Category: PlanetKDE

Desktop Summit: Registration and Call for Workshops/BoFs

I have two announcements for the Desktop Summit participants:

  1. Please register for the event asap if you have not done so already. We need a good estimate of how many people will attend for a lot of things very soon. Please help by registering for the event. Registration is free but mandatory to attend.
  2. Propose your BoFs and workshops. You have time for this until July 3rd. There will also be opportunities for scheduling BoFs and workshops at the conference.

See you all in Berlin 🙂

KDE Community Working Group office hour in 2 days

Just a quick reminder that the Community Working Group will be doing another office hour on Saturday (11th of June) at 7pm UTC. We’ll be meeting on IRC in #kde-cwg on freenode. You can add topics to the wiki. Everything related to community is welcome.

Oh and before I forget:
I'm attending the Qt Contributors' Summit
If there is anything you’d like me to bring up wrt community and/or Community Working Group please let me know in the office hour or via email.

Desktop Summit 2011 reminder – accommodation and child care

This is a friendly reminder that if you are coming to the Desktop Summit (and I hope you are!) then you should book your accommodation pretty soon. We have some special rates but they are only valid for a limited time and run out soon. We also expect the time of the Desktop Summit to be rather busy in Berlin. So go and book your accommodation now, please. DesktopSummit.org has some suggestions.

We’d also like to offer a child care option for the attending parents at the summit. To see if this is feasible we’d like to know who would be interested in such an option. Depending on the demand and a few other factors this might not be gratis. We’d have professional staff on site for the kids. We have to make a decision on this soon. If you’re interested please send an email to ds-team at desktopsummit org soon to let the team know.

Oh and see, the conference can begin now. Thanks to Damien we have a shiny button. What more do you need? 😀

I'm going to the Desktop Summit 2011

sweet stats from sysadmins

I’ve been hanging around in KDE’s sysadmin IRC channel for a while now and you know what’s the best thing about scanning the backlog every day? You get to see whenever a new developer gets added to the committers list, making him/her able to commit to (nearly) every bit of the codebase. That’s really really awesome. And while watching this Tom, Eike and I thought that while we’re creating a lot of accounts it seems to have increased a lot in the last weeks. Since we wanted to be sure Tom and Eike ran some stats. And tada – here’s the result:

That’s the new accounts created for KDE’s SVN and git repositories since January 2008. As you can see our feeling was right. Last month 39 new accounts were created. That’s more than 1 account per day! That means more than 1 new developer per day. Pretty amazing if you ask me.

Hats off to KDE for being able to attract so many talented new people and for being able to integrate them in the community.

PS: Policies on when an account request is granted have not changed in that time.

Season of KDE applications closed

Wow. So I have 96 Season of KDE applications now. The majority of them are matched up with a mentor. I am really amazed by the response to this opportunity. It far exceeded my expectations. Looking forward to the results that will come out of this year’s SoK. Make us all proud, students 🙂

With nearly 100 SoK applications and 51 accepted Google Summer of Code students KDE has reached the end of its mentoring capacity unfortunately. This means I will not be accepting further applications for this year. (If you’ve already talked to me about applying a while ago email me.)

Please don’t let this stop you from contributing to KDE outside of our mentoring programs. I will also do my best to make sure we’ll do a GSoC and SoK again next year.

Mentors needed – no, seriously!

I currently have 72 Season of KDE applications and more are coming in. I really need more mentors for these students than I currently have lined up. If you are a KDE contributor and willing to mentor an enthusiastic student on a project please get in touch with me. (This is your chance to get some of those tasks done that you always wanted to do but never really got around to.)

Not accepted into GSoC? Here’s what to do…

GSoC acceptance/rejection emails have been sent out not long ago. Congratulations to everyone who was accepted. Now if you are among those who received a rejection email this blog has a few things for you. None of these are GSoC or directly affiliated with it. Each of them however is pretty damn cool 😉

So first of all: Pretty much any GSoC org will accept you outside of GSoC if you are dedicated and they have someone who can help you a bit. Ask them! A few orgs have dedicated programs though:

  • Haiku with Haiku Code Drive (not confirmed yet for this year)
  • illumos with illumos Students – You get mentoring to work on a cutting-edge operating system at your own pace and get a t-shirt, recommendation and other prizes, possibly even internships.
  • KDE with Season of KDE – You get to work on cool stuff all over KDE and get a t-shirt and certificate if you are successful.
  • Umit with Umit Summer of Code – Your chance to work on networking tools and get a t-shirt, certificate and recommendation letter.
  • X.Org with X.Org Endless Vacation of Code – You can get paid to work on X.Org and you can do it at a time that suits you and your mentor.

All of these programs allow you to work on really cool software with a mentor over a longer period and create something you can be proud of. So ask your org and see what you can do outside of GSoC with them. It’s in your hands. And if they don’t have enough mentors for example, there are a lot more projects out there waiting for you. Don’t be shy and ask.

If you know of more GSoC orgs running similar programs this year please mention them in the comments.

announcing Season of KDE 2011

I’m super happy that KDE could accept 51 student for GSoC this year. It’s an impressive number and they’ll make a difference in KDE this year. But this number also means that we had to say no to many students. A lot of tough choices had to be made. Now I can’t magically make more GSoC slot appear unfortunately. But I can do something else.  I can run another Season of KDE together with an awesome team of mentors and co-admins. And that is exactly what I am going to do. So here’s the details for this year’s Season of KDE:

  • What is Season of KDE? It is a program for people we could not accept into Google Summer of Code for various reasons.
  • Who can take part? Everyone but preference is given to those who have applied for GSoC.
  • What do I get out of this? A great summer working on a really cool KDE project and gaining valuable experience, a t-shirt, a certificate and maybe a few other goodies.
  • How do I apply? If you are serious about it fill out this short survey and I’ll try to get back to you asap.
  • What is the timeline? The timeline is up to you and your mentor. We ask you to stay close to the GSoC timeline if possible.
  • Do I need to have a mentor before applying? It is preferred. If you don’t have one yet we will try to find one.
  • Do I need to have a project idea before applying? It is preferred. If you don’t have one yet we will try to find one. You should at least have an idea however which part of KDE you want to work in. KDE is huge.
  • Do I need to write a proposal like in GSoC? No but we’d like to see a project plan describing what you’ll be working on.
  • Is it only for coders like GSoC? Depending on the project we’re willing to consider non-coding projects as well. Get in touch to figure out details.
  • I applied for a project in GSoC and another student got selected for it. Can I still work on it? Likely not. But we will try to find something related for you if you want, or something completely different. Let us know what you want.
  • Is this GSoC or connected to Google? No.

If you have further questions please come to our IRC channel #kde-soc or send an email to the admin team at kde-soc-mentor-owner@kde.org.

In previous years we had 1, 4 and 8 successful Season of KDE students. My personal goal for this year is 16. Are you going to be one of them? You should be!