2 days to go and KDE turns 15!

Whoooo. Just 2 more days until KDE can celebrate the 15th birthday. Have you prepered your presents ;-)
And even more important: Are you ready to party?

Find more information on the dot.
http://dot.kde.org/2011/10/05/freedom-15-years-party

October 14th—a global celebration of freedom and achievement!

Back from the Desktop Summit 2011 in Berlin

Perhaps I am the last one writing about the wonderful Desktop Summit in Berlin some days ago. Nevertheless I want to summarize my personal highlights.

The Desktop Summit was awesome. I had the pleasure to meet people (old and new friends from all over the world), discuss complicated stuff face-to-face and of cause: have a lot of fun together.

In a combined cross desktop marketing BoF we discussed some ideas how we (GNOME and KDE) could join forces to get bigger media coverage (e.g. TV, radio or big newspapers). One intresting first step is by paying attention on our messages. It occured that the message was: "... is THE Linux Desktop Environment" or "A is better than B".

From a commercial marketing perspective this is very common. Just a little bit ignoring the reality and making a strong statement (with the hope the unknowing reader is going to believe it) is usual. On the other hand this takes us (down) to the same level of trust many of the big companies have today. Exacletly this is one of the big differences we want to make. We are NOT like these big companies, playing with "the truth" to manipulate people. So we agreed to use phrases like "... is ONE of the leading / bigest / ... Desktop Environments for Linux" etc. There is GNOME, there is the KDE Plasma Workspace etc. and if we look at the whole market we see, that the big competition is not the other community.

Further I had some good discussions with different people about the improvement of the business side of KDE. Recent (economic) developments showed us the danger of having only a few, but big companies in our environment. The big ones are very nice, however, we gain stability by having many small businesses as well in our ecosystem. You might like business or not. But who would deny some money for hacking on his/her favorite open source project?

I recognized with big pleasure how powerful, creative and successful small/medium companies could be when they cooperate. Plasma Active is here one excellent example. In my view we need more such cooperation. There were some ideas how we, the community could build a better context for those developments.

Besides the talks and BoFs there were many techical and social activities together.

 Hacking on computers ...

 ... and hacking on the piano ...

 ... or having lunch together.

 Jos did again his collaborative open source cooking.

There were really many great events. One of my personal favorite was the football match (thanks to openSUSE/SUSE for sponsoring).

Like last year I came back with a huge motivation and many plans how I could help to bring KDE further. As I know big plans and great ideas do not matter in our world, it is the result, the things you have actually done. My daylife hit me (not really soft) when I came back and I did a poor job for KDE so far. Other times will come in a few months.

Preparing my talk about conflict management for the Desktop Summit

This is my favorite place to prepare my talk for the Desktop Summit in Berlin. It is about conflict management in communities and teams. Watch it on Aug. 6th from 12:00 until 12:30, room: Audimax.

Last chance: Vote on openSUSE strategy

The vote on the openSUSE strategy is closing on 30th of june. So official openSUSE members have the opportunity for ONE more day to express their opinion.

Take your chance. It is here: go, read the document one more time and cast your vote!

And if you are not sure if it is important, here you find some hints.



And BTW:

Visiting Randa: The multi sprint

Last Saturday I visited Randa to see my friends working hard on the future of KDE. There were about 60 developers in the house, hacking and discussing everywhere.

Hacking everywhere - The nepomuk and multimedia crowd

Especially for my they did some lightning talks to give my an overview. (I haven't expected less.)

The audience is listening

Sebas was explaining the whys and the hows about plasma active.
Miliam talked about new features of KDevelop like the plasma based dashboard and python language support.
Frederik Gladhorn presented some work about accessibility.
Harald Sitter gave an overview about KDE multimedia covering Phonon, Amarok, Tomahawk kde'n'live and more.
Finally the Fluffy gang reveled there plans to go Flinky.

Also some "work" was done outside.

Platform_11 team at work

Finally Sebas gave us a demo of the plasma active tablet. The usability was not so bad. Even my 3yo daughter could change activities.

My impression during the short time was that a lot of work was done yet and a lot was waiting to be done. I am sad I could not stay longer. But it was a pleasure meeting you all again. See you in Berlin.

Strategy is alive

CC by nc sa mikep @flickr

There was a long pause during the strategy process. Now the strategy team is working on it again. News are coming the next days. Stay tuned.

Contributions that matter

CC-BY-NC-SA by __Dori__ @ flickr

In the last days I read two post on planetkde and planetsuse, written by (to me) new contributors with the best intention to help their projects. However the response of the community was not as positive as they would have expected. What happened?

3 types of potential new contributors

Some lines from my last years Akademy paper.

"Krogh, Spaeth and Lakhani analyzed the characters of potential new contributors in mailing lists.[12] Based on that work three types could be found.

• Proactive problem-solver: They use the program, find a bug, and work out the solution. In the first mail to the list they send the patch. These people are very successful in communities and often become continuous contributors.
• Waiting volunteer: This group offers their abilities to the community and waits until they get a job allocated. In general this character is not very active. Most communities can not integrate them successfully.
• Visionary: They use the program and have ideas on how the program should be improved. Although visions and aims are important in communities, the character-type visionary is not successful. In the past his/her visions were not identical with the ideas of the code developers. The resulting costs of conflicts exceed the benefits of the discussion."

Even the headline of one of the post gives you a hint which type might be behind the post in question. Visionaries often use words like "it should", "you have to" etc. instead of "I have done" or "I am going to do".

Results matter - words do not

In open source communities the developers decide what they do. They want to get work done. In most cases they have a vision for their project and not enough time to do as much as they would like to. That's one of the reasons why achievement is the currency. Talking and writing visions is not. If you want a change - do it.

This does not mean, that your contribution is not appreciated. The contrary is the truth.

Contributions that make a difference

KDE as well as openSUSE have special pages to guide new contributors. They propose your first steps into the project. (You will find other useful information about how to start contributing at openhatch a plattform to bring new contributors and projects together.)

Contributions that make a difference are contributions which are important and valuable from the perspective of the community; things the developers want to get done. Help them and you will succeed. Junior Jobs (JJ) are a good starting point as well.

Start now doing things!

There is really a lot to do. Your contribution is very welcome. Visions are important in communities, but they are not the best point to start with.
Instead, grab a task the community needs to be done. Inform yourself first, invest some time and love. Then contact the mailing list and post your questions or ask for a mentor. Present a solution and be amazed by the positive feedback you might receive.

Good luck!

P.S.: If you have an idea how the program could be improved use the provided tools (the brainstorm section in the KDE forum is the place for your are locking for; more experienced users could open a feature request at bugs.kde.org; openSUSE has openFATE.) or contact the developers on the mailing list.