Plasma Active Three sprint - (top left to bottom right): Aleix Pol,
Martin Gräßlin, Marco Martin, Martin Klapetek, Martin Brook,
Sebastian Kügler, Laszlo Papp, Alex Fiestas, Dario Freddi,
Maurice de la Ferte
Not shown: Cornelius Schumacher, Fania Bremmer, Seif Lotfy,
Thomas Pfeiffer. (click for larger)

Last week, a group of Plasma Active hackers and designers met in basysKom's office in Darmstadt. The officially dubbed "Plasma Active Three Sprint" had as its goals to plan the next release of KDE's device-spectrum user experience, define work needed to accomplish this release, design user interfaces for new features and enhancements, and of course get cracking. Another point of focus was to work on a few things that need to be done before the launch of the SPARK, the first consumer device featuring a fully free and openly developed software stack, running KDE software.

Over the weekend of 19 and 20 November, KDE contributors met in Berlin for the KDE e.V. Sprint—the first ever. KDE e.V. is the non-profit organization that represents KDE in legal and financial matters and provides funding to assist KDE development and promotion. We aimed to work on some key areas to form a strong foundation for KDE e.V.'s future development, including:

• The Individual and Corporate Supporting Membership Programs
• KDE's policy on providing public thanks to donors of money, hardware and services
• Budget and goals for 2012
• Setting up a better method for approving sprint financing, planning and reporting

Over the last couple of years the KDE Mobile project has been evolving as it targeted many embedded platforms. Currently, the focus is on the shiny Nokia gadgets (N9 and N950) running the platform called Harmattan.

From the left, top: Hanna, Arjen, Ralf,
bottom: Laszlo, Stuart and Leinir (click to biggen)

Over the last couple of years it has become almost a tradition to have a Gluon sprint prior to Qt Developer Days in Munich. This year was not different. Through much effort, a sprint was pulled together for the Gluon team, in part commemorating the first of these sprints two years ago, where the Gluon Vision was first laid down, and in part to assist in the work towards the next release.

Randa Group Photo

In early June 2011, a sizable group of KDE hackers met high up in the Swiss Alps. In Randa, four co-located meetings took place to further KDE technologies. One of these groups, Platform 11, had as its goal to take the KDE development platform to its next level. This group consisted of about 25 people who work on and around kdelibs, the build-system, distributions, and 3rd party developers, and was intended to represent needs and wishes as completely as possible, while trying to find better ways to organize the KDE development platform.

Randa was not the only place to welcome KDE contributors at the start of June. In an altogether warmer part of the world, nine contributors with an interest in KDE's websites gathered outside Essen in Germany at the world famous Linux Hotel (page in German).

Attendees included members of KDE's design, web, promotion, UserBase and sysadmin teams, bringing a healthy mix of creativity and pragmatism. We looked at technical, design and promotion issues facing the kde.org website and the UserBase (and, to a lesser extent, the other KDE wikis).

In what is beginning to become quite a tradition, the Krita team came together from May 20 to May 22 for the third Krita meeting. The first sprint had four attendees. Last year's, eight. This year, we had twelve people in attendance. If the trend continues, the Blender Institute, which hosted our sprint, will be too small for us next year!

Over the weekend of May 14th and 15th, the Open Collaboration Services Next sprint took place at the Physics Institute of the Humboldt University in Berlin. Seven experienced developers participated in this event--some of them coming directly from Linux Tag--in order to meet face to face, create new bonds, and discuss current and future issues around Open Collaboration Services.

For four days, starting on Friday April 15th, about half a dozen souls gathered in the hive01 headquarters in Stuttgart. The goal of this very first ownCloud sprint was to discuss, plan and of course hack on the web services project.

To kickoff we had a brainstorming session and discussion of the topics that were to be dealt with over the following days. We extensively debated fundamental things concerning the future directions of ownCloud.

The KDE PIM community gathered at Osnabrück, Northern Germany for a weekend in February. The discussions covered recent achievements in KDE PIM, the current state of the community and applications, and brainstorming about the future and new cohesive and social applications. The meeting as usual had many attendees and was hosted, as in each of the previous 8 years, by Intevation GmbH. The agenda reflects the breadth and scope of this year's meeting, ranging from website maintenance to release engineering to features and tools.