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A big "Thank You!" to all the sponsors, Technologiestiftung Berlin (TSB; in English, Technology Foundation of Berlin), Humboldt University of Berlin, and nearly 800 attendees who gathered from around the world to make a successful Desktop Summit 2011!

Geoffray Levasseur attended RMLL (Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre/Libre Software Meetings) in Strasbourg, France on behalf of KDE, and gathered some useful feedback on our efforts and the views of Linux users in general.

While the heat of the Desktop Summit 2011 is still remaining, we are already looking for a host for Akademy 2012.

Akademy is the annual gathering of the KDE community, one of the largest and most significant in the world of Free and Open Source Software. At Akademy, the KDE community gathers to exchange ideas for development and to discuss other important topics. It is an extraordinary occasion for creativity, enthusiasm, commitment, close working relationships and innovation, so hosting Akademy is a rare opportunity.

KDE Italia, the Italian community backing the KDE Italia website and the KDE Italia forum, is pleased to invite you to CoNAsSL 2011, an end-of-summer event aimed at gathering all the Italian associations involved in Free Software. The event will take place on 9, 10 and 11 of September, in a beautiful location: the Tuscan seaside! People attending will be hosted at the same place where the talks and workshops will be held: the "Baia dei Gabbiani" campsite in Scarlino, a town near Follonica (Grosseto).

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

          <ul><li>The refactoring of <a href="http://api.kde.org/4.0-api/kdelibs-apidocs/">kdelibs</a> for Frameworks 5 has started</li>

            <a href="http://commit-digest.org/issues/2011-08-14/">Read the rest of the Digest here</a>.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

• Calligra sees work on DOC list styles, improved drag-and-drop in Document Structure Docker and multiple bugfixes; kformula becomes a shape
• The split/migration of image and thumbnails databases has started in Digikam
• There is a new and improved describeResources method in KDE-Runtime
• Kate now highlights GNU LD scripts
• There is a new journey search string parser in PublicTransport
• Optimizations have been made in route rendering in Marble, and preview rendering in KDE-Base
• Umbrello receives work on the new code importing wizard
• The way Konsole queries for the PTY size is changed, this should fix multiple problems with terminal dimensions
• Bugfixes in Kate, Amarok, Phonon, Network Management.

Read the rest of the Digest here.

Jonathan Kolberg

One particular highlight of the past few days was the Intel AppUp workshop, in which conference attendees who had preregistered were able to learn about the AppUp program, including App stores and development tools to optimize and distribute applications for Windows and MeeGo. The Intel team explained that Intel AppUp is the only large online Appstore system that is really friendly to distributing free software. For example, if the application developer chooses GPL, they are prompted to upload source code which can then be automatically distributed along with the applications binary. As a bonus, Intel loaned each of the workshop attendees a developer tablet running MeeGo to enable easy testing of applications and aid development.

The third and final 'traditional' conference day began with Mirko Boehm, Claudia Rauch, Stormy Peters, Karen Sandler and Cornelius Schumacher meeting with members of the Berlin City authorities. The city officials wanted to get acquainted with the free and open source leaders involved in the Desktop Summit, because open technology is important to the local government (more below).

Boudewijn Rempt shows off Krita

The hallways and courtyard were again busy with small, lively discussions. As the morning went on the attendance at talks increased noticeably. Sunday was also the day of the press conference, where key figures from GNOME, KDE and the cross-community organizing team met with the press to answer their questions about the event and the future of free software.

Friday, 5 August - Preparations for a Big Event

Friday, 10:00, August 5, 2011. A big group of people was standing a bit lost in the cloakroom of the Humboldt University at Unter den Linden, Berlin. They were the volunteers for the Desktop Summit 2011 - but without guidance and leadership, they were just nervously looking around and talking to each other.