Community and Events

The team behind The Randa Meetings is pleased to announce a community partnership with the KDE e.V. The Randa Meetings is the largest sprint organized by KDE, where roughly fifty KDE contributors meet yearly in the Swiss Alps to enjoy seven days of intense team work, pushing KDE technologies forward.

For the past years the sprints were organized by a core Swiss team and supported by the KDE community. Organizing sprints was challenging, but the result always justified the efforts. To keep the yearly sprints going and make easier the work for the Swiss core team, the Randa Meetings have now become an official KDE e.V. community partner.

This decision allows the Randa Meeting to simplify their workflows like organizing fundraising and traveling reimbursements. It removes pressure from the organizers and allows them to spend more time on the sprint and their own personal affairs like family or the building of a new house.

The Randa Meetings will continue with a yearly meeting. For 2017, the date is already set to 10 September to 16 September. This year the meetings will be focused on accessibility and personal information management (PIM). We want to make our software accessible for people with visual disabilities and also to make our software accessible from different operating systems, different devices and with different user interfaces, such as graphical with keyboard and mouse, or touch or speech and other senses.

We look forward to greeting you in 2017 and wish you all a good new year!

The KDE community will once more be participating in Google Code-in, which pairs KDE mentors with students beween the ages of 13 and 18 to work on tasks which both help the KDE community and teach the students how to contribute to free and open source projects. Not only coding, but also documentation and training, outreach and research, quality assurance and user interface tasks will be offered.

Students who are interested in contributing, see https://codein.withgoogle.com for more information.

Mentors, please subscribe to the KDE-Soc-Mentor mail list, and write to [email protected] if you have not yet been invited to the GCi webapp. Now is the time to login and begin adding your tasks. Former Google Summer of Code students are especially welcome to mentor. 

KDE has finished its fantastic week, celebrating 20 years of hacking and freedom fighting together with Qt, VLC and FSFE in Berlin. We finished our week with a fun day trip to Pfaueninsel, Berlin's Peacock Island.

Videos from many of the talks are now available to download with the rest being added in the coming weeks. They are also linked from the conference program with slides, where available.

Many thanks to the organisers of the conference. We have now returned to our homes around the world to implement our plans for the next 20 years of being the best community for end-user software.

Peacock Island

For all the gearheads around the world, the occasion of KDE's 20th birthday brings with it the traditional yet unconventional slice of our virtual birthday cake - our brand new book called 20 Years of KDE: Past, Present and Future scribbled in icing on top.

There is so much about QtCon and all its diversity and enthusiasm right from the Traffic Cone hats to the Ratatouille to the parallel KDE, FSFE, Qt tracks that all of it can't be summed up even across numerous dot stories. So this article in particular aims at giving a detailed summary of some of the talks not covered in the previous dot story and a more detailed version of the lightning talks for those who prefer a quick read over watching videos.

Governments Migrating to Free Software

From 1 to 4 September 2016 the communities of KDE, Qt, FSFE, VideoLAN and KDAB join forces in Berlin for QtCon. The program consists of a mix of Qt trainings on day 1, unconference sessions, lightning talks and more than 150 in-depths talks on technical and community topics on days 2 to 4. Track topics range from KDE‘s Latest and Greatest, Testing and Continuous Integration and QtQuick to Free Software policies and politics, Community and Beyond code. Check out the program.

QtCon 2016 Call for Papers is open. The event will assemble KDE Akademy, VideoLAN Developer Days, Qt Contributors' Summit, FSFE Summit and KDAB Qt training day. We invite contributors to these projects to present their work and insight at QtCon 2016. The conference will take place from 1st to 8th September in Berlin, Germany. The talks will be from 2nd to 4th with KDE continuing with BoFs till the 8th

2016 is a special year for many FLOSS projects: KDE has its 20th birthday while Free Software Foundation Europe and VideoLAN both have their 15th birthday. All these call for celebrations! This year KDE has come together with Qt, FSFE, VideoLAN and KDAB to bring you QtCon, where attendees can meet, collaborate and get the latest news of all these projects.

KDE will have an exhibit in the Expo at the upcoming LISA (Large Installation System Administration) Conference. The full conference takes place November 8 ‒ 13 in Washington D.C. The Expo is open on the 11th and 12th. There is no charge to attend the Expo.

We are raising money to support KDE sprints. People have asked legitimate questions about those funds—who gets the money? Who benefits?