In the second week of January, KDE's Plasma team gathered in the Blue Systems office in Barcelona, Spain, to discuss and work on the next generation of KDE's popular workspace products. The meeting comes just at the right time, as the Plasma team has just finished a first technology preview, which puts the base technology in place and allows for an evaluation of the current progress. It also gives an opportunity for more refined plans for a first stable release.

conf.kde.in was announced in November, to take place February 21 – 23, 2014 in Gandhinagar, India. This three-day conference, the biggest KDE event in India, will bring together Qt developers, KDE contributors, open source enthusiasts and users from all across the nation. Visitors will have the opportunity to learn, share, contribute, innovate and create around Qt and KDE technology.

KDE will be at FOSDEM in Brussels on 1&2 February this year. We will have a stall both days showing off the latest builds of Frameworks 5 and Plasma 2. Saturday will see our Desktop devroom which is shared with GNOME, LXDE and Unity.

Where is the next Akademy? In Czech, "KDE je příští Akademy?" as 'kde' means 'where' in Czech.
Akademy 2014, the annual KDE community summit, will take place from 6-12 September in Brno, Czech Republic.

conf.kde.in 2014 is taking place February 21 – 23, 2014 in Gandhinagar, India. The conference is a vibrant occasion for sharing ideas, knowledge and, most importantly, support and enthusiasm for KDE and for open source. It is an event for both new and experienced technology enthusiasts. Collaboration and freedom are the main features.

Akademy-fr takes place in Toulouse next week. Akademy-fr is the meeting of KDE France.

Google Summer of Code 2013 (GSoC) brought fifty budding new shoots and branches to the mighty KDE family tree, and the canopy of warmth and love offered by the community helped them blossom and bloom in the three months of the program. With a few snips, a little trimming and pruning, they have learned, innovated, created and contributed to one of the largest free and open source communities in the world, and have developed software that will touch many people around the world.

The KDE Community makes software; most of the people in the Community are software developers. However, this large and extensive community includes more than just the people who write software. Among the many non-technical contributors there are translators, bug finders and fixers, writers, promoters, and those who provide user support. User support is critical to KDE's success, because it provides a way for technical issues to be properly reported to people who can do something about them.

KO GmbH today presents Krita Gemini for Windows 8. Krita Gemini is a fusion between Krita Sketch and Krita Desktop: Krita Gemini switches seamlessly between the full-featured desktop/laptop user interface and the sketch interface, which is optimized for tablets.

Inge Wallin, COO at KO GmbH explained: "The open development process usually employed by KO and supported by Intel allows early community feedback as well as access to the vast repository of code and knowledge in the KDE community, shortening the development cycle and improving results"