Agustín Benito Bethencourt (aka "toscalix") recently joined the KDE e.V. Board of Directors. He will be presenting the KDE Community Keynote at Akademy 2012 in Tallinn.

Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the third in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.8 series. 4.8.3 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.8 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.8.2 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

• Konsole gains a Web Shortcuts menu that allows searching selected text using any of the search providers; search scrollback is now possible in Konsole KPart
• New placement policy in KDEWorkspace: allow "under mouse"; work to include screenlocker into ksmserver
• Amarok ships the Free Music Charts by default; Amarok's iPod collection completely rewritten

The Akademy 2012 Program Committee is proud to present the Akademy 2012 Sessions. Given the broad nature of KDE, the proposals submitted contained a wealth of interesting and valuable topics. From those, 28 proposals were selected that we felt would address the most relevant topics and be deep enough in the areas of most interest to the KDE Community.

Google has published the list of 60 student proposals that have been accepted for Google Summer of Code 2012 for KDE. It means that 60 students will be able to work full-time on changing the world this summer! A big thank you to Google for making this possible.

Latin America is a big place with many opportunities for KDE; major deployments of KDE software are proof. Over the years, groups of KDE developers have emerged in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and probably other places. These groups work together to make a better KDE. As we know, meeting and talking in person is important to strengthen the bonds in a community. So we decided to organize a Latin American meeting of KDE contributors following the lead of the first Akademy-br in 2009. Like Akademy-br, the first LaKademy will be similar to a sprint for developers and one for people interested in promoting KDE in this part of the world.

The first LaKademy is taking place in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil from April 27th to May 1st, 2012. People were invited from Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Colombia. 12 known KDE contributors have confirmed their presence, along with 6 newcomers. Current KDE contributors recommended newcomers based on their abilities and their potential to become long-time KDE contributors.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

• Dolphin now uses KMessageWidget for error and information messages, and has faster file sorting
• Initial Fuse backend implementation for Solid
• It is now possible to save images from HTML mails in KMail
• OSRM (Open Source Routing Machine) is supported as routing backend in Marble

Mathias Klang  photo by Ola Waagen

Dr. Mathias Klang is a researcher and senior lecturer at the University of Göteborg in Sweden. His research revolves within the field of legal informatics with particular interest in copyright, democracy, human rights, free expression, censorship, open access and ethics. He holds Master of Laws and Ph.D. degrees.

Dr. Klang will deliver one of the keynote talks at Akademy 2012 in Tallinn, Estonia. My interview with another keynoter, Dr. Will Schroeder, was published recently on the Dot.

(Matthias) Kalle Dalheimer is the President and Founder of KDAB, and also one of the founding members of the KDE project and KDE e.V. He hasn't personally been very active in KDE lately, but some of the old-timers will remember that he served as President and Treasurer of KDE e.V. for a few years. He also wrote the first C++ class ever used in kdelibs (KConfig) even though it's doubtful that any of the code is still left in today's codebase.

KDE China User meeting

On March 30th, a grand meeting called KDE China User was held in Beijing. This meeting provided KDE users, community members and technophiles with a nice "face-to-face" opportunity to discuss KDE's latest and cutting edge technology trends. Read on to find out what transpired at the meeting and what the future might hold for KDE in China.