Community and Events

aKademy 2007 is now open for registration. aKademy is KDE's World Summit, a week long event for all KDE contributors, industry partners and users. The week starts with a two day conference, and is set to include a tutorial day and a schools and education day. As always, attendance to aKademy is free of charge, but you must register. Registration must be in by the end of the month if you want the aKademy Team to book your accommodation for you. See you in Glasgow!

The first Guademy event finished yesterday at the university of A Coruña, Spain. Organized by the GPUL (Grupo de Programadores y Usuarios de Linux), the Linux User Group of A Coruña, it was an event which brought together people from the GNOME and KDE camp (thus the combination of "GUADEC" and "aKademy" that forms the name of the event). Read on for a short report of the event.

The KDE Project will present itself at CeBIT, the world's largest computer trade show, taking place in Hannover, Germany, from March 16th to March 21th. KDE will be presenting the latest release KDE 3.5 and give a preview of current developments for KDE 4, the next major KDE-version. You will find numerous KDE-developers and other contributors in Hall 5, booth G64/6. The KDE team would like to thank the LinuxPark for the booth and KDE e.V.

The second day of FOSDEM 2007 was as busy, if not more, as the first day. Many face-to-face interactions, of great benefit to cooperation between developers and projects, and time spend on hacking on and promoting KDE. The KDE developer room was well used, first by an Educational workshop, well led by Anne-Marie Mahfouf, followed by some more talks. Topics included Krita's present and future by Bart Coppens, a KDE 4 talk by Jos Poortvliet and a KDE e.V. talk by Sebastian Kügler. Read on for a report on day two.

This weekend, the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting will be held at the Université Libre in Brussels, Belgium. FOSDEM, being one of the biggest European Free Software events usually attracts several thousand people each year. The schedule for the KDE devroom is now published.

A joint KDE and Gnome meeting is taking place in Spain next month called Guademy. The objectives are to create new projects and initiatives of collaboration between both Desktops and allow new developers to get started. Aaron Seigo will give an update on KDE 4 and Albert Astals Cid will talk about Okular.

KDE was once again well represented at the 2007 Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE 5x), demonstrating to show-goers why it is the most popular Linux desktop. There were talks, demonstrations from KDE developers and and thank yous in return. Read on for the full report.

OpenMind 2007 is an Italian event dedicated to Free Software and free content. The event will be from this Thursday until Saturday (22nd to 24th) February in San Giorgio a Cremano, Naples. Giovanni Venturi, KDE Italia webmaster, KDE Italian translator and KSniffer developer will present KDE 3.5 and will give an update on the state of KDE 4 and Qt 4 on the 24th (Saturday) and will be running a KDE booth.

Due to a beastie in the submissions system, the aKademy 2007 Programme Committee has extended the deadline for talk proposals until February 23rd. See the Call for Participation for some guidelines and how to submit. Confirmation to those who have already submitted has been sent out, let us know if you have no heard from us. If you contribute to KDE in any way it is likely others will want to know about it, so send us your abstract before next Friday.

The organisers of aKademy 2007 have put out a Call for Sponsorship. aKademy is the KDE World Summit, this year taking place in Glasgow at the end of June. Sponsorship is an opportunity to promote your company or product to the developers, users, deployers and consultants who will attend the conference. It will also provide a marketing avenue for your company to the thousands who read our website and publications.