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COMMUNITY REPORT 1ST QUARTER 2013 | ISSUE 25 WELCOME MESSAGE The first quarter is always a time of with the Qt community and will hold how we will approach them. We preparation for us. With Akademy as the Qt Contributors Summit together worked on publishing more our central community event in with Akademy. This is a unique information about KDE e.V. and the summer, there are a lot of things opportunity to get Qt and KDE board to make our work more which need to be put into place to contributors together and discuss and transparent. You will hear more about make this event the energetic place work on common ground. KDE all this over the course of the year. where people come together from all wouldn't be here without Qt, and Qt over the world to work on KDE and wouldn't be what it is today without There were also some fantastic its various projects. This special KDE. Maintaining these common activities this quarter. For example, feeling of getting together, meeting roots and nurturing our communities there was the meetup of our old and new friends, and feeling the and what we can do together is one awesome Indian community, and the inspiring vibe of the community, the of the cornerstones of our future. PIM and Calligra communites had momentum which drives free This joint meeting also takes their annual sprints. Read more about software, this needs a carefully preparation. all this in this quarterly report. prepared environment. This year Akademy is taking place in Bilbao. There are many more things which We are looking forward to the We have an excellent team there need preparation; we had an coming quarters of 2013 and the which does magic to provide this extended board meeting in March to exciting things they will bring for KDE. environment, together with all the work on some of these topics. Be prepared. other community members who take Extended means that the board on the task of organizing Akademy. invited a number of other members to work on specific topics. We kicked Cornelius Schumacher This year we have a special setup for off the Financial Working Group, for the KDE e.V. Board of Directors Akademy, because we joined forces discussed fund-raising activities and CONTENTS Welcome Message ................................................................................ 1 Featured article: KDE India ....................................................................... 2 Supported member activities ............................................................. 3 – 4 Developer Sprints ......................................................................... 4 – 6 Trade Shows and Community Events ................................................ 6 – 8 New Members, Financial Report and KDE e.V. Board .................. 9 Featured article KDE INDIA Pradeepto Bhattacharya KDE India is a purely volunteer effort by a group of volunteered to design it and Sirtaj whose company contributors based in India. sponsored the printing costs, we could print and ship the booklet. The KDE booklet travelled far and wide to A small bit of history. Indian involvement in The KDE Asia, Europe, North America and Africa. Thank you Project is as old as the Project itself. Sirtaj Singh Kang, Ade for being the awesomest messenger ever. We are who was a student based in Australia, was one of the proud that the booklet was the inspiration for the first contributors to KDE. After returning to India, Sirtaj even-more-awesome official KDE Booklet. went around the country spreading the word of KDE by speaking at various events. During FOSS.IN/2005, This was when I set out to fulfill my long cherished Sirtaj along with Till Adam, a core KDE PIM hacker, dream of having a KDE event in India (ok to be and a group of individuals came together to form an honest, I wanted to organize Akademy in India, but I informal group called “KDE India”. On 2nd December knew it was probably not economically feasible ). 2005, in a Birds of a Feather session at FOSS.IN/2005, Sometime in late 2010, I believed that it was the right it was decided to create a mailing list, an IRC channel time to go ahead and execute the plans to fulfill the and a website for Indian contributors. Till got all the dream. I spoke to a few people and then finally the infrastructure issues sorted out by talking to the KDE KDE e.V Board who extended their full support. So Sysadmin team. Soon we had our own mailing list, with a bunch of folks none of whom had ever IRC channel and temporary website (in.kde.org) since organized a conference, we started organizing one. the kde.in domain was not available. Later the KDE We learned the ropes as we moved ahead, secured e.V. Board kindly bought the domain and still owns it. sponsorships, convinced speakers to come to India, made it happen! “conf.kde.in” took place between This is how things started moving. I started going to March 9th and March 13th 2011. Earlier this year, a various colleges and FOSS events to speak about The team led by Yash Shah organized the KDE Meetup in KDE Project (as it was known then). Between 2006 Gujarat. and 2010, I pretty much went to every FOSS event in India I could afford or was invited to. I remember Going forward, we plan to register KDE India as a February of 2009 when I was away from home every non-profit society according to Indian laws. That weekend speaking about KDE at a different city in would give us some legal standing here and would India.We got excellent support from FOSS.IN also help to secure sponsorship for events. The organizers, where we have organized a KDE mini- number of KDE contributors has been increasing conference pretty much every year since 2007. Other slowly every year thanks to Google Summer of Code FOSS events also supported us. A bunch of current (GSoC) and Season of KDE (SoK). It is really Indian contributors met us first at one of these events. heartening to see that many of these students still We were fortunate that the KDE e.V Board sponsored contribute after their internship is over. My hope and one or two KDE developers to travel to India to speak commitment is that we can build up a self-sustaining at these conferences. Eventually we reached a critical system here in India so that these KDE contributors mass of contributors, if you can call it that. Programs can continue to work on their projects even after they like Google Summer of Code and Season of KDE saw leave college or university. It would be awesome to good and healthy participation from India. Many of have more local KDE events during the year and one the new contributors stay past their internships. big event each year. Akarsh, Shantanu, Vishesh, Sinny, Rohan have all stayed for good. It was really great to have a full An article on KDE India can never be done without house at the KDE booth at events. thanking people who have stood by us since we came into existence. The KDE e.V. Board, Sirtaj Singh During each of these events we did something Kang, Till Adam, Atul Chitnis (RIP), Swati Sani (Sanisoft), different and stretched our limits. One example was FOSS.IN, Prashanth Udupa (VCreate Logic), Rajeev getting the “KDE Booklet” done. It was a super effort Sebastian, Madhusudhan C.S., Santosh Vattam, by the team. My initial idea was to make a bunch of Krishna Bharadwaj, Aditya Kavoor, Kamleshwar simple flyers. But with the amount of content the Morjal, Supreeth Vattam, Abhishek Patil and many team built up, it soon became a full 32 page color others. Thank you all. booklet. Thanks to Lakshya Srivastava who 2 SUPPORTED MEMBER ACTIVITIES KDE E.V. BOARD MEETING also address users and people ensure the fiscal side of e.V. is who are interested in KDE not only sound beyond the sanity checking BERLIN, GERMANY because of the software, but also done by the auditors once a year. 23-24 Mar 2013 because by supporting KDE they This involves structuring the way are contributing to the public good expenses and income are tracked Apart from bi-weekly conference by supporting Free Software and among other things. Guidance and calls, the KDE e.V. board of Free Culture. oversight remains with the directors usually meets in person treasurer. 2-3 times per year. The most For specific activities KDE e.V. is recent meeting took place in Berlin planning to do focused In this first meeting, the working on the weekend of March 23-24. sponsorship drives like the one for group members focussed on The meeting was hosted at the the Randa sprint in Summer 2012. creating an improved cost code Wikimedia Germany office. The structure. Currently cost codes are goal of the meeting was to follow To professionalize our fund-raising already in use, but the categories up on the plans that were made at the plan is to work with other are too broad and poorly the last board meeting in organizations and consultants from separated from the account November 2012, and get work the non-profit space to improve structure. The goal is to have done on various items. our tool infrastructure and to build every invoice and spending up knowledge and skills in general associated with a cost center. To accomplish that we held the fund-raising. These cost centers all have meeting as an extended board budgets associated, allowing the meeting inviting individual The group also discussed concrete board and the working group members of the community in actions and next steps. It was members to keep an overview of order to share the workload, decided to implement CiviCRM as whether money is spent as involve the membership, and a tool for managing the budgeted and to notice when promote a scalable way of running relationships with donors and budgets are in danger of being KDE e.V.'s business.

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