Today we are announcing the winners of the Social Desktop Contest. The Social Desktop Contest was launched in June with the goal to bring Web 2.0 ideas and our user and developer community closer to the desktop and foster community development and innovations around the OCS API.

Last week Adriaan de Groot, Claudia Rauch and Kenny Duffus visited Tampere, Finland representing KDE. This gave a chance to meet face to face with members of the local team and talk about next summer's Akademy 2010 conference.

On October 29 the dutch NLUUG will organise a conference about 'The Open Web'. In 18 talks and one keynote we hope to give you the best from a wide range of topics. Things you can expect are cool stuff you can do with HTML5, integrating geoinformation in applications with Geoclue, comet, the social desktop (integrating information from web services and all contacts into applications and your desktop) and much more.

There will be quite some talks related to KDE. Accidental? We don't think so. It shows that KDE is on the forefront of integrating open web technologies into the desktop. It also means that KDE is exciting and cool.

The complete program and details about registration can be found on the conference website.

The last few years has seen the company formerly known as Trolltech open their arms to one of the largest parts of their supporting community, KDE, in a new way: By offering a few members of the KDE community free admittance to the Qt Developer Days conference. This year is no different, and they have invited a number of people to attend this year's conferences. Yes, that's plural: There are two conferences. One from the 12th to 14th of October in Munich, Germany and one from the 2nd to the 4th of November in San Francisco, USA.

We are pleased to announce Camp KDE 2010!

Camp KDE 2010 will take place at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) in La Jolla, California, USA from January 15th until January 22nd, 2010. The event is free to all participants.

KDE Developers of Spain

During the final days of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, the fourth edition of Akademy-es was held in the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Akademy-es is the sister of Akademy aimed at Spanish speakers.

Over the last few years KDE has seen increased involvement of students and university researchers. While many universities still feel uneasy about working with Free Software, the open and welcoming attitude in the KDE community has already brought several scientific research projects to life. A prime example is of course the Nepomuk project, officially finished but still very much alive within the Free Software- and scientific communities. Furthermore, many involved contributors make use of scientific research papers while looking for inspiration to solve the more complex problems involved in writing software. The Free Software community also contributes in a practical way to science: the Avogadro project, grown out of the KDE educational application Kalzium develops an advanced molecular editor designed for use in computational chemistry, molecular modeling, bioinformatics, materials science, and related areas. Last Akademy, an initiative was developed by Celeste Lyn Paul to bring KDE and science even closer. Read on for an interview with Celeste about this initiative and a talk with Laura Dragan, one of the contributors to this initiative for Akademy 2009!

Many of you who did not come to Akademy might be wondering how this meeting compares to the previous years' conferences. After all, aside from being in a sunny location, there are many different animals around here besides the usual trolls and dragons. Gnomes might be small, but they are noticable and they certainly make for interesting company. Read on for an impresson of Akademy at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit.

The Akademy 2009 Group Photo

The New Conference Location

At the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit much cross-desktop work has been done. The days we have are being used for the Cross Desktop Tracks and during the talks there are KDE and Gnome developers mingling everywhere. Cross desktop sessions included bug triage, metadata sharing, instant messaging and sharing personal data cross-desktop with CouchDB. Read more about the results!

The conference auditorium

The Desktop Summit is continuing with talks in the Cross Desktop tracks and the start of the Akademy tracks. Between the talks developers can be spotted huddled in groups discussing everything from problems with their code to building community. The tracks covered metadata, community, infrastructure and multimedia. Read on for some of the talks.