This year in Dublin will host the annual meeting of the KDE community, and it will be a great occasion for developers to meet, code, hold bug-fixing sessions, discussions and much more. During the week of the conference, some KDE-Edu developers will meet to discuss themes including their future strategies of the module for the upcoming KDE 4, current applications, ideas for new ones and collaboration with other education-related projects, like SkoleLinux.

Today we received confirmation that we have been successful in obtaining a booth at LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. The two-day event is taking place on the 25th and 26th of October in London's Olympia 2 conference hall. Following last year's success we are hoping to have a bigger presence this year to demonstrate our efforts at Akademy 2006 as well as the progress that will have been made with KDE 4.

"Wow, that's impressive!" was one of many comments made by visitors to the KDE stand at LUG Radio Live 06. Five of the KDE-GB crew attended the two day event in Wolverhampton demonstrating the latest Kubuntu distribution, Dapper Drake, and the finest KDE applications, including Digikam, to over 400 attendees.

This year at aKademy, Tuesday 26th September will be OpenDocument Day. The OpenDocument format (ODF) is a Free document file format for saving and exchanging office documents. KOffice was the first office suite to support OpenDocument and other programs have been following suit. OpenDocument Day at aKademy offers software developers interested in ODF to exchange ideas, build relations and collaborate on all things ODF in an informal setting.

While preparations for aKademy 2006 are in full swing, next year's annual meeting of the KDE community, aKademy 2007, is sending out a Call for Location and Organisation. aKademy is made possible mainly because of financial contributions by corporations. These corporations prepare their budget for 2007 in autumn of 2006, in order to be able to secure funding for aKademy 2007 we need to start organising aKademy 2007 early to be able to apply for sponsorship soon.

The event consists of the general assembly of the KDE e.V., a KDE developer conference and a multi-day hacking session.

On September the 9th and 10th (Saturday and Sunday) the Essener Linuxtage will take place in the University of Essen in Germany. KDE will have a stall there, but needs more representatives. If you are interested in helping us man a stall or giving a talk, then please contact us.

It's hot and you're melting? The KDE.org hardware infrastructure owned by KDE e.V. is melting as well! Out of the desperate need to upgrade our current disk RAID, we need new hard drives. If you have visited bugs.kde.org any time the last couple of months, you've noticed that this site often responds extremely sluggish. To improve the situation, we need to employ a new server, but need some more money for the hard drives for this beast!

About two weeks ago, several KDE developers gathered at FrOSCon, the Free and Open Source conference in St. Augustin near Bonn, Germany. Hosted by the Computer Science department of the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, the

The aKademy 2006 organisation team is please to announce that registration for this year's conference in Dublin, Ireland, has now opened. KDE welcomes registration from anybody interested in the future development of KDE, including developers, translators, other free software projects, representatives of the software industry and ISVs interested in using free desktops and the KDE application framework.

The deadline for aKademy 2006 submissions is fast approaching. We are still looking for technical contributions, community success stories, tales of interoperability, industrial innovation and integration and cross-desktop creativity. The Call For Papers says that a 300 word abstract and a short bio is needed to secure your place for consideration by the programme committee. Send them in!