COMMUNITY REPORT 4RD QUARTER 2012 | ISSUE 24 WELCOME MESSAGE Dear members, community feeling in many in Spain. They will help make places on a smaller scale. Akademy 2013 happen in Bilbao, KDE is a community—an amazing Spain. We hope to see more of one—made up of dedicated KDE e.V. plays a vital role in these groups grow in the future, people from all around the world. making this happen through as they are already in India and It is always a pleasure for me to sprints, conferences and other Brazil. travel near and far and know for get-togethers. In this report, you sure that I'll be able to meet can read about what happened in Lydia Pintscher fellow contributors. My latest the last quarter of 2012. In for the KDE e.V. Board of Directors experience was traveling to India addition, many more sponsored for FOSS.in and meeting so many activities happen throughout the enthusiastic fellow contributors. year. But growing this community Each and every one of us has is too big a task for KDE e.V. had a part in making KDE what it alone. There are local groups who is today and what it will become help move KDE forward locally, tomorrow. Meeting each other in who help run events, who talk to person is immensely important people, who show up at trade- for a community like ours. As shows and much more. In this large and diverse as we are, one report we highlight KDE EspaÑa, can no longer know everyone, the first official organization to and it is crucial to build represent KDE locally, in this case CONTENTS Welcome Message ................................................................................ 1 Meet KDE EspaÑa ..................................................................................... 2 Supported member activities ............................................................. 3 – 5 Trade Shows and Community Events ................................................ 6 – 8 New Members, Financial Report and KDE e.V. Board .................. 9 MEET KDE ESPAÑA Aleix Pol i GonzÀlez KDE EspaÑa is a Spanish registered association that Even though we recognized the opportunity in 2006, officially represents the KDE community in legal we did not start acting on it seriously until 2008 when matters in Spain. The organization was registered in we gathered at a Free Software party to draft the 2009. During Akademy 2010, KDE e.V. and KDE statutes of the association (thanks to Debian EspaÑa EspaÑa board members signed an agreement making for the inspiration). We then started working through KDE EspaÑa an official representative of KDE e.V. the regulatory bureaucracy. The Association was registered officially in the third quarter of 2009. KDE EspaÑa includes people of different backgrounds: developers, translators, promoters, and other KDE The lack of a legal entity did not stop us from enthusiasts. The current board members are: organizing Akademy-es, which we did in collaboration with various organizations like Hispalinux and GPUL President: Aleix Pol i GonzÀlez (Grupo de Programadores e Usuarios de Linux). Even after the Association was official, we still sought Vice-president: Alejandro Fiestas Olivares partnerships with other groups when organizing Treasurer: JosÉ MillÁn Soto Akademy-es to build on synergies. We have partnered SecretarÍa: Eduardo Robles Elvira with Itsas (a free software advocacy group at EHU, the Spokesperson: Daniel GutiÉrrez Porset University of the Basque Country) and CENATIC (Centro Nacional de Referencia de AplicaciÓn de las TecnologÍas de la InformaciÓn y la ComunicaciÓn) for 2010 and 2012. Itsas is now helping to organize Akademy 2013 for the global KDE Community. Going local, worldwide KDE EspaÑa is about developing roots for KDE and Free Software in Spain. This might sound strange, considering that KDE is a worldwide community. But KDE EspaÑa is not about the territory. It is about getting closer to people by talking to them in their Photo courtesy of kde-espana.es language and working together hand in hand. This has materialized in many different ways, enabling What do we do some people to join the KDE community. Baltasar is a good example. He is a teacher who blogs about KDE The main focus of KDE EspaÑa is the yearly in Spanish with great impact Akademy-es event that gathers contributors and users (http://www.kdeblog.com) and who has collaborated from all over the country for 3 days. We have been with KDE Edu on many occasions. We want to inspire celebrating the event in one way or another since other communities all over the world to develop local 2006; it was one of the reasons the association was KDE roots. founded. In addition to producing Akademy-es, we organize A bit of history "Release Parties" for each of the major KDE releases. We also travel to various cities in Spain to give talks The idea of KDE EspaÑa first surfaced when a few of and workshops at other Free Software events. KDE-es us organized Akademy-es 2006. The first related e- members help to organize KDE sprints taking place in mail to a larger group of people was sent in April Spain, such as the KDE Next Iteration sprint in 2012 or 2008, proposing the idea of a formal association. the KDE Edu sprint in Bilbao in 2011. Organizing and hosting events is great, but they involve dealing with money. We realized that having a KDE EspaÑa is proof that narrowing in on one aspect legal entity for financial matters would work better of a huge project can open many interesting than how we had been doing things. This is similar to possibilities. the way KDE e.V. was founded. 2 SUPPORTED MEMBER ACTIVITIES looking into different areas that brought you Quanta+, fought Developer would potentially be affected and various email filtering issues. All then began investigating and by himself. With one hand tied to Sprints implementing various his back. Victoriously! improvements. KDE PIM SPRINT Sources close to various email Thinking big filtering issues report that there BERLIN, GERMANY are discussions within the group to October 2012 Milian Wolff, for example - famous retire from the active fighting for his work on KDevelop- took on scene and move on to consulting. Kevin Krammer the task of improving the runtime We shall see! memory consumption of KMail Supported by KDE e.V. and KDAB, itself, i.e. the actual end user Teaching, Learning and a group of enthusiastic KDE PIM application. Most developers Research (Personal Information confronted with that task would Management) contributors run and hide. Milian, however, is An important aspect of any KDE gathered on Friday, October 12th KDAB's master of memory sprint, independent of the topic of in KDAB's Berlin offices and profiling and author of the Massif interest or any strong focus area, worked hard over a weekend to Visualizer. There was a distinct air is spreading knowledge! Several improve KDE PIM applications and of defiance in the air. people new to KDE PIM had the their underlying infrastructure. opportunity to learn about the At the other end of the process, inner workings of KDE PIM Even though it doesn't have such a where emails are fetched from technologies, from design long history as the annual KDE various backends, several people considerations (during an PIM meeting in OsnabrÜck at the worked hard on speed, parallelism introduction to KDE PIM beginning of each year, a second and timely progress reporting. components) to implementation PIM sprint around One team, consisting of Alex hints and best practices. Naturally, October/November is starting to Fiestas of Solid and BlueDevil those who currently have this become a tradition of its own. fame, and Volker Krause, a.k.a. knowledge welcome these Similar to last year and in contrast The Guru, worked on a new way sessions as a means to reflect on to the OsnabrÜck meetings - to speed up the initial things, gather input from new which usually focuses on synchronization with IMAP servers. points of view and identify areas discussing ideas and planning - They referred to this as "The with missing or outdated this year's October sprint again Spanish Sync", which is neither a documentation. concentrated on improvements to reference to the Spanish existing features. Inquisition, nor any hint Sprinting hard whatsoever of Bob's identity. Emails, lots of them Within such an environment, Somewhere along the processing thriving on the free flow of One of the guys at the sprint -let's chain, Andras Mantia, the guy who information, where people with call him Bob for privacy- not only has tons of email, he also likes having many folders, organizing several hundred thousand messages! Bob expects KMail and all involved background components to be able to deal with his situation. He actually expects them to work really well. And rightfully so! Naturally a challenge like that could not go unanswered for long at the sprint. So soon after Bob's arrival, several people started Photo courtesy of Martin Klapetek 3 expert knowledge in lots of areas During the sprint Alex and Martin, What's new in Kate are readily available, new use who are part of a Behind the cases being brainstormed, Scenes of KDE effort called KDE The developers worked hard to prototypes being shown off and TeaTime sat down with Kevin make Kate, KDE's Advanced Text world domination plans being Krammer and Volker Krause, and Editor, an even more pleasant refined, some minds are tempted talked about KDAB, KDE PIM, experience. There were about 400 to explore uncharted territory. Akonadi and other things. You can commits in Kate's source code in watch the video at just this week, ranging from major Kevin Krammer—famous bridge http://www.youtube.com/user/kdet changes to small details such as builder and chocolate eatime.