Community and Events

Did you think that this year we would not have a KDE event in Spain? Nothing further from reality. Badopi (the LUG of Barcelona) are organising the first aKademy-es event so you can have an excuse to meet other Spanish KDE developers, users, translators, artists and share some good days with other KDE people. aKademy-es 2006 is scheduled to be a small event for all KDE users and developers from Spain to attend talks, share experiences, etc.

Solutions Linux is currently taking place in Paris -- January 31st to February 2nd. KDE is participating in the Pavillon des associations and we're running a booth over there. We are welcoming present and future users to our demonstration of the latest stable version of KDE.

Aaron Seigo will be presenting at SCALE 4x, the 2006 Southern California Linux Expo on February 11-12 in Los Angeles. His presentation will cover the next KDE release and how the Plasma project is looking to reinvigorate the desktop experience by centering the desktop on workflow-centric interfaces. Additionally KDE will have a booth on the expo hall floor.

FOSDEM, the sixth Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting will be held on 25 and 26 February 2006 in Brussels. KDE will be present there to socialise, hack and take part in the wider Free Software community. KDE has reserved a devroom to serve as a central meeting point for the KDE crowd. We will be holding our own talks which so far include Raphael Langerhorst on KOffice 1.5 and Jonathan Riddell on Kubuntu.

Witold Wysota wrote in to inform us of the newly launched Qt Centre which is being billed as the ultimate Qt community site.

It is hard to believe that our last official fund raiser was in mid October of 2004. As a member of the community you might think that represents a lot of success for our fund raising efforts as we have done fund raisers as often as every few months. Nothing could be further from truth. In actuallity we were already behind when a $100 a month sponsor was forced to pull out.

On the weekend of December 10th & 11th, a small group of nine KDE contributors met in Hamburg to work on quality assurance checks for KDE's code base. This not only covered C++ sourcecode but also other aspects such as checking the state of the API documentation, looking for common errors in KDE's manuals and evaluating the usability of KDE applications. Read on for the full report.

A group of enthusiastic KDE users and developers met last week at the
FOSS.IN conference in Bangalore, one of the largest Free and Open Source Software meetings in the world, to combine their efforts in various regions of the country under a common banner and build a central platform for all things KDE in India. Along with spreading KDE awareness in India, especially in colleges and
with local businesses, KDE.in has a few more practical goals. KDE.in

The next annual central meeting of the KDE community, aKademy 2006, is looking
for a location. The event consists of the general assembly of the KDE e.V., a
KDE developer conference and a multi-day hacking session. The main goal of
the event will be to shape the upcoming new major step of the K Desktop
Environment, KDE 4. If you are interested in hosting this large and exciting
free software event, please consider to submit a proposal to the board of the
KDE e.V. which will act as a co-host.

KDE will be present in the next Jornadas Andaluzas de Software Libre (Andalusian Free Software Conference), an annual event sponsored this year by the Junta de Andalucía (Andalusian goverment), the University of Cordoba and many others. This event takes place in Córdoba, Spain this coming weekend (4th, 5th and 6th November) with a strong KDE presence. KDE related talks include Kiosk mode and KDE-Guadalinex.