Community and Events

The Desktop Summit 2011 is a joint conference organised by the GNOME and KDE communities, in Berlin, Germany from the 6th August 2011 to the 12th August 2011. Held annually in cities around Europe, GUADEC and Akademy are the world's largest gatherings of those involved with the free desktop or mobile user interfaces. Developers, artists, translators, community organisers, users, and representatives from government, education, and businesses and anyone else who shares an interest are welcome. GNOME and KDE are Free Software communities that drive the user interfaces of many Linux-powered devices, ranging from smartphones to laptops, or personal media centers. This year, for the second time, both communities have decided to organise a single, joint conference. We anticipate over a thousand participants, covering both projects as well as related technologies.

Registration for the event is now open and the Call for Participation is available.

There is only a month to go before the first KDE and Qt conference in India opens. The event will be headlined by three keynotes speakers talking on the effects of technology on culture, the law and what makes our community tick. Talks and workshops have been announced and registration is open for anyone planning to attend. Read on for details.

Next weekend (5-6 February 2011) is FOSDEM, one of the largest gatherings of Free Software developers in the world. KDE will be in Brussels with a stall and as part of the crossdesktop devroom. KDE talks will cover: education, an introduction to Qt and Qt Quick, Phonon, KDE on Windows and mentoring.

It has been several months now since the previous set of major releases by KDE and it is time for some more! KDE's Plasma workspaces and the KDE Platform will all reach version 4.6 on 26 January and many of KDE's application teams will also be unveiling new versions of their software on that day.

That means it is time to gather with local KDE mates to celebrate the new releases. It is a good reason to just chill out with other people and discuss anything you have on your mind, from KDE to pink fluffy bunnies.

The Indian KDE community will organize its first conference at Bengaluru in March 2011. The 5 day event will bring together KDE contributors, Qt developers, users and FOSS enthusiasts.

We realise that there are not many KDE/Qt related events that are accessible to Indians. FOSS conferences or meetings are an excellent way to show people the technology first hand and ways to contribute to it. We not only dazzle them with the world of KDE, but show them first hand how simple it is to get involved and make a difference. This is our motivation for conducting this event.

Where will KDE be in five years? To answer this question, we plan to bring together visionaries, strategists, planners, out-of-the-box-thinkers, realists, dreamers, doers, creators, leaders, coders from the KDE community and everybody else who is interested in discussing the future of KDE and picturing what it will be.

Read on for details of the meeting and how you can get involved.

FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels. We are now inviting proposals for talks on KDE, KDE software and general desktop topics to take place in the Cross Desktop devroom. This is a unique opportunity to show the novel ideas of KDE to a wide audience of developers.

In January the KDE community is set to ship major new versions of the Plasma workspaces, the KDE applications and the KDE development frameworks. As usual, a series of beta versions and release candidates is released in the months leading up to the release day, with the purpose of letting users test the changes in the upcoming versions and help us find and fix bugs and regressions.

The first of these pre-releases, 4.6 Beta 1, is out now, and you can help the KDE team ensure the upcoming final release is stable and solid: the KDE BugSquad team plans on having a Beta 1 Bug Squashing week, with the aim of having as many bugs as possible reported and to triage them together.

The EU research project, ALERT, is looking for KDE experts to assist research on free and open source software collaboration processes. The goal of the ALERT project is to develop methods and tools that improve FLOSS coordination by maintaining awareness of community activities through real-time, personalized, context-aware notification. KDE provides one use case for applying and evaluating these methods and tools.

This year, KDE is delighted to have been chosen to take part in Google Code-in. Following the success of Google Summer of Code in previous years, Google Code-in is a new program to encourage pre-university students to contribute to free software communities. Like other participating organizations, KDE has provided a list of tasks that can be completed in short timeframes ranging from a few hours to a few days, whether they be simple bug fixes, documentation tasks or outreach projects and more.