At last year's Akademy the vision of the Social Desktop was born and first presented to a larger audience. The concept behind the Social Desktop is to bring the power of online communities and group collaboration to desktop applications and the desktop shell itself. One of the strongest assets of the Free Software community is its worldwide community of contributors and users who belief in free software and who work hard to bring the software and solutions to the mainstream. You can find more of this conceptual background on Frank Karlitschek's slides from his keynote at Akademy 2008.
A core idea of the Social Desktop is connecting to your peers in the community, making sharing and exchanging knowledge easier to integrate into applications and the desktop itself. One of the ideas Frank addressed was to place a widget on the desktop where users can find other KDE users in the same city or region, making it possible to connect to these people, to contact them and to collaborate.

The KDE development team is working hard on the KDE 4 platform. KDE 4 will include many exciting new technologies which will greatly enhance the functionality of KDE. One of these new technologies is Decibel. We would like to give you an idea of what Decibel is all about.

The KDE contributors conference part of aKademy 2006 in Dublin
kicked off Saturday morning bright and early, much to the dismay
of those who had been out late the evening before at the registration
desk, conveniently located in a pub. Read on for a full report.

The yearly KDE World Summit, Akademy, has found a home for 2006 on the emerald isle. This year,
the multi-day event for contributors to the leading Free Desktop
will be held from September 23nd
to 30th 2006 in beautiful Dublin, capital city of
Ireland. Our hosts will be Ireland's oldest university, Trinity College. There are three sub-events: a contributors

Marcel Gagné's latest "Cooking with Linux" over at the Linux Journal covers some nice graphical ways of dealing with or joining the MS Windows network neighborhood, lately referred to as network places.

I am starting a new monthly feature, tentatively dubbed KDE & Companies, which will consist of a series of interviews with KDE-related or KDE-friendly companies. We will start with the company that, through Qt, is arguably at the root and foundation of KDE; Trolltech's CEO Eirik Eng has agreed to answer our questions. Please submit any queries you may have for Trolltech in the comments below.

Polls are an oft-requested feature of the dot. KDE.com has risen to the challenge with its latest user poll: "What Should Be the Highest Priority of KDE Developers Leading Up to KDE 2.2?".