KDE.news 

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.

Deeper Plasma integration

The fork of Nextcloud from ownCloud has brought about new questions regarding this topic: Will the Plasma team have to support two different systems? It would obviously be vastly preferable if both cloud implementations could be supported with one client, which would require collaboration between ownCloud and Nextcloud. The Plasma team has communicated this requirement for both parties. From an implementation point of view, at least Nextcloud features a key-value store which could be used to store client settings.

Featured Article – The KDE Incubator

The KDE Incubator is how KDE currently approaches new projects joining our "umbrella". This program aims to help projects with similar ideals to our existing projects join us with all that that implies. The incubator couples a sponsor from the KDE community with a plan to move/migrate a project into the systems KDE provides as a community, including mailing lists, websites, code repositories, etc. In this featured article, Jeremy Whiting tells us how The KDE Incubator works and provides an overview about the projects that have been incubated in 2015.

Akademy, KDE's annual conference, requires a place and team for the year 2017. That's why we are looking for a vibrant, enthusiatic spot in Europe that can host us!

A bit about Akademy

Akademy is KDE's annual get-together where our creativity, productivity and love are at their peak. Developers, users, translators, students, artists, writers - pretty much anyone who has been involved with KDE will join Akademy to participate and learn. Contents will range from keynote speeches and a two-day dual track session of talks by the FOSS community, to workshops and Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions where we plot the future of the project.

Have you ever felt that you wanted to give back to the KDE project? As the season of giving draws near there's never been a better time to support KDE and help the project continue to bring free software to millions of lives worldwide.

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.

WikiToLearn is KDE's project to create textbooks for university and school students. It provides free, collaborative and accessible text books. Academics worldwide contribute in sharing knowledge by creating high quality content.

Amongst the 20 year of KDE parties around the world one of the busiest was held in Beijing. Dot News interviewed the organiser Leslie Zhai about KDE in China.

KDE China's 20th Anniversary Group Photo

Leslie Zhai

20 years ago today Matthias Ettrich sent an email that would mark the start of KDE as we know it today - a world-wide community of amazing people creating Free Software for you. In his email he announced the new Kool Desktop Environment and said “Programmers wanted!” In the 20 years since then so much has happened. We released great software, fought for software freedom and empowered people all over the world to take charge of their digital life. In many ways we have achieved what we set out to do 20 years ago - “a consistant, nice looking free desktop-environment” and more. Millions of people use KDE’s software every single day to do their work, have fun and connect to the most important people in their life. And yet we still have a long way ahead of us. Our job is far from done.

KDE is 20 years old, a community working on beautiful software to free the world and spread privacy, all while having a lot of fun which we do it.

In cities across the world there are parties being held this weekend to celebrate. As we write the KDE Korea party in Seoul is setting up for some talks and drinks.