Almost all communication between KDE community members happens online, and includes people from all around the world. At Akademy, KDE people meet each other and work together in person. Virtual communication is necessary and valuable for day-to-day work; working face-to-face is much more effective. And Akademy provides much more than that.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

Will Schroeder Keynote

Will Schroeder is the CEO of Kitware Inc., a company that builds open source scientific software that also depends on open source. He suggested that open source is the most effective way to get things done through agile, collaborative innovation.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

Community Keynote
Agustín Benito Bethencourt

Yesterday, nearly 300 hackers grabbed their badges at the Estonian IT College in Tallinn and launched Akademy 2012. Mathias Klang's keynote, Freedom of Expression, got things going quickly with his urgent call to action for those who stand for freedom, which often disappears gradually and in a slow creep.

Some people kicked off the conference on Friday night at the pre-registration party sponsored by Intel or even arrived earlier in the week to explore Tallinn and sample Estonia's beers. During the first day of Akademy, there were sessions on release management, Plasma Active, and the future of KDE and Qt technologies.

The KDE Community is looking for a host for Akademy 2013.

Akademy is the annual gathering of the KDE Community, one of the largest in the world of Free and Open Source Software. At Akademy, KDE people gather to exchange ideas for development, plan for the future, and discuss other important issues. It is an extraordinary occasion for creativity, enthusiasm, commitment, close working relationships and innovation.

Today KDE released the first Release Candidate for the 4.9 versions of Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is still on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality.

The KDE e.V. report for the first quarter of 2012 has been published. It gives an overview of the activities KDE e.V. supported during that time, including various sprints, conferences and projects. It also has a feature article by Stuart Jarvis about the ALERT Project, an initiative to improve bug resolution processes in Open Source development teams.

Read the full report today.

Tuukka Turunen - Digia Director of R&D

Digia is a Silver Sponsor of Akademy 2012 Tallinn. They are also a new supporting member of KDE e.V. Digia and KDE have a close partnership based on a common interest and commitment to Qt. Like many people in the KDE Community, I had some questions about Digia, their plans for Qt and their views of KDE. The interview with Tuukka Turunen follows.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

• Android native look&feel plugin added to android-qt
• New assistant for new classes from templates in KDevelop
• Fancy bookmarking in rekonq
• Experimental rgbaf32 colorspace in the lcms color engine, all missing chart marker types implemented in Calligra