC). Don’t miss your chance to show us how much you rock!

Session chairs for the Desktop Summit needed

We are still looking for more volunteers for the Desktop Summit. Especially needed at the moment are for example session chairs. As a session chair you introduce the speaker, make sure they have everything they need and start and finish on time. People who sign up first get to chose with parts of the program they get. So be quick!

The Desktop Summit is an event for the community by the community – help make it happen and sign up as a volunteer now: http://wiki.desktopsummit.org/Volunteers

It’s party time!

Another 6 months passed pretty quickly if you ask me. It’s time again to get together and celebrate a release together with fellow KDE contributors and users.

Ingo was so kind to prepare a wiki page for the 4.7 parties at http://community.kde.org/Promo/Events/Release_Parties/4.7. Organizing a get-together? Add it quickly. The release is planned for 27th of this month.

If you have no idea what this is all about:

  • KDE people will meet all around the world for nice chats and a fun time for everyone to celebrate the 4.7 release.
  • Everyone can organize a party. Just add it to the wiki and let people sign up.
  • What happens at the party is up to you! Everything from meeting in a bar for a drink to a full event with talks and stuff is allowed. Be creative!
  • Everyone is welcome – contributors, soon-to-be contributors, users and close FOSS friends alike.

If you have questions email me or kde-promo at kde org.

The last release party here in Karlsruhe was great fun and got KDE a new awesome maintainer for Step.

And now go and reserve a table at a local restaurant 🙂 (There really isn’t more to do than that, a blog entry and maybe emailing a few locals. Oh and you should of course show up for your party :D)

more stats from sysadmin

At the Qt Contributors’ Summit I did a Social Skills for Geeks session together with Hanne and Alexandra. I’ll try to post a summary of the session as soon as I have the video.

One of the things that we talked about is managing and wasting time. Together with the attendees we came to how much time is wasted by sending useless emails to mailing lists. One of the reasons for that is that people are not aware how many people will get their email and spend at least a few seconds of their day on it. To improve that situation I asked KDE’s sysadmin team to give me the subscriber numbers for our public mailing lists. Here are the numbers for a few of them:

list subscribers
amarok 620
bugsquad 127
digikam-devel 137
digikam-users 613
kde 994
kde-accessibility 183
kde-announce 5714
kde-artists 237
kde-bindings 174
kde-buildsystem 201
kde-commits 153
kde-core-devel 1124
kde-devel 1797
kde-edu 405
kde-extra-gear 186
kde-freebsd 491
kde-games-devel 293
kde-i18n-doc 537
kde-india 306
kde-licensing 99
kde-linux 888
kde-look 312
kde-mac 112
kde-multimedia 351
kde-nonlinux 181
kde-pim 606
kde-promo 348
kde-quality 641
kde-science 98
kde-scm-interest 183
kde-soc 351
kde-solaris 314
kde-usability 322
kde-windows 553
kde-women 201
kde-www 132
kwin 172
nepomuk 141
okular-devel 88
owncloud 217
plasma-devel 585
rekonq 72
release-team 193

Keep in mind that these numbers are the lower boundary. There are quite a few people on top of that reading mailing lists through GMane and archiving services who do not show up in these numbers.

Have these numbers in mind when sending a useless email to a mailing list. But also have in mind how many people you can potentially reach with important messages.