- should have claudia as author (I only helped here a bit :D)
- should not be published yet, as FOSDEM is coming and will push the article down the stack too fast. Publish after the last FOSDEM article is online.
- one more editor needed to review
- Corrected a few things; should be good to go -Aaron
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Akademy is the annual conference of the KDE community and open to all who share an interest in the KDE community and its goals. This conference brings together artists, designers, programmers, translators, users, writers and other contributors to celebrate the achievements of the past year and helps define the vision for the next year. In its 7th year, we invite all contributors and users to participate in Akademy in Tampere, Finland from July 3 to 10 2010.

Looking to help the KDE community and living in Southern California? Then this is a great opportunity for you! The Southern California Linux Expo will be in town February 20-21, 2010, at the Westin Hotel near LAX. All you need to help out is to be willing and able to be there and be a user of KDE's applications, such as the Plasma Workspaces, Amarok and Koffice.

Last week, the KDE Community had their yearly Americas event, this year in sunny San Diego. Despite California not living up to its sunny reputation, the attendees certainly had a good time. The first three days featured talks about a variety of topics (day 1, day 2 and day 3), there were CMake and Qt development courses and of course several small meetings and work to be done. However there was more than sitting in the conference room at UCSD. We had a great time at Banana Bungalows on the beach, went out for a variety of food, had a few dragons and babies visit us and risked our lives getting to and from the university. Read on for some general impressions on the event, and for some motivation to attend Camp KDE 2011 next January, at a location still to be determined.

Day 2 of Camp KDE kicked off with a bang when Frank Karlitschek announced the start of a significant new KDE project. The ownCloud initiative will complement the Social Desktop and Get Hot New Stuff efforts which are already dealing with social and collaborative data. Like those, the ownCloud initiative strives to combine the rich desktop interfaces made possible by the Qt and KDE libraries with the large amount of social information and data users are putting online.

The second day of Camp KDE was filled with many more interesting talks. This day's talks were of the more technical nature versus the first day, and the KDE team took notes. As usual, the talks were recorded and videos will be available soon. A detailed rundown of the second day of talks are behind the link.

The first day of Camp KDE is behind us, with the first of the many presentations being well attended. A full summary of the talks lives behind the break, and videos will be online shortly. If you are in the San Diego region, feel free to join us for Camp KDE for talks and training.

Tomorrow morning, the third major North American KDE event will start with an introduction by Jeff Mitchell and Aaron Johnson. At 11:00 a keynote by University of California San Diego professor Philip Bourne will introduce us to the university's Open Data initiative and after a lunch we'll get going with the various presentations.

On the second weekend in January the 8th incarnation of the annual KDE PIM meeting in Osnabrück, Northern Germany, took place. This meeting has a longer history than any other regular KDE contributor event. As in all previous years, the meeting was hosted by Intevation GmbH. Up to 20 contributors followed an agenda of discussing design, marketing, attracting new developers, tools to assist and monitor progress, and the present and future of KDE PIM.

The admins and editors behind the Italian KDE Portal and forum are proud to announce the availability of the new KDE Italia site.

By announcing the availability of both the new site and the forum (which is on the official kde.org forums now), the KDE Italia team invites everyone to visit and have a look. There's not much there for now, but content is growing every hour thanks to the dedicated team working on it!