COMMUNITY REPORT

2ND & 3RD QUARTER 2013 | ISSUE 26

WELCOME MESSAGE

I am fortunate to get to see the What strikes me about KDE in the KDE community, and yet inside of a lot of free and open again and again when KDE remains a place for vital projects— both in comparing it to other innovation after so many years. and in Free Culture. I get to see communities is one thing: its Your contribution to KDE e.V. the small ones and I get to see ability to provide a safe harbor through programs such as "Join the big ones. The idealistic ones that can be depended on while the Game" helps us continue to and the pragmatic ones. The still retaining the ability to be a provide a stable background rough ones and the calm ones. place for change and organization for KDE to ensure The ones that are mostly shades innovation. KDE is a place where this will still be the case for of grey and the ones that are newcomers with little experience many years to come. colorful. The ones that want to but a willingness to learn can make a difference in the world come and do exactly that. KDE I hope you will enjoy this and the ones who are doing it is a place where companies with quarterly report - this time with just for fun. Each of them is commercial interests can come a feature about one of our great and lovable in their own and realize them. KDE is a place collaborations with ALERT, a way. Some because they give us where experienced contributors European Union research great software. Some because can come and make huge project. they fight for our rights in and changes. KDE is a place where outside courts. Some because researchers and universities can they give us really amazing art come to do research and Lydia Pintscher to enjoy and reflect upon. Some collaborate. None of this for the KDE e.V. Board of Directors because they provide much however makes KDE unique. needed knowledge about the What makes it unique is that world we live in to everyone. they all can easily feel at home

CONTENTS Welcome Message...... 1 Featured article: EU ALERT Project...... 2 Supported member activities...... 4 Developer Sprints...... 4 – 6 Trade Shows and Community Events...... 7 – 12 New Members, Financial Report and KDE e.V. Board...... 13 Featured article EU ALERT PROJECT CONCLUDES SUCCESSFULLY

Stuart Jarvis

Back in the last months of 2010, the ALERT to track bugs, but for large projects such as KDE Project began. It was partly funded under the there are problems with duplicate reports and European Union's 7th Framework Programme, with reports being filed to the wrong team (it is which has funded other substantial research not always easy for a user to understand that an projects that KDE has been part of. The ALERT apparent problem with a web browser failing to Project's objectives were to help open source show pages is actually due to a separate developers to work more effectively and to software handling wireless connections). With this produce better software by improving bug in mind, the KDE team decided to focus on Solid tracking, resolution and software quality tools. (the KDE software components dealing with hardware interaction) as a base for KDE's testing The ALERT (Active support and reaL-time of the ALERT software. coordination based on Event pRocessing in FLOSS developmenT) Project brought together partners After the initial stages, Adriaan left the project due from seven countries, including large software to conflicts with other commitments and Dario companies such as Atos (with over 70,000 and Stuart took over the work between them. The employees), medium size enterprises, and research partners demoed ways of gathering research institutes and universities. It also information about bugs from diverse resources included KDE e.V. as a partner, specifically for the such as mailing lists, wikis and forums and purposes of guiding the project and providing a showed how natural language processing and test case for the software that would be stack trace analysis could help to identify produced. As part of this process, three KDE duplicate bug reports. One partner even began experts, Adriaan de Groot, Dario Freddi and profiling developers, identifying developers suited Stuart Jarvis were contracted to another project to solving particular bugs and bugs suited to the partner (Corvinnno Technology Transfer of skills of a particular developer. Hungary) to provide consultation services on the needs of free software developers and to Concerns over privacy and data rights led to facilitate communication with KDE e.V. and the intensive discussions between research partners, KDE community. The KDE experts were chosen the KDE experts and KDE e.V. board. The experts through an open selection process. were eventually able to resolve these concerns by advising the ALERT partners on how to access A kick-off meeting took place in October 2010, as data via public sources and open protocols (for the partners got a chance to meet each other example, RSS) rather than requiring database and discuss objectives and timescales. The dumps that might have contained sensitive data. project really got started after a meeting in January 2011 when the KDE experts attended for By early 2012, most of the software components the first time and met the other participants. It were working, but as individual entities (each became clear that many of the partners had partner had taken responsibility for particular limited experience with open source software and functions and written their own components and so it was important for KDE to be involved and interfaces). A message bus enabled give advice on issues such as licenses acceptable communication between components, but there to free software developers, the importance of was no user-facing single, consistent interface. code re-use and availability of source code. Identifying this as a shortcoming with the aid of the KDE people, resources were diverted to build Over the next two years, the partners met a unified user interface. This was first demoed in approximately every three months, with frequent the summer of 2012, becoming ready for the first email exchanges and online chats between set of user trials in the autumn. In parallel, work meetings. KDE's involvement in the early stages began on automating installation of the diverse was mostly in the form of contributing to components and on providing a ready-built documents describing the problems that should virtual machine. KDE team members provided be solved. For example, Bugzilla is a popular tool extensive testing and feedback on the latter.

2 The public profile of ALERT was also raised research partner, the Libresoft group at the during this time, with an appearance at the University Rey Juan Carlos, has set up a spin-out OpenWorld Forum in Paris where the ALERT company to further develop the software. They software was presented for the first time in have already done some work in integrating public. ALERT capabilities into Bugzilla, so that some of the benefits can be accessed without the need to Near the end of 2012, the first set of user trials learn new software or access a separate system. began. The KDE people continued to focus on Solid as the main use case and recruited Solid Overall, the project has provided a very positive team developers to try out the ALERT tools via experience and has helped to raise the profile of the ALERT user interface as part of their normal KDE (and free software in general) among some activities. This meant using ALERT to hunt for of the partners. Discussions have already taken duplicate reports, using it to gather additional place about possible future collaborations. The information on a bug from mailing lists, wikis or ALERT software is fully operational now and can the forum and getting customized notifications on be downloaded from the ALERT website, either as particular patterns of activity in Bugzilla or the source code (with some binaries) or as a ready source code repository. The feedback was set-up virtual machine. Some configuration is returned to the project partners in December needed to get started, as detailed in the user 2012 and led to further developments early in manual. Future developments will further 2013 before a second trial period began in March streamline the software and make its deployment 2013. easier. KDE will continue to watch developments and consider a wider deployment of the software Feedback from the trials was largely positive. The as it matures. project has been judged a success and featured as a success story by the EU Commission. Thanks to all KDE community members that have Although the initial project is over, many of the participated and helped with this long term partners intend to continue developing their project! components and the software as a whole. One

3 SUPPORTED MEMBER ACTIVITIES

Developer almost none. The group also discussion about a new system discussed other general issues settings module UI, unit testing Sprints such as branding for Solid, using virtualbox and support for integration and unit created modes. testing. The beloved libsolid to The first big specific topic was detect hardware was also SOLID SPRINT power management. In the weeks addressed; there were some April 2013, Brno prior to the sprint, the Solid team discussions to draft the next identified areas where work could version of it. We also talked about by Álex Fiestas be done to improve the Power what areas from the Windows Management user experience support should be improved first. (based on the bugs found in bugs..org) such as brightness After years of hard work, we The annual Solid sprint took place handling or hybrid suspension, so removed a huge amount of code in Brno (Czech Republic) at the Red we started to work on them. We called "Solid::Control", a failed Hat offices this year where a also discussed plans for "Power experiment from years ago to bunch KDE hackers met to work Devil 2", the power management address issues that now have on all things related to hardware application for future releases. No finally been completely addressed support. The group covered a wide conclusion was reached on in other ways. range of topics. behavior changes but we made good progress on the technical Months before the sprint, we In general, the community and the side of things. Improvements on discussed on IRC (#solid on projects covered by Solid are screen locking and a specific irc..net) what to do with getting broader so it is important domain debugging tool for power network management. One option that tools are well maintained, management were also was to keep and improve the which in this case means keeping investigated. current code. The alternative was a bug tracker that can actually be to create a new interface that used in an efficient way. So The newest member of the Solid leverages the new technologies before, during and after the sprint, family, KScreen, also got some that we lacked when "KDE a large amount of time has been attention during the sprint in the Network Management" was invested in triaging bugs. After form of discussions and features created. The team was split tears and sweat we now have a such support for more special use between the options so we bug tracker that can be used cases (environments with XRandR decided to give the new interface effectively. Starting with about 200 1.1 version). There was also a try; if it failed, we could always unconfirmed bugs, we now have fall back to the code we had. So during this sprint, we evaluated the state of the new code and decided to go for it.

The next big for support in KDE is moving to bluez5, so we are focusing our efforts on that rather big task. A plan was drafted and is currently being implemented.

4 PLASMA SPRINT Frameworks, especially in KWin of the workspaces design April 2013, Nürnberg and the Oxygen widget style. language" will allow quick While KWin is making excellent changes to the entire theme and by Sebastian Kügler progress towards being able to be allow downstream partners to used as Wayland compositor, the ensure greater consistency for From 16-22 April, members of the future of the Oxygen widget style their products with less effort. For Plasma team met in Nürnberg, is still an unsolved problem. a highly customized user Germany to discuss open experience, a tool will give the questions on the road to Plasma Definition of Done user an easy way to remix the Workspaces 2. The meeting was Look and Feel of the workspace. kindly hosted by SUSE and As with every transition, a clear definition is needed of an supported by the KDE e.V. For the One to Rule All Devices team, the meeting came at a important milestone: When is all of perfect time: porting of Plasma to this ready to be used? The highest A generic shell is one of the things a new graphics environment has priority for the team is to avoid that is already in place. Rather commenced, is in fact well under disrupting the user experiences, so than having one binary per way, and has raised some the baseline is to not introduce workspace, each with slightly questions that are best discussed regressions in primary workflows different mechanics, the Plasma in a high-bandwidth, in person when users update from KDE developers have merged these setting. Plasma Workspaces version 4 to code bases. Elements of the shell the upcoming release. such as default configuration, Graphics Stack Options setup of panels, toolbox, The idea is to streamline the containments et cetera are now The developers laid out the plans design language of the current defined in a so-called shell for an eventual release of Plasma workspace, not to introduce a new package. The generic shell itself Workspaces 2, based on KDE user interface. Common and does not hold any assumption Frameworks 5 and Qt5. Wayland is consistent elements for the user about the target device, or use also part of this plan. Starting with experience will be defined, and case. The UI elements are all Plasma Workspaces 2, Wayland made available as packages. This defined in Quick-based code. will join X11 as a supported goes along with less granularity in This makes the shell easier to windowing environment, and all the workspace setup options, but hack on and more maintainable, new development is taking this fear not: the user will be able to while allowing for greater into consideration. Wayland is a mix and mash these elements to flexibility for both, users and replacement for most of the create a customized user developers. functionality which is offered experience. To this end, the today by Xorg. Wayland simplifies hackers introduced a new type of One aspect of Plasma's device the graphics stack significantly Plasma packages: Look and Feel. convergence strategy is with the goal of making every A Look and Feel package transparent switching of the frame shown on screen perfect, combines code for UI elements workspace User Interface. While something that is hard to achieve such as the application switcher, Plasma does offer different reliably with X11. Wayland's leaner activity switcher, splash screen, workspaces already (Plasma graphics stack and improved logout dialog and lock screen into Desktop, Plasma Netbook, Plasma security model also make it more a single package. The Look and Active, Plasma Mediacenter), these appropriate for use on modern Feel package can be swapped, pieces are still distinctive programs devices. As such, it is widely seen either along with the shell right now. The plan is to move all as the successor to X11 in the Free package, or independently, these different user experiences software ecosystem. Most of the providing for freedom in the into Plasma packages that can be grunt work needed for this choice of UI while delivering a switched at runtime. The switching transition is already offered in Qt. great deal of consistency. This itself can be manually invoked, but However, there are still some X11- way of organizing the "vocabulary can also be based on heuristics dependent code paths in the KDE

5 such as input and output devices KDE E.V. BOARD MEETING experience KDE e.V. has built over plugged in. A user could, for September 2013 the years. The Board members example, plug a keyboard and a drafted a policy for the KDE e.V. mouse into a tablet, and the The KDE e.V. Board of Directors community partner program workspace would automatically be has a new composition since the during the Board meeting which switched from a Tablet and touch- General Assembly at in will be up for discussion and vote focused UI to a more traditional July. The Board met in person in on the KDE e.V. membership Desktop setup. Connecting a TV to Berlin on September 28-29. The mailing list. the device could swap the goals of this meeting were to get workspace to a media center the new Board on track, discuss There was also a short review of interface. Some of the code for current topics and plan for the the discussion about a KDE this is already in place, but not in future. Board members Albert incubator program that took place a state yet where it could be Astals Cid, , during Akademy. As KDE is demonstrated. Lydia Pintscher, and Pradeepto growing and more projects want to Bhattacharya were present, as join the community, KDE needs to Quicker was Claudia Rauch, the find ways to integrate these Association's business manager. projects. There was no concrete Qt Quick is the way of doing UI in outcome during the Board meeting Plasma Workspaces 2. This allows The agenda was a broad range of other than that the Board is graphics rendering to be offloaded topics such as an assessment of supportive of this idea. to the GPU, making better use of the Board work and decision graphics hardware, freeing the making processes. There are two Next on the agenda was the topic CPU for other tasks and areas which are particularly of events. KDE e.V. regularly conserving battery life, as the GPU challenging for the Board: legal, organizes and funds community is much more efficient in these financial/business issues. Since events. There was a short review operations. there is no in-depth expertise in of the first proposal for Akademy these areas within the Board and 2014 and the next steps towards It does not require OpenGL drivers, KDE e.V. in general, the Board organizing this event. Since there however. Graphics on systems that members rely on external advice is a lot of experience within the do not support OpenGL can fall quite a bit. The Board looked into KDE community in organizing back to XRender or fully CPU- how to increase this expertise in Akademy, the practical steps are based rendering. The worst case the Community. well planned. However, it might be scenario is that the rendering will good to think about the goals for be done on the CPU, which is how The Board also reviewed internal the event and if the format should the desktop layer is rendered communication via the Board stay the same. There was an today, so the performance would mailing list and bi-weekly calls agreement that Akademy should be as it is now. To achieve and the decision making process be the place for cooperation with performance parity even on and how to introduce new Board like-minded projects and technical systems which lack properly members to those processes. communities. The date and place accelerated graphics drivers, for Akademy 2014 will be usage of "heavyweight" graphics Also on the agenda was the set up announced in the last quarter of effects will be kept to a minimum. of a community partner program. this year. In the end, a system that is There are currently two concrete capable of running the current use cases for creating proper rules The first conf.kde.in, the version of Plasma will also be able on how to deal with community conference of the Indian KDE to run Plasma Workspaces 2, most partners or partner communities community, took place in 2011 and likely with even better which also imply managing funds was very successful. There are performance. on their behalf. The partner plans to repeat the event in early program is a great tool to let 2014. Pradeepto gave a summary others that share goals and values of the status of the planning and with the KDE community benefit the Board talked about how KDE from the organization and e.V. can help the organizers. It is

6 likely that there will be another Many thanks to Wikimedia IRC and email. Even first time conf.kde.in in 2014. Germany e.V. who generously attendees felt right at home. One hosted the meeting in their Berlin person said, "It's amazing to see The Board then moved on to talk office. the face of someone I only know about contributor sprints and why by their IRC nickname." The there were fewer sprints and entertainment was live jazz requests for sprints this year than Trade Shows and featuring the leader of the local in previous years. There are Community Events Akademy team, Dani Gutiérrez indications that community Porset, on the trumpet. members are reluctant to request AKADEMY 2013 money for sprints out of financial Saturday concerns. There was consensus BILBAO, THE BASQUE COUNTRY that the community members The conference officially started should be encouraged to organize SPAIN on Saturday, 13 July 2013. A those meetings and that there is July 2013 closely associated event, sufficient budget for these working Akademy-es—the annual by Carl Symons and several Akademy gathering of KDE-España—took sprints. participants place on the preceding Thursday Overall budget and planning for For most of the year, KDE—one of and Friday with presentations in 2014 was also a topic for this the largest free and open software Spanish and Basque. KDE-España meeting. The general goal for communities in the world—works is the legal representative of KDE 2014 will be to continue in the online by email, IRC, forums and e.V. in Spain. spirit of the previous two years. mailing lists. The annual The opening keynote talk by Eva This means: aiming for a balanced conference Akademy provides all Galperin from the Electronic budget while sustaining current KDE contributors the opportunity Frontier Foundation (EFF) revealed activities. There are reserves which to meet in person to foster social the impact and implications of NSA would allow KDE e.V. to invest in bonds, work on concrete (U.S. National Security Agency) important activities. The Board will technology issues, consider new surveillance and other offenses to identify opportunities that KDE and ideas, and reinforce the innovative, privacy. Eva gave an overview of KDE e.V. should pursue in order to dynamic culture of KDE. Akademy these intrusions and described continue to be successful. brings together artists, designers, how almost all networking developers, translators, users, companies go along with them. In order to create a more writers, sponsors and many other Governments regularly buy sustainable funding base and to types of KDE contributors to software to spy on citizens—their be able to continue to support the celebrate the achievements of the own and others. To KDE activities of the KDE community, past year and help determine the developers, Eva implored, “You're KDE e.V. is planning to invest in direction for the next year. This the developers. You're our last and raising funds from individual year, Akademy took place in only hope. Build encryption donors and improving the Bilbao, Spain, from 13 to 19 July. software. Save us.” supporting membership program. 220 KDE contributor got together Currently, Claudia Rauch is for 2 days of talks and 5 days of Following the keynote, talks working with Detlev Sieber from Bird of a Feather sessions (BoFs), commenced. The program had a Software für Engagierte e.V. on workshops, parties and more. implementing the CiviCRM system wide range of topics, like Kevin Krammer's talk about declarative for managing contacts, Akademy 2013 activities actually widgets as KDAB has developed membership and related data. got started on Friday, 12 July with them. He showed how QML with the KDE e.V. Annual General widgets can create impressive UIs All in all, the Board meeting was Meeting (AGM), details in next in a small number of lines of clear productive, and left Board article. In the evening, people and easy to understand code. members with a list of To Dos for picked up their badges at early Marta Rybczy ska spoke about the upcoming weeks and months. registration and partied at Hika her involvement with two different If you would like to get involved Ateneo in Casco Viejo (Old Town KDE projects. She noted their with KDE e.V. or have questions Bilbao). As usual, people were similarities which suggest for the Board, get in touch on the delighted to see each other in principles that might help every Board mailing list at kde-ev- person after working all year by [email protected]. project. Some of the

7 by Knut Yrvin commonalities were code re-use, modularity allows for a wide set of organize it. Devaja explained that openness to change, and the usecases. David covered several their goal was to share the importance of publicity/promotion. technical points, drawing questions enthusiasm of KDE, show how our Slides and videos are available at on build technologies and some of community is open, inviting and akademy2013.kde.org. the choices that the Mer Project interesting; inspiring visitors, made. sharing knowledge and bringing There was a focus on mobile them up to speed on our platforms with Till Adam speaking The second keynote was also technology and culure. The team about the Nokia N9 and about focused on mobile and was learned a lot themselves and Blackberry and its platform. He presented by Vesa-Matti helped create a new generation of called on KDE developers to get Hartikainen from Jolla talking brilliant, cool KDE people from Frameworks 5 done. Till asked, about the Jolla phone, which is not India. "How hard can it be? Let's kick the yet available, and the Sailfish OS, project into gear, get the modular which is based on the Mer Project Martin Gräßlin talked about Porting libraries ready, and offer them to Core OS and Qt/QML. Veskuh (on KWin to Qt 5. Martin gave a great the Qt world!" He recalled his IRC) did a live demo of the Jolla tech talk about changes in KWin statements at the Desktop Summit phone. KDE developers want the that are due to changes in lower 2011, when he claimed that KDE phone already. level layers. And Jos Poortvliet development was spreading itself spoke about "Marketing KDE", too thin and that KDE should focus Other talks included Lydia suggesting three areas where on being the best Desktop on Pintscher addressing the topic of promotion can be focused for the Wayland on . That goal is still burnout in Free Software projects most benefit to KDE and KDE right in Till's view. However in and how to avoid it. FLOSS people users—deliver a great user reality KDE must work with more really love what they're doing and experience, promote KDE's Qt platforms to remain relevant. "The take on too much. This can lead to involvement, support grass roots world is complicated, deal with it!" the feeling of being the only one efforts. David Greaves, ex-MeeGo and who can do certain things. Lydia now Mer (employed by Jolla and talked about how to notice when The first day of Akademy 2013 in at his first Akademy) has been you or someone else is close to Bilbao finished in grand style with KDE user and Qt hacker for a long burnout, and gave some valuable a party and great music. The time. In his talk, he went over tips for avoiding getting burned Akademy attendees partied at some history behind Mer and out. Kafe Antzokia, some stayed until MeeGo, starting at the point where the sun came out the next the big guns left and things moved Devaja Shah and Yash Shah talked morning. Everyone enjoyed the in different directions (different, as about the the great KDE India Basque folksongs and dancing in several at once). There are now Meetup that took place earlier this went on and on. teams like Plasma Active, Jolla and year. Yash explained how he got other projects building on Mer. Its inspired at meetings like Randa to

8 Sunday presentations (Google Summer of FROM within KDE. So, Kevin asked Code, Season of KDE, Google the question: Now that we have Despite the long party, almost Code-In and Outreach Program for the environment, are we done? everyone made it back to the Women). The presentations conference on Sunday for day 2 covered Tomahawk, KDE- He continued explaining that of great talks. Samikshan Telepathy, Keyboard, , democracy is a journey, not a Bairagya's talk, "How I used QML collaborative text editing, destination. Democracy needs to make KStars more interesting" connecting your phone to your citizens, so who are the KDE had appeal even to the non-coder. KDE and a local adjustment tool citizens? The answer: all of us To him "interesting" means for digiKam. It was amazing to see from users who are actively "interesting for the Kstars user" how exuberant students have engaged to all developers. Kevin referring to what the viewer wants made interesting and useful also talked about the KDE to see in the sky. In his GSoC contributions to KDE through the Manifesto that was written and project, he provided a way to various mentoring programs. published as a result of choose what to see in the sky discussions at last year's map: stars, planets, nebulae, etc. After the student lightening talks, Akademy. It seeks to define what He used QML to create this easy- Lydia Pintscher took the stage and a KDE project is based on the to-use interface. told the audience about common values of the KDE "Negotiation Theory for Geeks". community: open governance, free Oihane Kamara's talk covered the Key take-aways were that you software, inclusivity, innovation, use of Marble in scientific projects. should always focus on interests common ownership and end user The presentation included multiple not on positions. Talk to each focus. But what's next? The illustrations, including the final other and actively listen to what manifesto was a stepping stone; program prototype with real data. the other person has to say. now we must complete the work The discussion after the talk dealt Proper communication and on democracy, says Kevin. KDE mostly with Python bindings in understanding the other person's culture needs governance Marble. Timothée Giet gave a ideas patiently while keeping an documentation both for the great demonstration about the open mind is important. Consider Community and the Project. Right power of . He started drawing ahead of time a fallback position if now, KDE relies on auto- the KDE mascot, using many Krita the negotiation fails—a BATNA organization, which is good, but capabilities, rotating the drawing (Best Alternative to a Negotiated could easily devolve into chaos. space, using various brushes and Agreement); it doesn't make sense Kevin stresses that it is important colors to make a beautiful version to settle for less than your BATNA. to respect the Elders (based not on of Konqui. Jos van den Oever and When there is trouble, TALK to the age, but experience) in the Friedrich W. H. Kossebau shared person, CARE about the other community. Some turnover is "Slices of ". They talked person, and look for COMMON good, but it's important for about problems with documents GROUND. wisdom to be retained. KDE also stored and edited in the Cloud, needs Alliance Management like and proposed some solutions. Then it was time for Kévin Ottens's with the Qt Community. Perhaps, They also explained WebODF, a Community Keynote on KDE he says, KDE also needs a JavaScript library to add Open Democracy. In the beginning, KDE "Foreign Office" to handle these Document Format (ODF) support to was about software, not alliances. In Q&A for Kevin's talk, websites and mobile or desktop community. Then, software there was a discussion about what applications. WebODF is easy to modules were created and teams makes someone an elder? And, is implement and works with Calligra formed around them. At an earlier KDE a meritocracy? These are Words. We had the opportunity to KDE gathering, Matthias ongoing conversations about how test collaborative editing in Welwarsky said, "KDE is not a the Community can make further OpenODF during the talk. project, it is an ongoing process". progress. They were also OpenODF includes an online The KDE rebranding a few years discussed in some of the BoF collaborative text editor similar to ago came from acknowledging sessions later in the week. Etherpad but better in many ways. that KDE is the community, not the software. Hence, KDE contributors Sunday afternoon brought more After the coffee break, it was time moved from working ON the interesting talks. In their talk for the Student Programs to working "People in KDE: metacontacts for

9 all KDE apps", Martin Klapetek and Grasch in his talk. There is Lydia Pintscher, Kévin Ottens and Vishesh Handa spoke about the considerable differences between Nicolás Alvarez presented the value of multiple contact sources. specific use cases. Yet there must following awards: With Nepomuk, data already on be a goal to focus on or the scope the system can be reused. KPeople of this project is too wide. Peter Best Application: Eike Hein for his is a library that wraps around gave a brief introduction about work on

Best Non-Application: Vishesh Handa for taking over the Nepomuk maintainer hat and rocking at stabilizing the beast

Jury's Award: Timothée Giet for shaping the future and community of Krita

Jury's Award: Kenny Duffus for being the memory and soul of Akademy

The Organization Award went to Dani Gutiérrez and the whole Akademy team for organizing a by Samikshan Bairagya wonderful event. Nepomuk data. It is flexible, app- lication internals. His demo used specific, provides ready-to-use BoFs and more information and invokable actions the Acoustic model from Voxforge (such as a phone call from a (voxforge.org) and language But Akademy did not end on widget). It can include live models from a variety of sources. Sunday evening. After the information, such as when people Speech recognition generally is presentations during the first two are online. not sufficiently robust. There are a days of Akademy, people moved lot of easy opportunities available. into action. Birds of a Feather ThreadWeaver is a programming But, beyond those, there is a lot of sessions (BoFs) and workshops library developed for KDE by hard work to do. The technology provided the opportunity to Mirko Böhm. It provides an easy is interesting and rewarding, the discuss, plan and hack. way for developers to take project could use more people advantage of multi-core who are up to the challenge. There were session on translation processors. In ThreadWeaver, the with seven translators for various workload is divided into individual Milian Wolff spoke about making languages. There is an ongoing jobs, and the relationship between applications run faster, and Kai effort to introduce some common jobs is defined (completion order Koehne presented various tools booking functionality on the and priority). From that available to KDE developers in his translation website. The group information, ThreadWeaver works talk "Qt Quick Tooling". He discussed the proposed 3 month out the most efficient way to encouraged KDE developers to release cycle. The translation team execute jobs. Krita has embrace and extend the tooling wants to be able to do all implemented visual filter previews infrastructure. translations offline; they need using ThreadWeaver to prevent someone to work on this. They GUI lockups. Mirko used several Recognition and Appreciation also talked about finding ways to examples to illustrate the basic communicate more, and proposed At the end of the day, it was time usage patterns: single jobs and that translators just fix the context for the traditional Akademy sequences. for messages (i18nc). closing ceremony. After the "Speech recognition" alone is not sponsor lightning talks, the an application, explained Peter Akademy Awards committee took the stage. Last year's winners

10 In the Promo BoF, the team worked Other BoFs included an session to Summit during the BoF days and on release notes for the 4.11 introduce the Fiduciary Licensing the VLC folks spoke about the releases. The group discussed Agreement (FLA). Matija Šuklje and packages they want in the new various issues with release Armijn Hemel from the FSFE legal release. Contributors to Tomahawk announcements: reaching different team--together with the KDE e.V. and also met at Akademy kinds of people; updating the wiki; Board--answered questions about and worked together, mostly too much or not enough content; the FLA. There were Frameworks hacking and fixing issues difficulty of compiling the release Office Hours, a workshop about related to . notes. One important point is to "Improving KDE personas" with the make developers aware of the goal to create a basic set of QT CONTRIBUTORS SUMMIT need for good information, and personas for the whole of KDE 2013 discussed the possibility of which most KDE applications creating videos and guides on how would be able to use. A group met One Monday and Tuesday of the to create release content material. to talk about the KDE Desktop Akademy week, KDE contributors There was also a PR for FLOSS Human Interface Guidelines (HIG). were joined by a group of Qt projects workshop by professional developers for the annual Qt journalist Jake Edge. There was a Frameworks 5 Contributors Summit (QtCS). Since Communication BoF which tackled there are many strong personal The usability testing BoF took key messages for the Frameworks and technical ties and working place with people who had no 5 and Plasma Workspaces relationships among KDE and Qt knowledge of the apps under test. releases next year, a speech contributors, KDE e.V. hosted the The apps that were reviewed were: engine session, and a mentoring annual work meeting of the Qt Kscreen, Kstars and the session with mentors and students Community during Akademy in NetworkManager plasmoid. The from several mentoring programs: Bilbao. QtCS is an unconference tests involved a task and a series Google Summer of Code, Google and the event depends on the of questions. They provided Code-in, Season of KDE, Summer hands-on approach of its important feedback about of Code in Space and Outreach participants. usability. Two developers and 3 Program for Women. The KDE Edu usability people--Thomas Pfeiffer, team also met as did the Plasma More than a hundred people from Lamarque Souza, Jan Grulich, Active team. There were many the Qt community met to discuss Björn Balazs, Heiko Tietze- the future direction of Qt -brainstormed about how and its various modules to improve the usability of and subsystems. Since the NetworkManager the first release of KDE plasmoid. Jan agreed to Frameworks 5 will be implement the proposed using Qt 5.2, this was a changes. great opportunity to discuss how to bring Qt There was also a conflict and KDE Frameworks resolution BoF. One of the closer together. On main topics was how to Monday night, there was make sure that a joint party to foster leaders/maintainers in the stronger relationships KDE community are between the KDE and the aware that they are Qt communities. leaders, and that they they have power and should do moresessions, by Jerome Leclanche A huge thank you to the their best to keep IRC channels demonstrating the broad range of Akademy organizing team, and mailing lists friendly and applications and topics with the especially to the local team in positive. There were also KDE community. Bilbao under the lead of Dani discussions about difficult Gutiérrez Porset whose tireless situations where easy measures Akademy is not only for KDE code effort and enthusiasm made are not enough and how to deal contributors. The team Akademy 2013 a fantastic event. with them. and VLC hackers also felt at home. There was a Kubuntu Developer

11 KDE E.V. ANNUAL GENERAL took place throughout the year. Agustín Benito's goals for 2013 are Between July 2012 and July 2013, to increase the transparency of the ASSEMBLY 2013 KDE e.V. helped organize and financial reporting and the by Claudia Rauch financially supported 12 of those accuracy of the budgeting. To smaller, focused meetings. The achieve these goals, KDE e.V. is The most important function of largest of those gatherings was now working with a tax consulting KDE e.V. is the annual general the Randa meeting in September firm that specializes in non-profit assembly (AGM) which takes place 2012 where 3 different groups organizations. The treasurer will once a year as part of Akademy. (KDE Education, Multimedia and be working with the newly From the KDE e.V. statutes: “The Accessibility) got together for a founded KDE e.V. Financial general assembly is the highest week. In addition, KDE was present Working Group. decision making organ of the at several conferences and Association and is generally in meetings all over the world, such Next up was the report by the charge of all duties, unless these as the KDE India Meetup, FISL in auditors of accounting—Till Adam Articles of Association have Brazil or the Free Desktop Meeting and Mirko Böhm—who informed assigned specific duties to another in Germany. the members that their audit of organ of the Association.” the accounting documents showed But KDE e.V. does more than that everything was done correctly This year, the KDE e.V. members organize events. Cornelius told the and that the association is in good met on 12 July in Bilbao. First up assembly about the mentoring financial health. They therefore was the report from the KDE e.V. programs that KDE is involved in recommended to the assembly to Board of Directors. Cornelius like Google Summer of Code, grant relief to the Board of their Schumacher, President of the Season of KDE and the Free responsibilities for the fiscal year Association, gave a summary of Software Outreach Program for 2012. This measure passed the activities of the organization Women. The association also owns unanimously. since the last AGM in July 2012. several KDE-related internet The KDE e.V. Board—all domains, and is represented in the To finish, there were the reports by volunteers—is the management KDE Free Qt Foundation by two representatives of the KDE e.V. team of the association, and is KDE e.V. members on its Board. working groups and the KDE e.V. supported by the Business delegates to the KDE Free Qt Manager of KDE e.V. The Board of Plans for the next few months Foundation. Directors is legally responsible for focus on growing the supporting the actions of the organization and membership for KDE e.V. to One of the important purposes of decisions about its budget. The become more independent of the AGM is to vote on new board meets 2 or 3 times a year large donors and corporate members for the board of in person and has bi-weekly sponsors. This is aided by the directors. This year, the term of conference calls to coordinate their implementation of CiviCRM, a Free Sebastian Kügler—long time work. Software tool for contact board member since management. 2006—ended. There were two One of the goals of KDE e.V. is to candidates for the vacant board promote education, exchange of The second report was by Agustín position: Albert Astals Cid and opinions and cooperation between Benito Bethencourt, the treasurer Marta Rybczy ska. Albert users, developers and researchers of KDE e.V. Last year, the board received the majority of the vote of Free Software. This is aided by projected a reduced income for and is now the newest board organizing many events. The the organization and budgeted member of KDE e.V. biggest event each year is conservatively for the second half Akademy, the KDE Community of 2012 and also for 2013. Dario Freddi and John Layt were conference, which took place in However, when presenting the elected as auditors of accounting, Tallinn, Estonia, in 2012 and in annual results for 2012, the income and both Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer Bilbao, Spain in 2013. Akademy is situation on 31 December 2012 and Martin Konold were re-elected central to community building and looked much better than expected. as representatives of KDE e.V. to setting strategy within the KDE The total assets on 31 December the KDE Free Qt Foundation. community. 2012 amounted to € 247,510.90. This was achieved by cutting costs Equally important are the and a positive result from developer/contributor sprints that Akademy 2012.

12 Sysadmin Report

Created 26 subversion accounts Disabled 4 subversion accounts

Created 1 kde.org alias Modified 9 kde.org aliases

Created 1 kde.org mailing-lists: kde-speech

Akademy 2013 Bilbao, the Basque Country – photo by Lamarque Souza

New Members Financial support

KDE e.V. is happy to welcome If your company is interested in providing financial support to the KDE the following new members: community on a continuing basis, please visit the Supporting Members page on the KDE e.V. website, http://ev.kde.org/getinvolved/supporting-members.php - Antonis Tsiapaliokas If you would like to support KDE financially as an individual, please visit the - Dan Vrátil individual supporting membership program site at http://jointhegame.kde.org.

- Giorgos Tsiapaliokas

- Guy Maurel

- Juan Carlos Torres

- Luciano Montanaro KDE E.V. BOARD Report prepared by: - Timothée Giet Cornelius Schumacher - President Carl Symons Claudia Rauch Lydia Pintscher - Vice President Jorge Cacho

Agustín Benito Bethencourt - Treasurer, Vice President Thanks to the other KDE members and supporters who contributed to this report. Pradeepto Bhattacharya - Board Member This report is published by KDE e.V., copyright 2013, and licensed under Albert Astals Cid - Board Member Creative Commons-BY-3.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/)