Technical Working Group Elected

The first Technical Working Group for KDE has been elected. It will consist of seven long-time contributors to KDE and become operational in the few next days. The group has been elected by the members of KDE e.V.. This initial Working Group is elected for a period of six months. After this period an evaluation of the Working Group will take place. If it proves successful, elections will take place once every year. The group will help the hundreds of KDE developers in reaching technical decisions. Read on to learn about the members of the first Technical Working Group.

Dirk Müller rounds up the purpose of the Technical Working Group "I think it is important to establish an infrastructure of people that are generally informed about what is going on in KDE and can provide a unique and well-functioning contact point whenever a developer is actively searching for help in some area."

The formation of the Working Groups was decided on at the KDE e.V. membership council held at aKademy 2005 last August in Malaga. The details of the Working Group formation were worked out during an open meeting. The Technical Working Group will be the second Working Group to be announced, after the Marketing Working Group was formed in November 2005.

David Faure, one of the authors of Konqueror, currently works for Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB and is being sponsored by Trolltech to spend 50% of his work time to work directly on KDE. David has been one of KDE's release coordinators in the past. Important for David as a member of the Technical Working Group is that the Working Group does not step on people's toes and makes all decisions. However, he does want the TWG to ease decision-making processes in the areas of application inclusion, release schedules and conflict resolution where KDE currently lacks a decision-making process.

Dirk Müller has been kept busy with system administration and KDE infrastructure tasks. He feels that it's important to move KDE 4 forward because it is once again a big chance to change the way KDE works internally and the way it interacts with the user. Dirk is also doing research in various areas of quality assessment, such as automated code verification. Dirk is working for SUSE/Novell.

George Staikos, who acts as the Canadian and general North-American press contact, wants to ensure that the Technical Working Groups doesn't overstep its boundaries or make questionable decisions. He states that he wants to keep KDE very free of bureaucracy and make sure it continues to follow the bazaar model that made KDE so successful. George is the President of Staikos Computing Services, Inc.

Gunnar Schmidt, one of the founders of KDE Accessibility (which is also his main working area within KDE) sees himself as the accessibility and human interface coordinator in the Technical Working Group. Gunnar is currently working on his diploma thesis which includes writing a decent screen magnifier with a KDE user interface.

Lubos Lunak, the maintainer of KWin, KSMServer, and some X11-related parts in kdelibs has also done quite a lot of work on performance. Lubos wants to do whatever it takes to shape KDE 4 and push it towards becoming reality. Lubos is employed by SUSE/Novell.

Stephan Kulow, the current release coordinator of KDE has been pushing KDE into new directions more than once, notably the modular way of distribution, adoption of gettext and the bug tracking system. Coolo works for SUSE/Novell where his tasks involve working on KDE.

Thiago Macieira is a 24 year-old Brazilian who recently moved to Oslo to work for Trolltech. He thinks that the Technical Working Group has to be pro-active, especially in elaborating a long-term vision for KDE.

The purpose of the Technical Working Group is to define and execute the official software releases of KDE, to provide guidance on technical decisions and to make sure that the Open Source development process is being maintained. The responsibilities of the Technical Working Group include release management, guiding the decision making process about external and inter-module dependencies, KDE-wide technical infrastructure and technical guidance. All decisions will be made in the spirit of the Open Source development process and will be well-documented. Furthermore, the TWG will coordinate actions amongst people acting as KDE representatives, and function as a representative itself. The Technical Working Group will involve the KDE community in the decision making process at all times. Discussions will be held on the relevent mailing list, usually kde-core-devel. Further details on the purpose, responsibilities and procedures of the Technical Working Group can be found in its charter.

If you are a long-term contributor to KDE please consider joining KDE e.V. which will allow you to take part in future votes for the TWG.

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Comments

by Ariya (not verified)

Practically you can't have 1000 dB of signal-to-noise ratio. So, IMHO you just need to ignore those who attack you (I know it easier to say that). How on earth can you please everybody anyway?

Looking at the extreme "don't attack my baby or I will ignore you!" principle, I'd be also cautious when I claim 'some developers....'. The sensitive one might just include her/himself in this category and thus refuse to listen further on.

Also, note that not everybody is a native speaker. Language sometimes plays an important role.

I remember what a friend has concluded: bombarding yourself with all the wonderful motivation and plans to go to the gym does not magically make you doing the physical exercises. Let's not convince every single developer first that her/his program needs improvement, we may as well focus on those who want to listen.

by Kevin Krammer (not verified)

Most parts of the KDE framework have been designed by a group of developers, usually drafts being discussed on mailinglists and concrete design being done at conferences such as aKademy or the annual KDE-PIM meeting.

Even after such meetings the concepts evaluated there are usually still open for discussion, since not all involved developers have the opportunity to attend those meetings.

At the moment examples for this kind of work in progress would be the KDe-PIM Akonadi Framework or the Phonon Multimedia API and I guess other areas like the hardware abstraction Solid or evaluating requirements for KDE4's KIO system would would welcome real design/review contributions as well.

I am afrid just posting "KDE should do more design" does not in any way increase the amount of designers.

by James Richard Tyrer (not verified)

> I am afraid just posting "KDE should do more design" does not in any way
> increase the amount of designers.

True, but ...

I believe that what I posted was my hope that the TWG would result in more design work being done.

by James Richard Tyrer (not verified)

Actually, I measure success by the number of reported bugs that have been fixed or resolved:

http://tinyurl.com/a7xgm

rather than 5 that have not yet been totally resolved.

Finding the fault and fixing the fault are both important functions.

And yes, I did fix some of these myself.

To say that nothing has been done on the remaining 5 bugs is missleading but it would take a while to enumerate what has been done and why these remain unresolved.

by Rex Dieter (not verified)

I, for one, greatly appreciate your hard work, diligence, and valuable contributions.

by aleXXX (not verified)

Hi,

IMO the really nice thing about the election results is, that it basically changes nothing: these are the people which we trusted already before, and this was now simply formally confirmed by the election.

Nice that Lubos and Gunnar made it into the TWG :-)
And of course David, but who would have expected anything else ?

Bye
Alex

by ac (not verified)

Aaron and Waldo?

Waldo seems to be less active but has been very visible in the past...

Aaron, aka M. Plasma certainly would be a good member

by Anonymous (not verified)

Both didn't candidate.

by Jonathan Riddell (not verified)

Aaron is already on the KDE e.V. board, things get tricky if you're on too many boards.

Waldo now work for Intel as their open source dude.

by Aaron J. Seigo (not verified)

yeah. and i already have too little time anyways =) we have lots of terrific and brilliant contributors and they are more than capable of handling these things very, very well =)

i'm actually really happy to see the group that is making up this new body. they'll do a terrific job.

by Waldo Bastian (not verified)

I have been working for Intel for about the last year on Linux Desktop issues in a broader sense. Unfortunately that means that I am not as involved with KDE's day to day development as I used to be. So I decided not to run for the TWG because I think it deserves people who are more in touch with the daily KDE development. I think the election resulted in a very strong TWG that will be able to properly represent and balance the different viewpoints within the KDE community whenever it will need to make decisions. I think that by establishing the TWG, KDE will be better positioned to handle the many challenges that a large project like KDE faces.

Cheers,
Waldo
http://www.intel.com/go/linux

by ac (not verified)

Hey Waldo, say thank you to your employer for cooperating with Skype and showing that way why closed software sucks. ;)
http://slashdot.org/articles/06/02/13/2015236.shtml