KDE has once again been selected as an organisation to mentor students as part of Google Summer of Code. I’m really looking forward to working with amazing students again. We have awesome mentors and exciting ideas lined up. So if you’re a student and want to work with KDE this summer you should have a look at our ideas list. If you have questions you can come to our IRC channel #kde-soc on freenode or send an email to the mailinglist kde-soc@kde.org.
Only 1 month left until I’m heading of to Bilbao for some vacation and my favorite conference of the year, Akademy. Akademy is shaping up to be a great event again for KDE – but not only for KDE! We’ll be hosting the Qt Contributor’s Summit as well and other projects like VideoLAN, RazorQt, Tomahawk are joining us again to create, discuss and maaaaybe also have a little fun 😉
I am personally looking forward to most:
Together with the fabulous Leslie Hawthorn I’ll be talking about negotiation theory for geeks and burnout. Don’t miss it! It’ll be fun. Besides that my major goal for this year’s Akademy is getting input from a lot of people for some fundamental questions about the future of KDE e.V.
But that’s not enough for a summer, right? No. No rest for the crazy people… After Akademy I’ll be heading over to Taipei for COSCUP to talk about what makes KDE tick as well as Wikidata. From there I’ll head over to HongKong for Wikimedia’s annual conference Wikimania to catch up with people on all things Wikidata and a whole bunch of other community and tech things around Wikimedia like the VisualEditor.
The accepted students for Google Summer of Code and the Outreach Program for Women have just been announced. I am so happy that we were able to accept 50 students for GSoC. Thank you Google! I am also excited that we were able to accept 3 women for our first participation in the Outreach Program for Women. Thank you KDAB and the other OPFW sponsors who made it possible to accept 2 more than we initially planned! This is going to be a great summer for KDE for sure. You can see all accepted GSoC projects here and the OPFW projects here. They’ll all be adding status updates here so keep an eye on that page. Please give them a warm welcome!
If we could not accept your proposal for any of the programs this time please have a look at this email I just sent to the student mailinglist about this year’s Season of KDE.
Since a few minutes applications for Google Summer of Code 2013 are open. If you plan to apply it is time to get started writing that proposal. GSoC is an amazing opportunity to become a part of KDE and many other free software projects. To help you get going here are some very useful links:
Oh and don’t forget that KDE is also taking part in the Outreach Program for Women.
KDE is looking forward to an amazing summer with a bunch of great students. Will you be one of them? You totally could be!
KDE is a huge project and to keep it running it needs all kinds of people with very different talents – be it artists, translators, promoters, community managers, documentation writers, bug triagers and much more. We’re relatively good with recruiting coders. We could do better for everyone else. The Community Working Group would like to invite you to its next office hour to talk about this topic. How can we make it easier for non-coders to get involved? How can we improve the help we give them? How can we reach more of them?
Join us in #kde-cwg on freenode IRC at 4PM UTC on 21st of April. I hope to see many of you there 🙂
Akademy is getting closer and it is time to submit proposals for talks. This is your chance to present your work and ideas to the KDE community in person. The call for papers is here. It has all the details. I’m sure there’s something interesting you could talk about in Bilbao. Don’t wait! If you have questions or are unsure I’m happy to help. Just send me an email.
Important: deadline for submissions is March 15th, 23:59:59 CEST. But please do your program committee a favor and don’t wait until the last minute 😉
KDE e.V. will once again provide travel and accommodation support to a number of people who need it to be able to attend Akademy. For details about this please see the reimbursement policy. The board will approve requests in 3 rounds. The budget is limited. You want to be in the first round! The deadlines for requests are:
To post a request please register for Akademy on akademy.kde.org. During the registration process you’ll be able to indicate it.
Google has announced that they’ll be running Google Summer of Code once again in 2013. This is splendid! KDE will once again apply as a mentoring organization to introduce many great students to Free Software and of course also get some important work done around KDE.
Last year KDE gave a focus to accessibility for its GSoC. This year (if we’re accepted again) we will do the same but with a different theme. This year’s theme is KDE++ aka polishing existing things. We’ll also accept projects outside this but this should be the main focus. I’m really looking forward to the results.
Here’s what needs to happen next:
FOSDEM is getting closer and I have booked my flight and hotel \o/ I hope to see many of you there.
We have decided to extend the deadline for submitting talks for the cross-desktop room to the 21st of December. If you have something relevant to talk about please consider submitting a proposal. You can find the call for participation here.
KDE is once again taking part in Google Code-in this year, a contest to bring 13 to 17 year-olds closer to Free Software. I asked some of our students to write about their experience with KDE. Here’s the fifth one by José.
Many of you may have heard about the Google Code-In. In this opportunity, I am writing you about this, not as an spectator of the contest, but as a participant. As today, I have been participating with KDE, an organization which has a super huge community. Basically, what you have to do here, is claim some tasks (in different areas such as coding, outreach/research, analysis/statistics, etc.) and work on it with your mentors, in a specific period of time designated by them. Once it’s finished, the mentor will approve the work and mark the task as completed. But it’s not only about that, you can win the great prize, which includes a trip to the Googleplex!
Well, participating with KDE has been a great experience until now. In my two tasks (third counting this one) tasks I’ve had with KDE, the community and my mentors have been greatly helpful, which added to my efforts in doing the best possible work, ended up in what I think are great results and work. By doing this I don’t think you may only be able to win the prize, the simple and maybe abstract fact of helping a community, which is the main purpose behind all of this (from my point of view) is what makes your work valuable. Knowing there’s a community and people behind it, thanking you for what you’re doing, only that feels great. I know I may not be able to win the prize, but for me, helping the KDE community is more than enough to be satisfied for the work I’m doing, and I will continue doing.
The two tasks I chose with KDE were done with the Amarok team, which develop a music player in KDE. The first one involved reviewing 30 old bugs to see if I could reproduce them again. So, after some hours of work that involved screenshots, and typing in every single detail I saw, I got it done.
In the case of the second task, I had to do a report on a database that has been storing feedback for a long time. I had to review it, and classify it, making some nice charts about the general and specific statistics of each part of the database, and compare it to the last report, that had been done about a year before. This was a little more complicated, as while in the task, I got stuck in an airport for hours, and couldn’t do much. Anyways, I ended up finishing the task, and my mentors were satisfied and happy because of it. I also learned that people get to understand bar charts better than pie charts!
Anyways, I am 100% sure that the KDE community is more than grateful with all the efforts each person taking a task from them is doing. I would also like to remark the fact that many of you may have been collaborating with some other different organizations, which is completely fine in this case. The organization I prefer after considering many different aspects is KDE, so don’t feel discouraged if I’m talking about a different organization, it’s part of the contest. But overall, I can say that my experience until now has been great, and I don’t regret my choice.
KDE is once again taking part in Google Code-in this year, a contest to bring 13 to 17 year-olds closer to Free Software. I asked some of our students to write about their experience with KDE. Here’s the fourth one by Thomas.
Google Code-In 2012 marks the first time in which I have participated in the Code-In or any similar program. Having some experience with smaller organizations and personal development, I did not know what to expect, but I signed up ready to learn and be challenged. Less than two weeks into the program I have completed two tasks (and now a third!) with KDE. More specifically, I have worked with the team behind ownCloud, a personal cloud
service, to help test and design new features for an upcoming release.
My first task was to help test and debug a RSS reader for ownCloud that was actually developed as part of this year?s Google Summer of Code program. The News app runs within the ownCloud instance and allows for each user to have their own RSS reader with multiple feeds. The app was operational, but lacked key features and was too buggy to be released as part of the ownCloud package. My mentor Alessandro Cosentino (zimba12) helped guide me with testing tips and practices. I also suggested features and changes to the existing help to make it more appealing for users. I personally do not use an RSS feed reader, but I found the news app to be easy to use and enjoyable.
My second task with ownCloud involved designing mock ups for a redesign of the software?s application administration panel. The current panel doesn?t use space effectively and has an excessive amount of whitespace. My second mentor Bernhard Posselt (Raydiation) introduced me to Balsamiq, a mockup creation tool. I designed the new control panel with a much more user-friendly features such as drag and drop and contextual menus. The design looks somewhat reminiscent of Google Chrome?s new tab page, with tweaks to make the interface more powerful for administrators. I also had the opportunity to design potential new features such as system-wide settings per app and an integrated app market. Feedback from the designs has been positive so far.
My experience with KDE through GCI has been phenomenal so far. The community of developers who I have had the opportunity to work with have been very helpful and supportive with my efforts to complete the tasks assigned to me. Alessandro, for example, guided me in setting up ownCloud on my own system for testing. Without my mentors? help and guidance I would not be able to be as successful with the tasks. The information and skills that I have developed through these and future tasks are invaluable to me as a student in both my academic work but also when I develop my own software. I look forward to working with the ownCloud and other KDE organizations in the near future as part of GCI and other programs.