Community and Events

Early on in the lifetime of the KDE Community Forums, the staff launched regularly-held courses for people willing to help KDE called "Klassrooms". For each of these courses, a mentor (usually a KDE contributor, but not limited to them) guided a group of "students" towards a simple, definite goal that would improve KDE, for example fixing simple bugs in an application. However, the courses were not limited to coding: documentation, promo and other important areas were handled as well.

Since they were held on the forums, Klassrooms possessed an advantage over real-time courses: students could progress at their own pace and the mentor was able to oversee the development even with limited time at his/her disposal.

Due to the large growth of the KDE Community Forums over the last year, the staff had to focus on improving the forums themselves and so there was little or no time to hold new Klassrooms. Until today ...

The KDE Community Forums team is pleased to announce a call for new Klassroom mentors, to allow increased effort to be focussed on these courses. The existing staff are already quite busy keeping the forum up and running, so this will provide the initiative with dedicated resources.

In Oslo, Norway, the second KOffice developer sprint this year has started. The KOffice developers must be getting used to seeing each other regularly - besides the two sprints there were many other meetings and events with a handful of KOffice developers present. However, their 'own' sprints still are special - dedicated to some team building, designing and hard work in a cooperative and positive atmosphere.

If you read PlanetKDE, you may have noticed that there was a combined Booth, Web and Marketing Sprint in Stuttgart last weekend. While those blog posts discussed the fun to be had in getting a load of KDE contributors together in one place, the event was really about having some important discussions and getting a lot of serious work done so that our presentation of KDE matches the quality of our products. Read on for details of the many things we got up to.

The deadline for requesting to give a presentation/talk at Camp KDE 2010 has been set for 0:00 on December 5th.

As indicated in the open registration announcement, if you wish to give a presentation, please indicate this preference when registering for the event. The organizers will look at the topics and handle any duplicates, and then ask for more detailed abstracts.

Matthias Ettrich.

Today at 4pm CET at the Center for Economics, Technology and Women’s Issues at the Berlin Senate, KDE founder Matthias Ettrich was decorated with the German Federal Cross of Merit for his contributions to Free Software. Matthias was awarded the medal in recognition of his work spurring innovation and spreading knowledge for the common good. The award was presented by state secretary Almuth Nehring-Venus. She mentioned that not only is Matthias among the younger recipients of the award but also that this is the first award ceremony where young children of the family were present. Also attending was Eberhard Gienger, member of the Bundestag for the county Matthias grew up in. Read on for more!

Akonadi working in KMail

The second Akonadi sprint this year took place in Berlin, Germany on October 16-18. With a confrontation between the local punks and the law simmering on the streets below, the KDE PIM team and others worked to port applications, add polish to the libraries, and complete PIM software that will raise sparks on the desktop without burning out your CPU. Read on for an overview of what happened there!

During the NLUUG end-of-year conference "The Open Web" in Ede, Netherlands, we did an interview with keynote speaker Steven Pemberton. Steven Pemberton is a researcher at the Center for Math and Information Technology in Amsterdam and has been involved with the web since it's first incarnation - he vividly remembers the day the connection from Europe to the US was doubled to 128 Kbit.

On October 9 through 11, a dozen developers gathered in the Nokia Offices in Munich to bring the vision outlined in Dan Leinir's blog about the "Future of Game Development in KDE" to life. After three days of hard work, the developers joined hundreds of other Qt developers for the Qt Developer Days 2009 (thanks to free tickets provided by Nokia). Read on for more!

At the Maemo Conference in Amsterdam Suresh Chande announced that Nokia has contracted KO GmbH to write a mobile office viewer using the KOffice libraries. The presentation by Suresh was given with the Nokia N900 smartphone, using the new Office Viewer.

The improvements in KOffice have largely been in the libraries, on top of which a Maemo-specific GUI was written. KOffice became faster and more stable, and the various file import filters have been greatly improved. This includes the beginnings of MS Office 2007 import support. Thanks to this work the KOffice document viewer for Maemo will be able to properly read files created with a wider range of office applications, and all other users of KOffice 2.x will benefit.