Hot on the heels of the 2.2 release of KOffice -- the first release we feel that users can give a try and use for real work -- the KOffice developers met in Essen-Horst in Germany, in the wonderful Linux Hotel. Thanks to sponsorship by the KDE e.V. and the hard work by Alexandra Leisse and Inge Wallin, we could spend three days discussing and hacking.
Last weekend a team of KDE volunteers (wo)manned a booth at LinuxTag. As hopefully many of you have already read about (and maybe already joined) on Wednesday the new Supporting Membership program was launched. There is some more content upcoming, but for now we'd like to give you all a quick taste of what those four days were like.
43 persons (including organizers, designer, bugsquashers, and others) from 17 different countries gathered in Randa from Thursday 20 May to Tuesday 25 May. Why Randa? It is a marvelous place in the mountains of Switzerland where Mario Fux knew a house that would be perfect for KDE developers. Several groups that work on different parts of KDE had a chance to meet and mix in one house. Present were KDE-Education, Amarok, various multimedia people (Phonon, KMix, vlc) and Gluon developers.
From July 3rd through July 10th the KDE community will gather in Tampere, Finland for our yearly Akademy conference. We are pleased to announce that, once again, a number of sponsors will be helping to make this event possible. Read on for an overview of who are supporting Akademy!
In 2010 the FOSS Nigeria Conference took place for the second time and, like last year, KDE attended the conference with two speakers. Just like last year we were enthusiastically welcomed by Mustapha Abubakar, Ibrahim Datsuma and Jibril Muhammad. Read on for the full details of KDE's attendance at this young Free Software conference.
At LinuxTag, everyone who Joined the Game as a new Supporting Member on Wednesday or Thursday gained the chance to win a place at the Join the Game dinner. So on Thursday evening, four lucky winners were drawn from the new members and invited to the Funkturm (Berlin Radio Tower) Restaurant to dine with some KDE celebrities.
This year, like every year, KDE will be present at Linuxtag, which is held from 9th to 12th in Berlin. As usual, visitors will be able to meet KDE contributors, chat about KDE and KDE-related topics, get a demonstration of the newest hotness that will be released as part of KDE SC 4.5.0 this summer, learn about the background of the KDE community and the technology it creates and of course just catch up with what's going on in KDE-land -- and that's a lot!
Recently the KDE PIM team had one of their regular face-to-face sprints. 15 developers met in the KDAB offices in Berlin for discussions, API review, development, and of course, community building (free dinner \o/!). The schedule shows the breadth of topics covered at the meeting, ranging from Nepomuk widgets to bugfixing. The focus in this meeting was stabilising and planning for the upcoming 4.5 release cycle.
Every year, the KDE community in Spain organizes a local Akademy event: Akademy-es. This year's event was held in Bilbao from 7th to 9th of May. The event gathered around 80 KDE contributors, users and Free Software enthusiasts from all over Spain and even people from other countries such as France and Ireland.
KDE was recently at the second Ökumenischer Kirchentag (Ecumenical Church Day) from May 12-16 in Munich, Germany. Representing KDE were Frederik Gladhorn, Daniel Laidig, Eckhart Wörner and Irina Rempt. They (wo)manned a booth among hundreds of other projects presenting aspects of life, the universe and everything, mostly from various Christian perspectives. The KDE community in general is of course secular (and should be), but our philosophy that software is primarily for people and should be freely shared fits admirably well with such an event.
Thomas Jensch and (for one day) Daniel W of FSFE made it a successful joint enterprise. Read on for full details.