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Akademy 2006 is in Dublin this September

Wednesday, 15 March 2006  |  Agroot

The yearly KDE World Summit, Akademy, has found a home for 2006 on the emerald isle. This year, the multi-day event for contributors to the leading Free Desktop will be held from September 23nd to 30th 2006 in beautiful Dublin, capital city of Ireland. Our hosts will be Ireland's oldest university, Trinity College. There are three sub-events: a contributors conference, the KDE e.V. annual general assembly and a week long hacking session that offers the opportunity to discuss all sorts of things face-to-face. We also look forward to the chance to mingle with local KDE enthusiasts.

"We are looking forward to meeting and sharing ideas with so many developers of quality Free Software from the KDE community" says Glenn Strong, Trinity College Computer Science Lecturer and Chairman of the Irish Free Software Organisation.

This year, based on a popular vote by the KDE e.V.'s members, Akademy will be hosted by Trinity College Dublin, one of Dublin's four universities. A team led by Marcus Furlong will organise the conference. From September 23nd to 30th 2006, KDE enthusiasts from around the world will converge to share experiences, code and perhaps ale.

"The School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College is pleased to welcome the KDE Akademy conference to Dublin this year, and hopes the event will be constructive for all KDE contributors, and that everyone enjoys and benefits from their stay in Dublin" said Dr. David Abrahamson, Head of the School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College.

The preliminary schedule for Akademy 2006 is as follows:

  • Friday 22nd: Arrival
  • Saturday 23rd & Sunday 24th: KDE Contributors Conference
  • Monday 25th: KDE e.V. Membership Meeting (members only, see the e.V. members page for how to join)
  • Tuesday 26th to Saturday 30th: Hacking session & workshops
  • Sunday 1st: Departure

A formal call for papers will be put up in due time, but you may wish to start thinking of posters, position papers, experiences and case studies to write up for the (peer reviewed) conference part of Akademy. For the hacking sessions, figure out who you need some quality face-to-face time with and convince them to come too!

Comments:

Who is Marcus Furlongß - ac - 2006-03-15

Never heard of Marcus Furlong... While previous aKademys were organized by well known activists and participants of the KDE community, this time there is a white spot on the map. And the link provided by the story --> https://www.cs.tcd.ie/~furlongm/ <-- tells me close to nothing... So... this isn't a joke?

Re: Who is Marcus Furlong - Jonathan Riddell - 2006-03-15

It's the same team as organised GUADEC in Dublin a few years ago.

Re: Who is Marcus Furlong - Alan Horkan - 2006-03-17

No it is not the same team.

Re: Who is Marcus Furlong - Gerd - 2006-03-18

Gnome is evil. KDE is not evil. Both Gnome and KDE are not bad. It is not the same team. Why not team up?

Re: Who is Marcus Furlong - Alan Horkan - 2006-03-19

> Gnome is evil. Huh?

Re: Who is Marcus Furlong - regeya - 2006-03-19

Oddly enough, I'll agree. It was begun primarily, instead of a way to help get KDE legal, to replace KDE with a nearly completely incompatible desktop. Nowadays its primary purpose seems to be the proprietary-software-friendly desktop. Another wrinkle is the attention and excitement paid to Mono, which may or may not have legal problems, depending on who you ask. And unlike KDE, the GNOME project doesn't seem to want to play nice. With anyone. I admire GNOME for their work on usability and for much of their work in becoming friendly in other areas, but big jeers for not playing nice and for all the code duplication.

Re: Who is Marcus Furlong - Alan Horkan - 2006-03-23

> No it is not the same team. Although I have been told that Dr. Mads Haar (a Trinity lecturer) has once again done great work to help make things happen.

Re: Who is Marcus Furlongß - Ian Monroe - 2006-03-15

Am I the only one annoyed by anonymous complainers. :S

Re: Who is Marcus Furlongß - sebas - 2006-03-15

He's a enthusiast KDE user, and contributes to KDE by taking a shitload of work on him. Organising aKademy is a lot of work and we're more than happy to have the local team supporting KDE in this very unique way. I'm looking forward to aKademy 2006. And btw, Marcus is a nice guy and until now, he's excellent to work with. So yes, this is not a joke.

Re: Who is Marcus Furlong? - ac - 2006-03-16

Thanks a lot for your explanation. I'll trust you on this. (With the "joke" I didn't mean the story per se -- I meant the so called "link" that is given for Marcus' home page at tcd.ie; which is only slightly better than a dangling or broken link.)

Re: Who is Marcus Furlong - Martin - 2006-03-16

OK -- I didn't know who Marcus was either, but obviously he is contributing in a major, major way just by organising this conference. So it is more than a little bit rude to imply that he is a "joke" IMHO. Go Marcus!

Re: Who is Marcus Furlong - s.o. - 2006-03-16

nobody said "he" is a joke. but the story was published; his name is linked to a website; such a link commonly suggests to the innocent reader that one can find more info about the person there; but that linked website is basically empty; so that link can only be seen as a kind of joke -- otherwise you wouldn't include it at all in the story.

Re: Who is Marcus Furlong? - Marcus Furlong - 2006-03-16

Hello all, Better introduce myself properly, my college webpage is automagically generated and I've never used it as you might have guessed. I am a postgraduate student in Trinity College and a long-time KDE user. I've been using KDE since KDE 1 and I am an active advocate (the usual suspects; family, friends and anywhere I have worked). I'm also going to be updating the KDE Ireland website, as Barry has been quite busy over the last few months. While I have not been involved in KDE development, I am currently doing research on metadata generation and retrieval and the hope is to develop a prototype KDE frontend based on this work. What I'm doing is similar to DBFS (http://ozy.student.utwente.nl/projects/dbfs/) without the SQL part, as we hope to store the keywords at the filesystem level. This probably all falls under the scope of the Tenor project, but at the moment I am evaluating and experimenting with different algorithms, so desktop integration comes later. About Trinity itself, around the CS department in college there are plenty of machines that run KDE, both staff and students. We have a lot a Unix machines in all the CS labs and most of the students run KDE in any of the classes that I am assistant in. The local aKademy organising team consists of a lot of people who are interested in free software in general and while I don't think any of them develop for KDE (although there is one guy who gets his students to use QT for his C++ class), many of them are also happy users and are ready to help out in any way possible. Also, there are members of the IFSO who are staff in Trinity and they are delighted that we are hosting the conference. So apologies for the blank webpage, I'll get around to updating it one of these days. And welcome to everyone who will be in Dublin for aKademy 2006, I can't wait to meet so many KDE contributors and I'm sure we'll have a great time and help make KDE even better than it is now! Marcus.

Re: Who is Marcus Furlong? - infopipe - 2006-03-17

thank you for the infos

Re: Who is Marcus Furlong? - Gonzalo - 2006-03-18

Marcus, Thank you for welcoming everyone to Ireland. I think this upcoming conference will be a real turning point for KDE and the free desktop and I understand and appreciate all the hard work that you will have to put in to organize an event as complex as a KDE conference. So thank you for making it happen and pass on our appreciation to the staff and faculty of Trinity College. Regards, Gonzalo

Re: Who is Marcus Furlong? - Alan Horkan - 2006-03-18

Were you an undergraduate at Trinity too? How can people get involved and help out?

I'm looking forward. - woow - 2006-03-16

Last year I've missed. This year I'll take the ride.

Re: I'm looking forward. - Bunter Chutney - 2006-03-24

Marcus is not very good at pub quizzes

Galway Oyster Fest - Alan Horkan - 2006-03-26

If you like Oysters and Guiness you might also visit Galway anytime from the 28th Sept to 1st October 2006 and enjoy the Oyster Festival. http://www.galwayoysterfest.com/

Re: Galway Oyster Fest - Mel - 2006-03-28

At the bottom of http://dot.kde.org/1142439906/ -Alan Horkan posted a plug for this site. This does not belong on a computer forum and is NOT the way to promote your wares, if everyone did that...!

Re: Galway Oyster Fest - John Tapsell - 2006-07-09

Ah lighten up. *hands mel a beer*

Ooooo Ireland! - James - 2006-03-29

I just got back from Dublin yesterday! (been there since st. patty's day) wow what a city! Dont forget to check out the book of kells while at Trinity, and definitely do the guinness tour! Also, eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at Lemon (amazing crepe place, like 3 minute walk from Trinity... on Dawson I think... do it!)