Community and Events

On Monday, thanks to the amazing help of Jill Ratkevic, Bruce Perens and Xandros, I was able to attend the Desktop Linux Conference to represent and speak about KDE.

KDE will be represented at the large US computer show COMDEX, in Las Vegas, from the 17th to 20th November, as a result of placing second in a poll run by O'Reilly Network.

Linux Expo UK 2003 took place in London on October 8 - 9. KDE took part in the .org village along with twenty other Free Software projects (photo from front, photo from back).

While the KDE project continues to research and develop the ideal desktop environment, now the KDE community and development processes themselves have been studied and researched by at least two different efforts: Christian Reinhardt of University of Innsbruck chose to study KDE for his "Collaborative Knowledge Creation in Virtual Communities of Practice" Master's thesis.

I would like to let you know about a new project which I have started, which is based on an idea by Ante Wessels: a Wiki for KDE. The 'working draft' name for this project is "KDE Community Wiki Site" (KDE CWS) and you can find the site which is more than just a Wiki at kde.ground.cz.

On Saturday, the KDE Contributors' Conference 2003 was officially opened. Two days full with talks in two tracks followed only being interrupted by meals, group photo and the obligatory social event on Saturday evening. On Monday there was a PGP keysigning, a press conference was held and in workshops further work was discussed.

The KDE-Women project was founded in 2001 as an international forum for women involved with or interested in KDE. It was originally intended to be a place where women could present their current contributions to KDE and where women who wished to contribute could find a starting point. That was the goal of KDE-Women then, and still is now.

Tomorrow is the first day of the KDE Developers' Conference 2003 (nicknamed "Kastle"), preceded today by the KDE e.V. membership meeting and followed by a week long hackfest until Sunday 31st. The Kastle event is hosted by KDE e.V., the Academic and University Center Nové Hrady and the Polytechnic University of Upper Austria in Hagenberg.

In lovely weather-schizophrenic San Francisco, KDE once again had a presence this year. The show itself had the distributions like SuSE, Gentoo, Debian, Redhat. Oddly, SCO was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps due to a lack of product? Also present were the big-name regulars like IBM, Sun, and HP. Little blood was lost between any Gnome-KDE strife.

The UKUUG Linux2003 Conference took place in Edinburgh last weekend. I ran the KDE stall, gave a talk on Umbrello UML Modeller and attended the other talks. Read on for the whole report.