Wednesday is the third and for many people last day of BoFs, as people start to head off home. However hacking and some smaller meetings will happen tomorrow between those still here
The second day of Akademy BoFs, group sessions and hacking has just finished. There is a wrapup session at the end so that what happened in the different rooms can be shared with everyone including those not present.
Sebastian Kügler writes on his blog about Plasma's vision statement, which names durabililty, usability and elegance as its corner stones.
intracommunity relationships.
Antonio Larrosa kicked off Sunday with his talk on The KDE Community and its Ecosystem. He expressed concern about what he perceived as an increase in the isolation of certain communities and laid out the advantages of working on intra-community relationships.
Later on in the day, Kevin Ottens gave his audience a taste of what Qt's 3D API can do in his talk Advances in Qt 3D. There are more and more applications that rely on 3D everyday, especially with the increase in popularity of virtual reality. Ottens introduced the tools Qt developers looking to include 3D into their programs and even treated attendees to a preview of a feature that is still in the works and that helps manage shader code.
Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen gave a very entertaining talk on Supporting Content Creators or Satisfying Your Inner Capitalist. Leinir laid out ways app developers could make enough money to be able to sometimes eat, while at the same time still feed their craving for developing cool stuff under free licenses.
Jonathan Riddell gave a demonstration of what Neonception would be like by running Neon inside Neon using Docker images. The point being that, apart from looking cool, as Neon comes in various experimental flavours, developers can run unstable versions in a container without endangering their main set up.
Jonathan gives a good explanation himself in the following video:
Ivan Čukić rounded off the day, invoking the Cthulhu of programming languages. In his talk C++17 and 20, he reviewed some of the more interesting features included into C++17, as well as those planned for C++20. Although some attendees would probably prefer C++ lay dreaming a few aeons more, new things like ranges, concepts, and coroutines may just convert some developers over.
For most of the year, KDE—one of the largest free and open software communities in the world—works on-line by email, IRC, forums and mailing lists. Akademy provides all KDE contributors the opportunity to meet in person to foster social bonds, work on concrete technology issues, consider new ideas, and reinforce the innovative, dynamic culture of KDE. Akademy brings together artists, designers, developers, translators, users, writers, sponsors and many other types of KDE contributors to celebrate the achievements of the past year and help determine the direction for the next year. Hands-on sessions offer the opportunity for intense work bringing those plans to reality. The KDE Community welcomes companies building on KDE technology, and those that are looking for opportunities. Join us by registering for the 2017 edition of Akademy today.
For more information, please contact the Akademy Team.
Akademy has had its first full day of BoFs, group sessions discussing our plans for the next year. The wrapup session has just finished so watch the video to find out about what Plasma devs are working on, what tutorials happened and how we avoided a fist fight to the finish.
Every year at Akademy we celebrate some of our hardest working achievers in the community. The prizes are selected and awarded by the previous year's winners. The winners this year are:
Kai Uwe Broulik for their valuable work on Plasma.
Cornelius Schumacher for their long term contributions to KDE.
Martin Konold & Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer for their work on the KDE Free Qt Foundation.
Honourable mentions also go to Lars Knoll and Tuukka Turunen for their work on the Qt side of the foundation which controls Qt's licensing.
The organising team were also given a certificate and thanked for their hard work. The organisation has been led by Kenny Duffus who has helped for over a decade making the events appear to run smoothly. The local team have worked hard this year led by Rubén Gómez and Ismael Olea to bring us a fabulous event.
Akademy continues for another four days with meetings, workshops and hacking from teams within KDE to discuss their work over the forthcoming year.
One final announcement was made at the end of the talks. The location for next year's Akademy was announced to be in Vienna, Lukas Hetzenecker introduced what he assured us was a beautiful and welcoming city.
On the 20th and 21st of July, KDE España held, with the invaluable help of UNIA, HackLab Almería and the University of Almería, and with the sponsorship of Opentia, its 12th annual gathering: Akademy-es 2017.
As it always happens when Akademy takes place in Spain, Akademy-es 2017 became a prelude of the international event and many well-known KDE developers attended.
Throughout two days, talks were offered covering many different topics, including Plasma, programming (C++, Qt, mobile), exciting projects like Kirigami, proposals for the future such as KDE on automobile, encouragement to use KDE software and contribute to KDE, and information about KDE España.
People who could not attend should not be worried as videos of the talks will be available online.
The local newspaper stopped by for a photo shoot and to write a story on the world gathering of KDE developers that was about to happen.
Attendees also got a chance to play around with Slimbook Ultrabooks such as the well-known KDE flavour or their new Pro edition.
As usual, KDE España members gathered to celebrate their AGM. If you wish to find out what goes on in there, or if you wish to help us out organizing events like Akademy-es and getting the word out in Spain about KDE, please consider joining KDE España. It is now easier than ever!
During the first day at the Akademy, everything went according to plan and nearly everything was on time. Kudos to the organisers.
The weather was balmy at the beginning of the day and, although Aleix Pol said it was not hotter than a hot day in Barcelona, many of the Scandinavian and Scottish attendees were visibly wilting under the sun. Fortunately for them, the venue is equipped with air-conditioning.
Little known fact about Almería: it is situated in the biggest desert in Europe, the Desert of Tabernas. A better known fact is that that same desert has been used as a location for many spaghetti westerns, including the seminal Sergio Leone movies "For A Fistful of Dollars" and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly". What is more interesting for some KDE members is that Tabernas has also been used in the filming of at least one Doctor Who episode ("A Town Called Mercy"). Unsurprisingly, the whovians amongst us quickly got busy and organised a trip to the place of the shoot for later in the week.
community of volunteers and the industry with MusicBrainz.
Robert Kaye did not disappoint and delivered an entertaining keynote on how MusicBrainz, a community-powered non-profit, has managed to be THE database of musical metadata. MusicBrainz's data is used by Google, the BBC, YouTube, Amazon, and nearly everyone else (including most FLOSS media players).
Jean-Baptiste Mardelle introduced us to the new features, back end and interface of Kdenlive, KDE's video editing software. Apart from having cleaner code and being more stable, upcoming versions of Kdenlive will sport intelligent clip cutting, resizing and inserting, making life for video editors much easier.
As expected Aditya Mehra's talk on the Mycroft plasmoid was another of the highlights of the day. The topic, after all, is intrinsically interesting -- there is something about issuing voice commands to an AI assistant on your desktop that appeals to everybody.
During the mid-afternoon Ask Us Anything session, attendees had the chance to... well, ask anything to the KDE e.V. board members. Questions ranged from governance to how donations were used, passing through the process of getting elected to the board. Talking of which, it was a chance to properly meet the new board member, Eike Hein, who stepped in for Marta Rybczynska.
Eike, among other things, maintains and develops Konversation, a user-friendly IRC client for KDE. He is also in charge of Yakuake, an original spin on the traditional terminal. Yakuake sits hidden at the top of your desktop and you can unfold it like a blind when you need it. He discovered KDE when test running Corel Linux (does anybody else remember that rather bizarre distro?) back in the 90s and started contributing in 2005.
In the evening, Timothée Giet gave us an update on GCompris, the suite of educational activities and games for young children. The improvements in design and to the number of features are turning GCompris into a free, safe and privacy-protecting suite of educational programs as opposed to some of the proprietary alternatives out there.
answering attendees' questions.
Agustín Benito, on the other hand, pointed to new sectors KDE should probably be looking into. Agustín has been working on Free Software on embedded devices for the automotive industry for some time now and reckons this is an area in which KDE could grow and even become a mainstream technology.
At the very end of the day, in the very last session, there was a lively debate on writing and how developers could better describe their projects to a larger audience. The discussion was animated enough to make us forget the time and, finally, we were all thrown out.
Day 2 promises to be equally fun.
For most of the year, KDE—one of the largest free and open software communities in the world—works on-line by email, IRC, forums and mailing lists. Akademy provides all KDE contributors the opportunity to meet in person to foster social bonds, work on concrete technology issues, consider new ideas, and reinforce the innovative, dynamic culture of KDE. Akademy brings together artists, designers, developers, translators, users, writers, sponsors and many other types of KDE contributors to celebrate the achievements of the past year and help determine the direction for the next year. Hands-on sessions offer the opportunity for intense work bringing those plans to reality. The KDE Community welcomes companies building on KDE technology, and those that are looking for opportunities. Join us by registering for the 2017 edition of Akademy today.
For more information, please contact the Akademy Team.
We have travelled from across the globe to meet for our annual gathering where we plan and discuss the next year's activities creating free software to share with the world. Almería is in the south east of Spain, a country which has long been a supporter of free software and collaboration with its creators. The sun here is hot but the water is also warm for those who make it to the beach to discuss their work with a pina colada and a swim. Over the last year KDE has run conferences in Brazil, India, Spain, Germany and sprints in Randa in Switzerland, Krita in the Netherlands, Marble in Germany, GSoC in the US, WikiToLearn in India, Plasma in Germany, Kontact in France, and sent representatives to OSCAL in Albania, FOSSASIA in Singapore, FUDCON in Cambodia, HKOSCon in Hong Kong and more.
Today we meet from around the globe, KDE contributors have flown in from Taiwan, US, all over Europe and British Isles, India, Brazil, Canada.
We have completed Akademy España, talks in Spanish to the community.
We also met for the formality of KDE e.V. Annual General Meeting.
The Community Working Group reviewed issues they had to deal with and were pleased there were fewer firefighting issues than in previous years and they could concentrate on gardening community.
Our outgoing treasurer Marta reported on the year's finances which were pleasingly balanced and with ample reserves. The Financial Working Group reported how they had supported this and that their main task is to support the incoming new treasurer.
The Sysadmin Working Group reported on the pleasing developments retiring old machines, old software such as Drupal 6 and old operating systems. They are moving towards Ansible for system deployment and were pleased at the new multi-platform CI system which is now running.
We heard from the Advisory Board Working Group who now have regular meetings with representatives from supporting companies and large deployments of KDE software.
The KDE Free Qt Foundation controls the licencing of Qt with representatives from both KDE and Qt company. In the last year they have concluded the relicensing of all Qt parts as Free Software. All parts of Qt are available under the GPLv3 or under a compatible license. Most parts are also available under the LGPLv3 and under the GPLv2. The last remaining code to be relicensed was the Qt Quick Compiler. This is now deprecated and replaced with an open source solution since the release of Qt 5.9.
Finally we voted on replacement board members for the three who's terms came to an end. Marta the treasurer did not renew her term. Holding one of the most important but least thanked tasks in KDE we owe her much gratitude for keeping out books balanced and our payments prompt. Lydia Pintcher and Aleix Pol i Gonzàlez both stood for the board again and were re-elected for another three years. And long term KDE developer Eike Hein was elected as a new board member, hoping to bring in more representation to the community from Korea where he lives. We thanked the outgoing and new board members with the traditional thanks of a fancy dinner.
Tonight we drink sangria and wine under the stars at a welcome party meeting old friends and new, eating tapas of salmorejo, croquetas, tortillas and rice, looking forward to the week ahead.
There's less than a week until the beginning of Akademy 2017 (if you still haven’t registered, do so now) and this is what you can expect from your first day at the event:
Akademy opens on Saturday, July 22 at 10 am with Robert Kaye, the brains behind Musicbrainz. We talked with Robert a few days ago, and he will tell us all about his projects and how he managed to marry FLOSS activism with the pragmatism of having to make money in order to keep them alive.
Sebastian Kügler will follow with an overview of the most important things that happened over the last year in the development of Plasma. He will talk about current features, future plans and goals, what to expect on your desktop over the next year, and how to help and get involved.
Meanwhile, in the next room, Jos van den Oever will examine Calligra and its native support for ODF. He'll look at a number of areas of ODF and see how well they are supported compared to other office suites.
At 11:50, Mirko Boehm will review the governance norms applied in FSFE, KDE and Wikimedia in his talk Why we Fight. He will examine how the norms developed over time and how current debates reflect their evolution.
At the same time, Volker Krause will present the UserFeedback framework, which provides ways to engage users from inside the application itself, including the collection of system or usage statistics, as well as asking an interested set of users that match a specific set of criteria to participate in an online survey.
Continuing on with a similar topic, at 12:30 Aleix Pol will talk about the challenge of developing for users employing bundled systems. We'll see what impact shortening the path between the development and users being able to run the software will have.
At the same time, Emma Gospodinova will tell us how she plans to add support for Rust, the promisingly popular programming language, to KDevelop during her Google Summer of Code project. Emma plans to include standard features any IDE should support for a language, such as semantic highlighting, code completion, refactoring, debugging and project management.
From there, we will move onto the light entertainment, which is movies. Or more like movie-editing. In Kdenlive, rewriting the timeline, Jean-Baptiste Mardelle will show us the new, polished Kdenlive 17.08, which now uses QML for many parts of the UI.
On a more technical note, Ivan Čukić will talk about how functional programming can improve our day-to-day work, make our code safer, cleaner and more correct.
After lunch, at 15:30, we'll have a bunch of lightning talks. The first one will be about Mycroft, the Alexa-like AI, and Aditya Mehra will explain how you can turn it into a Plasma widget and really enhance your life by having something you can boss about.
Volker Krause will then take the stage and tell us all about KF5::SyntaxHighlighting, a syntax highlighting engine that was originally tied to Kate, but can now be used anywhere.
Then Albert Astals Cid is up, and he will explain the work being carried out on Clazy, a compiler plugin which allows Clang to understand Qt semantics.
Marco Martin will then have ten minutes to explain how the feedback generated from the design and implementation of applications significantly improved the quality of Kirigami, KDE's user interface framework for developing applications that work both on mobile and desktop computers.
Finally, Vasudha Mathur will talk about Ruqola, the first generic chat application based on Rocket.Chat. Ruqola is a Qt/QML/C++ app and provides multi-platform portability. Ruqola will currently run on both desktop and mobile (Android) platforms.
At 16:30, Sandro Andrade will be talking about preliminary implementation of a modular and flexible framework for building Qt mobile applications. He will also explain how you can use code generators and a plugin-based architecture to automate the implementation of recurrent tasks.
At the same time and next door, Camilo Higuita will be introducing Babe, a contextual multimedia desktop app. Babe uses online resources and AI to find relationships between the music metadata and its context in order to generate personalized queries and suggestions.
Lydia Pintscher and the rest of the KDE e.V. Board will then sit down for an Ask Us Anything session with the audience at 17:10. If you want to find out what the board really gets up to and hear the plans for KDE as a community moving forward, here's your chance.
Meanwhile, Dmitri Popov will be teaching you how to take your digiKam skills to the next level by mastering its advanced functionality. Dmitri's talk will introduce several useful features and tools, such as filtering, batch processing, and curve presets.
At 17:55, John Samuel will be talking about Wikidata and how it can play an important role for the visibility of KDE applications. He will show how developers can build tools to integrate their applications with Wikidata to present an up-to-date view of their applications and their cool features.
At the same time, Arnav Dhamija will introduce you to the KIO (KDE Input Output) library. KIO is what allows your KDE apps to access data from a number of different protocols, such as local file systems, ssh, https, samba shares, ftp, and network file systems. Arnav will explain the need for KIO, how KIO works, KIO slaves, and how to develop for the same.
At 18:35 Timothée Giet will be taking us down the long road to GCompris-qt 1.0. GCompris, the collection of educational games and activities for children, has finally officially released the new Qt-based version. Timothée will show us the progress the team has made to get there, as well as some shiny new activities.
In the next room, David Edmundson will be explaining the Binding loop detected for property "title"" error, an annoying and cryptic error everyone developing QML has experienced at some point or another. He will talk about what this warning really means and how you can tackle even the most complicated loops.
At 19:15 we'll have the last three Lightning talks of the day. First up will be Agustín Benito with his Opening new doors presentation, in which Agustín will explain why he thinks KDE should jump into the embedded-for-automotive fray. Should he have called his talk Opening car doors? Definitely.
Then Annu Mittal will talk about all the application domains and various programs currently running in KDE, namely: Season of KDE, Summer of Code, and Outreach Program for Women. She will follow up by explaining the various ways you can get involved with KDE, both from the technical and non-technical point of view.
Finally, yours truly will help you look for love (for your projects) by explaining in ten minutes flat three simple steps that will improve your communication and increase your audience's appreciation for your project.
... And that is just day one.
Register here and don't miss Akademy 2017, one of the most important Free Software conferences this year.