Stuart Jarvis A troll's eye view

KDE will shortly be releasing versions 4.8 of its workspaces, applications and development platform. So, what’s new? Your KDE team would love to know… Every release, we write the release notes and the Dot articles that tell everyone – you, the press – what we’ve been up to over the past six months. but we don’t have a sixth sense and neither do we have the time to watch everyone in KDE. So, please help us:

• If you’re a KDE developer, let us know what’s new
• If you’re a use of KDE software, let us know what’s new
• If you’re using a 4.8 pre-release, get us some screenshots of cool new features

Simple huh? But how can you do it?

Well, we welcome direct edits at our release note drafting Etherpad. You can type in notes or full text and you don’t even need a KDE account – just go to promo.notes.kde.org/58

If you’re a developer, you should make sure that the 4.8 feature plan is up to date for your code.

If you’re really lazy, just leave a comment here with a link to more info

If you can make screenshots, please use the default wallpaper, styles and fonts. If you can store your screenshot online somewhere, just put a link to it in the Etherpad. If not, you can simply send them to me (find my contact details on the About page.

Help spread the word about our 4.8 releases and be a part of KDE.

I was looking back on this year and thinking about what the real successes have been. There have been many great things, new technology and work behind the scenes to make it all happen.

But perhaps the greatest thing has been the return of the Commit Digest, so I’ll name the Commit Digest team my personal heroes of KDE for 2011. Every week, they let us know what’s going on in this great community of ours. It’s a hell of a lot of work and they deserve a lot of credit.

To be more specific, I glanced back through the Commit Digests and mailing list to see who has been active. I’ve probably missed someone and can only apologise for that, but here are some definite contributors over the past year:

• Alexander van Loon
• Anselmo Melo
• Beat Wolf
• Danny Allen
• Dominik Tritscher
• Frederik Schwarzer
• Gaël Beaudoin
• Mutlu Inek
• Jaka Kranjc
• Marcin Dominiak
• Marco Krohn
• Marta Rybczynska
• Paulo Dias
• Roger Pixley
• Shafqat Bhuiyan
• Test Zy
• Thibaut Gridel
• Tom Vollerthun
• Vladislav Blanton

Thanks to all of you.

Among those, I know Alexander, Danny, Marco, Marta, Roger and Vladislav have been particularly active, also taking care of organising things, writing the Dot summaries and generally making sure it all happens.

I also know that a lot of work goes into every digest and there is always space for more people. So if you want to help, haven’t contributed for a while or can help in other ways please do.

Who are your heroes of KDE?

At the danger of turning this into a dedicated ALERT blog, there’s some more news from the EU funded research project in which KDE is a participant.

ALERT is featured (page 14) in the SOFI newsletter, but there is also a lot of news on other software related projects that are ongoing.

If you’re interested in seeing what’s new in software research in Europe, it’s worth a look.

This is going to be one of those weeks where a lot of my time is spent on trains and planes…

For the first half of this week, I was in Brussels for the first Annual Review of the ALERT project, in which the project partners – including KDE in the shape of yours truly – presented the work done so far to expert reviewers appointed by the European Commission (the project is part funded through the EU Seventh Framework Programme).

The meeting was very informative, as it was the first time I’d seen in one go what everyone has been working on for the past year. ALERT aims to improve bug tracking and collaboration in open source communities and the technical presentations included demos of the technology. At present, a lot of this happens at the command line, but it is already possible to monitor various data resources, including Bugzilla, and get some interesting updates. There are also some good results in indentifying developers and their particular areas of expertise (to suggest to developers for bugs or bugs for developers) and in semi-automated identification of duplicate bugs.

I got back to England last night, had a quick meeting at my university today and then tomorrow I’m off to the KDE e.V. sprint in Berlin. There, we’ll be spending the weekend working on various issues needed to support KDE contributors worldwide, including attracting more people and companies to our Individual and Corporate supporting membership programs.

By the way, if you lack the time to help KDE, but support our objectives (free software – and all the benefits that entails – for everyone) and have the money then why not Join the Game? That’s a serious question by the way – what’s lacking right now that stops you? Leave me a note in the comments.

The ALERT Project is a partly EU funded technology project that aims to improve the ways in whch free software communities track bugs in software, identify trends and issues and find the right person to fix a problem. KDE e.V. is a project partner and will be an end user, providing feedback and advice on the software system during development. To assist with this, Dario Freddi and I are contracted to the project as KDE experts.

It has been a little while since I mentioned ALERT here, although I chatted to some of you about the project at the recent Desktop Summit in Berlin. If you’re wondering what we and the other partners have been up to, take a look at the latest ALERT newsletter. This has news about the software for extracting information from structured (e.g Bugzilla) and unstructured (mailing lists, KDE forum) data sources, software for profiling developers, the potential impact on KDE, news of ALERT’s latest award and a look ahead to the testing phase.

Well worth a read – and of course you can always approach Dario and myself with any questions.