Quickies: Community Study, KSteak, Kde France

Laurent Rathle wrote in to plug the Kde France site where French speakers can enjoy forums, news, translations of KDE Dot News items as well as KC KDE issues, amongst other resources. Alongst with KDE.org/fr/, KDE French users should be well catered for.

Klaus Staerk wrote in to point out that KSteak, the English-German translation tool,
is the KDE.de App of the Month (de) for June 2002. An interview (de) with the author as well as a screenshot laden description (de) of the app is available. Moritz Moeller-Herrmann also wrote in to point that a major German newspaper recently carried an introduction to KDE (de).

Marcus Camen notes that KDE is breaking records -- again.

Finally, Andreas Brand is a sociologist studying KDE for a German University under "Project Electronic Labor Markets". Check out all the details here, and feel free to help out Andreas.

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Comments

by Stephan Oehlert (not verified)

That article in "Süddeutsche Zeitung" says there are 737 members in the KDE "team". Where do they get this number from? Would be interesting.

by Neil Stevens (not verified)

~> wc -l programming/kde/kde-common/accounts
745 programming/kde/kde-common/accounts

Unfortunately they didn't realize that some accounts are shared across many contributors, as in the case of translation teams. So the number should be a bit bigger. But, they're in the ballpark at least.

by ariya (not verified)

That programming/kde is surely your own path, Neil :-)

Another way to see it is to browse http://webcvs.kde.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/*checkout*/kde-common/accounts?...

by Neil Stevens (not verified)

Of course it's my own path. I pasted it hastily, having been awake longer than I should have been. :-)

Über die generelle Richtung des Projekts bestimmt eine Kerngruppe, der derzeit rund 20 Entwickler angehören. Sie trifft die wichtigsten Entscheidungen – zum Beispiel welche Anwendungen in neu veröffentlichte Versionen aufgenommen werden – auf Grundlage demokratischer Wahlen. Mitglied in diesem „KDE Core Team“ kann jeder werden, der sich verdient macht.

Rough translation:
The core team, about 20 people, decide about the projects' general direction. They make the most important decisions - like what applications are included in new releases - based on democratic elections. Member of this group of core developers can become, whoever has contibuted to the project accordingly.

Is that true, did I miss something?

by Daniel Molkentin (not verified)

I'd rather call it a "loose democratic system". People take their position on certain issues and that ends in a result.

Of course, the ideas of people acually working on that issue which is subject to discuss and long time project members ideas are mostly accepted because they often know best. However, that's not really a "dictatorship" of the core-team as it might appear in the article. KDE is always open for reasonable arguments, that's one of the thing KDE makes so successfull and popular.

That's why I think calling the way decistions in KDE are made a "group dynamic process" fits it best.

Cheers,

by Neil Stevens (not verified)

Making decisions democratically has been consistently rejected!

The concept of some developers getting to make special decision has been consistently denied!

by Timothy R. Butler (not verified)

Would you guys quit breaking so many records?!? How am I suppose to keep up to date on all of this if there are new records broken so often!!! Sheesh, could some of you go work on the GNOME project or something to slow down the record breaking?

-Tim

by ariya (not verified)

While I don't work on any GNOME projects, I do keep an eye on Abiword and Gnumeric on daily basis :-8