The organisers of Akademy 2008 are looking for sponsorship. Akademy is the KDE World Summit, this year taking place in Sint-Katelijne-Waver, Belgium in August. Sponsorship is an opportunity to promote your company or product to the developers, users, deployers and consultants who will attend the conference from around the world.
Akademy plays a central role in KDE community, enabling contributors to give presentations, discuss and develop software face to face, allowing them to get to know the people they work with often on a daily basis over electronic communication channels. Becoming a sponsor will provide a marketing avenue for your company to the hundreds of attendees and thousands who read our website and publications. Most importantly, it gives vital support which ensures that hundreds of KDE contributors can meet together to plan the future of the free desktop.
If your company would like to sponsor Akademy please contact us at [email protected]. If you know of any companies in your local area who could also be potential Akademy sponsors, please let us know too.
Comments
The brochure looks quite nice, I can't really unterstand the complaints.
Keep in mind that the margins are for printing. Page 3-5 have a minor font issue. On my system it is nearly noticeable but I've seen some pretty fucked up Linux installations with heavy font problems. Maybe it looks much worser on such systems. E.g. on the screenshot in the news "Sponsorship Brochure" looks absolutely terrible - on my system it looks perfect. What a difference.
Besides the content per se is well done. Short paragraphs but enough information. Nice to read even on a display.
WAKE UP PEOPLE!
a negative comment is posted on the dot, and all of a sudden there is a flurry of people debating moderation schemes.
That's right, let's ignore the people we'd care not to listen to, to further delude ourselves.
oh wait, i have an idea!!!! the negative posters must be some gnomies, or couldnt possibly be contributors. WRONG again.
It says on the brochure that it was created in conjunction with two individuals, the akademy team, the community, and the ev. Do we not see a problem here?!?!?!?!?!? WAKE UP! this crap survived a review?!?!? BY WHO?! SERIOUSLY!?!
QUALITY CONTROL PEOPLE!!!
do you see why people could have strong opinions about this?! they're supporters (not gnomies or windows users you idiots!) You want sponsors with LOTS of money to align themselves with a fantastic DE, and THIS!!! is what you send them!?!??! COME ON, WAKE UP! it looks like it was slapped together in an afternoon. What's with the messed up fonts? compressed to shit rasters? what's with the margins? The pages look like they're shoved in the corners, i could go on and on. (but no aaron. I don't have a lot of extra free time and energy)
do you really mean to suggest that AFTER it's officially released I should suggest 50+ things to clean up this rubbish publication so there would be TWO official brochures?! how does that look?
There are many problems with the brochure and the process that released it. If instead this was released as a sample to improve with community input, great, but instead a piece of junk is presented as *the* brochure.
so i rest, it is horrible, it does suck. consistency was no where to be found.
and before the devs fire up their keyboards to shout at me. they should think about the process with which their code is scrutinized and corrected and reworked before it's officially released. Why would something so essential as a sponsorship brochure not be subject to this process?!
> Why would something so essential as a sponsorship brochure not be subject to
> this process?!
Because it was created in a different process by the Akademy team, I don't know the exact number of people, but I'd guess that they are around 4, and I guess they wanted to get it done. Having more people in the team would of course be nice :-)
Seriously, I think the majority of KDE contributors are still coders, and in general most of them don't have much spare time left.
Alex
>Because it was created in a different process by the Akademy team
the process is clearly flawed. it contains too many errors to be excusable.
> I guess they wanted to get it done.
everyone wants to get stuff done. but something like this shouldnt be released unfinished unless it is only for feedback. Community input and HELP was ignored.
> I think the majority of KDE contributors are still coders
An engineering firm (infrastructure related, not computer) I worked for kept a database of the skill sets of the individual employees. It was very comprehensive. If a problem needed to be solved we fired up the database, and was given a list company wide of who possessed the skills. The KDE project being the size it is should definitely have something like this.
"everyone wants to get stuff done. but something like this shouldnt be released unfinished unless it is only for feedback. Community input and HELP was ignored."
You're shouting again, Mike. And you should realize that the people who put together this brochure _are_ part of the community. What have you done to become part of the community?
> What have you done to become part of the community?
I do not write code. hope you find my contributions worthy:
I happen to volunteer time refurbishing computers to redistribute to low income families. While most have ubuntu installed quite a few try kubuntu. The three volunteers in our shop all use KDE and promote it. I also have submitted many KDE bug reports, art work and do a lot of KDE translation work for two languages.
notice i post anonymously. so no, I'm not going to specifically point out everything I've done over the 3 years ive been a kde user. You can believe me or not.
> _are_ part of the community
yes. I can tell arguing with you would be exhausting.
"and before the devs fire up their keyboards to shout at me."
Well, Mike, you're the one doing the shouting.
> but no aaron
dude, chill.
the obvious answer is:
* don't be an ass to others. (the first two comments are absolutely in the "ass to others" category and it has nothing to do with their not liking the brochure)
* input could become the next revision of the document, not a fork as you suggest
* you don't need to provide 50 ways, just a couple of thoughtful ideas would be awesome
"rubbish publication" .. wow. that's... harsh. would you actually say that to their face? or is this more internet-enabled-rashness?
but let's get to the quick of it:
"do you see why people could have strong opinions"
it has *nothing* to do with strong opinions and *everything* to do with being a complete asshat in the process of communicating those strong opinions.
example: one of your volunteers putting together computers connects the IDE cables inside a box wrong. you turn it on to test and it completely fails. do you:
a) scream at them as loudly as possible and tell them they are a complete f'ing moron
b) look at them with disgust in your face and walk away with a "humph" and a sigh
c) open the box, see the cable and say, "you put the cable on wrong, you need to do it this way..."
i'll bet that unless you're a real turd of a human, you'd do (c).
and yet people jump online, our primary means of communicating for most of the day within the various f/oss projects, and choose (a) or (b).
amazing.
you can express strong disagreement in a very progressive fashion. you don't have to agree, but you also don't have to be an ass about it. the former can help improve things, the latter only tears communities apart.
just how long would your little shop of volunteers continue if you repeatedly chose options (a) or (b) in real life?
"This sucks" sucks.
Uwe
the logo looks awesome. i especially like the colors of 2008, and how it plays nicely with the background of the sky. continue this good artwork! saying "it sucks" does not tell us anything to improve it. please stop that!