KDE is quite unlike anywhere else I have worked, for fun or profit. Probably the closest analog is my involvement at university with the student newspaper, the Warwick Boar where I started off writing general features and ended up as Science Editor.

The Boar had a few similarities to KDE. It was staffed by volunteers, was successful (we won awards and stuff), diverse and quite large (I don’t know exactly, but well over a hundred contributors). However, unlike KDE, it was hierarchical. At the top was the Editor, who had ultimate power and responsibility. He or she made the call when someone threatened to sue for libel, or when one of the big national newspapers wanted access to one of our sources (it happened). Below the editor, each section had its own head, responsible for organising their team and making sure that their pages got done.

As a writer, you got told what to do and you did it. You could make suggestions and argue, but ultimately if your editor disagreed you could either accept it or go away. As editor, you had to get things done. If none of your writers turned up one week then you had to put the section together yourself and meet the weekly deadline.

Such an approach, with a named person responsible for every aspect of the project and sanctions (like getting sacked) for getting it wrong, meant that the newspaper always arrived on time and was generally of decent quality.

KDE is quite different. We don’t really have a hierarchy. Sure, there are people in each group that are almost defacto leaders – people listen to them and they push things to get them done, but there tends not to be one person whose approval you need to get to do something. There’s also no one to make you do things and no one who will have to sort things out if you screw up. This can be a good or a bad thing.

Costs and benefits of being KDE

Benefits of a hierarchy:

• If a named person is responsible for doing something, generally they do it
• Power lies with experienced people who are less likely to screw up
• People outside the organisation know who they should contact (even if they don’t know a name, they ask for ‘the Science editor’)

Costs of a hierarchy:

• If you are going to be held responsible for finishing something you get involved in, you may be discouraged from getting involved in the first place
• Power lies with experienced people who are less likely to take chances, try new things and make things better
• People outside the organisation are only aware of the leaders and they tend to get the credit (or blame) for the successes and failures of the organisation as a whole – so the people actually doing the work can feel that success or failure will have little impact on them personally

Herding Cats

Going back to my experience with the Boar and contrasting it with being an editor on the Dot: on the Dot we work by consensus and a few rules that we set. That sometimes means we’re a little slow to get things done because there’s no one person who has to do it. If everyone is busy then it doesn’t get done. However, it also means there are more checks and balances in place – I made a couple of major screw ups while working as an editor on the Boar because I didn’t have to consult other people, but on the Dot we rarely make really big mistakes that don’t get spotted before publication.

There’s also the question of time as a volunteer. If being involved in the Dot meant committing to getting things published within set deadlines and taking sole responsibility for that then I would have to resign tomorrow. We all have real jobs and other things to do and simply cannot make those kinds of commitments.

Conclusions

For me, KDE is in some ways flawed by its freedom – the fact that we can all, in theory, wander round doing whatever we want. Looking at it that way, it’s amazing we ever get anything worthwhile done. But in practice, the bonds withing teams and the consensus that we build mean that generally we do things pretty well. A more rigid structure would kill a lot of that and I think we would have a lot less people involved because it would be less fun and would require commitments that people simply cannot make.

Some more experienced gearheads sum up getting things done in KDE with the simple phrase of “herding cats“. Well to all our cat herders out there: thanks. You do a great job.

• Krita. I had picked up “critter” as the pronunciation here and used it when introducing Lukas’s talk. However, he used “Kree-ta”, I think, so I guess that’s right
• Akonadi. Seems to be “ack-on-aah-dee”. I had always imagined the last bit rhymed with “die”
• Nepomuk. The “nep” but rhymes with “sep” in September, “o” rhymes with the “o” in FOSS and the last bit seems to vary between an “uck” and “ook” sound

There are a few that have some interesting splits:

• GNOME. This one fascinates me for its difference between native and non-native English speakers. In English of course we have gnomes pronounced without sounding the “g” and most native English speakers seem to say GNOME the same way with a silent “G”. Most people who don’t have English as a first language seem to sound out the “G” as “guh-nome”
• GNU. For me, this has always had the “G” sound included: “guh-noo”, but I also met some people who say “noo”, which confused me at first. It is easy to do
• openSUSE. This still splits people between the (original and best?) “open-soo-suh”, “open-soose” (which rhymes with “loose”) and “open-soo-zee”. At least everyone seems to agree on how to say “open”.
• Plasma. Even this has some subtle variations between a soft and harder (more like “z”) sound for the “s” and which syllable carries the stress

There are a few too that no one seems to know how to say:

• KRandRTray. Is it “kay-ah-and-ah-tray”? Is it “krand-ah-tray”? Or is it just that handy thing that does monitor stuff?
• Kopete. Maybe one of the developers knows? I heard “koh-pet”, “koh-peet”, “koh-pet-a” and maybe a few others too

And another that came up due to some other event that was on at the same time as Akademy:

• Uruguay. I know I say it wrong, I’m British after all and we do funny things with our “u”s, pretending we can use them like the “y” in “year”.

So this is more about some of the things I’ve noticed about our community at Akademy: goals and consensus.

Goals

We have some massive tasks to do, particularly in promo. Or may be not even particularly in promo, but that’s the bit I’m aware of.

Some of these tasks will take years (having a sane, accepted brand structure for example) and many of them have already taken years (having a sane, accepted brand structure for example). The things that have been achieved since I’ve been watching KDE promo are those things with very well defined goals that are achievable in the short term. They don’t take us all the way to where we want to be, but they get done and make things better, even if not yet perfect.

These are things like making some general purpose leaflets, making the branding improvements, making the software labels, making a KDE booklet (almost done now). These are part of much bigger goals that are not done yet, but as tasks that, ultimately, could be implemented by a few people in a few months they looked achievable and were achieved.

Fluffy, as presented by Frederik - a highlight of the conference

Longer, larger plans cannot be done in one go in an organisation like ours. There are many subdomains on kde.org that are unmaintained as they were just too large as projects. A full time employee might have done them in months, for a volunteer it is a time commitment that leads to a distant in invisible future – with a good chance that when it is finally delivered it has been superseded by something else.

We are still guilty at times of getting bogged down in big discussions when what we need to do is ‘just do’, but that is getting better. It is preferable to paint the bike shed in a bright green colour that not everyone likes than not to paint it at all and let it rust away.

Consensus

Something that Aaron mentioned in his keynote speech and very relevant to the Dot and promo teams is the issue of consensus. We are different people with different priorities and different ways of doing things. So, of course, we don’t agree on everything. However, one of the things that really impresses me about KDE promo (and KDE in general nowadays) is the ability of people to express opposing views but then support the consensus decision and work to make it a success, even if they believe it is the wrong way to do things.

As with setting goals, working together on the second best solution (from your point of view) makes more sense than working on nothing at all until everyone agrees. That way, no one ever works on anything.

Akademy

Well ok, just a little bit about Akademy. Apart from the things that everyone else has mentioned it has been fascinating meeting people and putting comparing personalities on and offline.

It’s also been great to bump into quite a few people currently based in the UK and Ireland. I’ve always had the sense that the UK was pretty dead for KDE, apart from a few of the well known people, but there are far more of us than I thought.

I'm going to Akademy

I’ll be doing a few things while I’m there, so here is a bit of shameless self-promotion:

• KDE Software for Scientists (lightning talk)
• Beyond Our Comfort Zone: Spreading KDE Software to Non-Free Platforms
• KDE Software for Scientists (BoF with Luca Beltrame)

There are many fascinating things going on and I’m particularly looking forward to learning more about Nepomuk, community building and the Plasma Media Center project. Well, actually there’s far more than that. I’d particularly like to go to Inge’s KOffice talk too but have unavoidable commitments elsewhere – I do have to turn up for my own talk, right?

Other than that, I’d like to sneak off and see at least a little bit of the football in some of the evenings, even though England’s chances of winning this year have suffered a minor setback (very unlikely -> impossible). Also, if someone local (or someone with luggage space) can bring a ball along perhaps we can sort out some jumpers for goalposts style KDE football action?

Other than that, there’s a lot of serious work to be done. Many of us will be trying to give those of you who can’t attend a taster of the action through regular blogging and the promo team will, I’m sure, do their best to make us Dot editors collapse from exhaustion.

Oh and thanks very much to KDE e.V. for assisting with my travel expenses – which by extensions means thanks to the companies and individuals who have chosen to Join the Game and support KDE.

There’s far too much for a Dot article, but I’m trying to sift some general trends and a few quotes out of the mass of information and am writing the article at the moment.

The level of interest has taken both Luca and me by surprise (in a good way) and the information you gave us is very useful in helping us to plan the next steps.

Initially, I’ll be talking about this at Akademy and it also feeds in to Luca’s BoF. However, we are also setting up another quick session to try and get interested people together and share a few ideas. If you can, please come along to the KDE Science BoF on Wednesday at 1030.

If you can’t make it, don’t worry, we’ll be sharing our initial thoughts and there will be plenty of chance to give feedback and get involved as we try and develop this. All the comments on my last post will be considered and please feel free to add any further thoughts below or contact me via the About page.

KDE: a global community

Well, KDE “is an international technology team” – it says so on the website We localise our software and being part of KDE is a great way to meet and mix with people of other cultures. Within Europe and North America, even language barriers are not too much of an issue – luckily most people seem to speak English and so we’re pretty good at picking up news from across Europe, the US and Canada.

But there’s a lot more to KDE than that.

We have vibrant communities in Brazil and some great work coming out of India (just check our list of GSoC participants). We’re attending events in Africa. We have hackers in Iran. We have… well, I get the sense I’m hugely ignorant about what we really have. Do we report enough on what is going on around the world?

It is great that we have regional communities. It is far better to be invited in to KDE by someone who understands your culture and speaks your language. However, the KDE website and the Dot should be the central home for all of KDE – www.kde.org is afterall probably the first place that many people find.

The Dot features application releases (doing ok there), interviews (quite euro/North America-centric) and reports on events that we attend (very Euro/North America-centric).

What can we do to make better communication between our teams and to make the Dot better reflect the activities of our worldwide community?

We have a few thoughts and we’d like to invite you to attend our Akademy Marketing team BoF on Tuesday at 1600 to give us your ideas too.

If you can’t make it to Akademy or the Marketing BoF then please feel free to add thoughts here and let us know what we can do or what you can do. Join kde-promo@kde.org or contact one of us directly (you can find my details on the About page here).

Do you use KDE software?

Do you use KDE software for your science?

Gratuitous picture of Einstein

Update: Well, actually, I have plenty of answers now Thanks very much. I don’t need any more responses, but if you’d like to let me know what you think then by all means go ahead (probably won’t make the article though).

There are (I sense) a few scientists in KDE land and some of us (Luca and myself at least) are beginning to ponder how we can achieve world domination for KDE through the sciences.

We have some pretty cool sciencey apps already:

• Kile (LaTeX)
• Cantor (young, but promising)
• KBibTeX (I crave a Platform 4 port)
• LabPlot (Platform 4 port in progress)
• Kalzium
• Kalgebra
• KStars
• Marble
• Rocs
• KmPlot
• Step

We also have external projects such as SciDAVis that are working with KDE projects (LabPlot in that case).

So, if you can spare some time for me, here’s a mini open interview for you:
(Edit: made it an ordered list for easier answering and added questions 9 and 10 from Luca)

1. Who are you and what field to you work in? (Add where and for whom if you’re happy to do so)
2. What KDE software do you use in general?
3. What KDE software do you use specifically for science?
4. Were you aware of all the applications I listed above?
5. If not, are there any you weren’t aware of that could be relevant to you?
6. What is missing among KDE software for you?
7. Would you be interested in a dedicated mailing list/website area for KDE software for scientists?
8. What else would you like to tell me?
9. If you developed scientific software/algorithms, did you ever consider KDE users/platform as a target? If not, why?
10. Did KDE software help you with your research in general? For example, do Kontact or Plasma widgets help keep things orrganised?

I’d like to make you comments up in to some kind of Dot article – they may be edited and it is likely that not everything will be used. You can either drop a comment using the form here or mail me directly at myfirstname.mylastname at gmail.com (if that isn’t obvious then go to the about page and solve a captcha to reveal my email address). If you use the comment form then please use your genuine email address (it is never disclosed) if you’d be willing for me to come back with some follow-up questions.

Also, if you’re making it to Akademy, there are at least a couple of KDE-science things that you can attend: Luca’s BoF at 1500 on Tuesday (see the wiki page) and my lightning talk at 1030 on Sunday.

Competition

PowerPoint is ok-ish but requires using Windows and doesn’t save in an open format (ODP or PDF). OpenOffice Impress – well, it doesn’t impress. I find the interface clunky and counter-intuitive, resizing images is fiddly, mysterious ugly lines appear around graphics on some machines on which I need to run it and, lacking the network transparency of a KDE app, I can’t work on remote documents via fish, but have to make a local copy (it even has the cheek to claim that opening a remote document is not possible on Linux).

KPresenter 2.2.0

I already had a play with KOffice 2.0 when it came out, but – as the KOffice team made clear at the time – that was really just a technology preview and not stable or featureful enough for day to day use. KOffice 2.1 was also advertised as not ready for general use, but I decided to give it a go and found KWord 2.1 perfectly adequate for the simple tasks I threw at it (I use LaTeX for big docs). I also had a bit of a play with KPresenter 2.1 and was quite impressed, but the only presentation I needed to work on was an adaptation of an older one from OpenOffice Impress that didn’t import well into KPresenter so I stuck with Impress.

This time, however, I decided to give KPresenter a go. So, a few hours later (spread over several days) I have a shiny, new, graphics-heavy presentation produced in KPresenter.

Quick verdict

Is KPresenter ready? Well I didn’t manage to crash it (and I normally manage to crash presentation apps) and found only a few irritations. For my personal use case, at present, there’s nothing better.

Nice points

Configurability and convenience

KPresenter, like all the KOffice apps has a highly configurable interface so that I was able to move tools around to exactly where I found them most convenient. It even shows and hides toolboxes depending on whether you’re moving shapes around or editing texts – which is nice to keep the interface relevant although having things disappear is a bit disconcerting to start with.

Shapes in KPresenter

Shapes

Like the rest of KOffice, shapes are the tool used to add images, text boxes and – well – everything. But it’s in KPresenter that they really seem to shine. Images in particular are easily placed, resized and bordered without right-clicking or drilling down through multiple menus. Items can be grouped and raised and lowered easily and I did a lot of drawing right in the app itself.

There’s also a nice set of default shapes to use, including the ubiquitous ‘gearhead’ figures and speech bubbles that are themselves easily configurable.

Beauty

Being Oxygen, the user interface just looks so much nicer than either Impress or KPresenter 1.6

Some quibbles

Colour selection

The colour selector has a checkbox (on by default?) that hides colours with poor contrast. I didn’t notice this and since it hid black I accidentally made a number of components dark brown instead, something I had to fix later. Personally, I’d rather have the full choice of colours all the time, but it is easy to set it to your personal preference.

PDF export doesn't match page to slide by default

PDF export

KPresenter has a simple to use PDF export function, simply choose it from the file menu and choose a file name. However, the default settings produce a PDF with portrait pages with the landscape slide centred on the page with big margins – not very useful if you want to produce a PDF to use in the presentation (for example if the presentation PC might not have KPresenter on it).

You can however work around this by instead choosing to print the document to PDF and manually setting up a page with the correct aspect ratio and no margins – it’s not difficult, just takes a bit longer.

And yes, there’s a bug report.

Lists

Bulleted lists are not quite right yet – if you use a large font then the decoration is small and not vertically centred (bug report).

Conclusion

Overall, on the basis of my experience with KPresenter – and a brief play with KWord and KSpread – I think KOffice 2.2 is definitely worth a look and, yes, it is ready for real work. Even with the niggles outlined above, KPresenter will now be my application of choice for preparing presentations – I find it the most comfortable application to use for this task on any platform. Of course, depending on your particular needs, your views may differ.

KOffice is very exciting right now. It has always been – for me – the nicest office suite to actually use, but in the old days it was held back by a lack of some advanced features, a file format that no one else used and limited import and export capabilities. Now that it has standardised on OpenDocument, is able to import proprietary formats and seems to be developing quickly the future looks bright.

A few points:

• The final designs are chosen by four panel judges from the KDE Promotion team and you, via the forum poll
• The forum poll results will be normalised to a scale of 0-10 in common with the panel judges’ votes – so each design will end up with an overall score out of 50
• The panel judges’ votes are in and are very close, so your votes do matter
• There are eleven entries. For a while at the weekend the default settings for a few users meant that only nine showed on the first page, with the final two on a second page, but this is fixed now so all are on one page (unless you explicitly set your display preferences to be different)
• The poll will be open until 13 June

If you haven’t yet submitted your design for a KDE software label then you have just over a week (until 31 May) to do so.

There have been some great additions and refinements in the last few weeks and picking the best is going to be a difficult task. But we don’t mind if you make it still harder