Kastle 2003: Conference Report
On Saturday, the KDE Contributors' Conference 2003 was officially opened. Two days full with talks in two tracks followed only being interrupted by meals, group photo and the obligatory social event on Saturday evening. On Monday there was a PGP keysigning, a press conference was held and in workshops further work was discussed.
Prof. Dr. Helena Illnerova, president of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, attended the opening ceremony led by Dr. Dalibor Stys, director of the Institute of Physical Biology, University of South Bohemia, and Kalle Dalheimer, KDE e.V. president. Heartly greetings were also submitted from Prof. Dr. Witold Jacak, rector of the Polytechnic University of Upper Austria in Hagenberg, who was unfortunately unable to come. As special guests Havoc Pennington of freedesktop.org, GNOME and Red Hat fame and Leon Shiman of X.org were welcomed.
The talks attracted varying amounts of visitors depending on the talk type: There were talks summarizing current work and upcoming features like in KDevelop and Kontact, talks teaching general basics about design patterns and aspect oriented technologies, presentations of research studies in the usability and KDE developer structure areas, tutorials for advanced KDE programmers and conceptual talks presenting ideas which yet are missing more than a prototype. Havoc talked in his two talks about freedesktop.org and the D-BUS message system. Leon presented the MAS Media Application Server.
The slides of the presentations are collected and will be made available on the conference website later. Jonathan Riddel provides many talk writeups in the conference wiki for the talks he attended. Additionally several talks were recorded on video and may be made available soon.
After lunch all developers gathered on the stairs for a group photo. Don't miss the image map functionality which shows you the name in the status bar if you move the mouse over the head of a contributor! This picture will be featured in the upcoming KDE 3.2 Alpha version in two weeks. A photo of Thursday's smaller group of attending KDE e.V. members is available as well.
The social event sponsored by Trolltech was preceded by a talk by Matthias Ettrich on Qt 4. In summary: Qt 4 will be faster, smaller, more flexible, more productive and easier to learn. Read more details in our Qt 4 story. After a long humorous free speech the developers celebrated with free beer, wine, barbecue and were entertained with live music.
During the conference the possibility existed to buy KDE fan articles like T-shirts and pins. Some of these T-shirts were handed over by the KDE e.V. board as a thank you to our host and a lot of helpers, mostly employees of the university, shepherding us without being paid additionally and in their spare time.
Monday morning after a PGP keysigning giving everyone the chance to see some embarrassingly old identity card photos, the provided Hewlett Packard laptops were given out and were quickly integrated into the already running Teambuilder compilation farm running on the computers contributed by the Polytechnic University of Upper Austria, bringing the total number of hooked-up machines up to 52 and leading to huge compilation speed increases.
Also on Monday the KDE e.V. issued a press release about KDE and the conference and held a press conference with attending journalists from the Czech Republic, Germany and Brazil.
The rest of Monday was reserved for workshops where the topics were Kolab, KOffice, KDE/Qt integration, Usability and Scripting Applications with DCOP. Some led directly to heavy coding activities while for others additional meetings had to be scheduled later on the same day or within the next days.
All of the above is documented in detail in eight ever-growing photo albums. You can find the links on the PhotoAlbum page of the conference wiki.