Stuart Jarvis A troll's eye view

Next week, I’ll be heading off to the KDE Web World Sprint to represent the KDE Promotion Team.

Web, by Curt Smith

We had a combined sprint back in 2009 when the current version of the main KDE website was designed in consultation between the two teams and KDE’s artists. The result was a site that much improved on what we had before, but there is still more to be done.

The last few years have also seen the growth and improvement of KDE’s wikis, from the phenonmenal UserBase that should be the first stop for any user of KDE software experiencing difficulties to TechBase and our Community Wiki. However, these could integrate better with one another and with the main website and – importantly – all look like they belong together.

The Web Team comprises many of KDE’s unsung heroes, so in addition to building links between them and the Promotion Team, I’ll also take the opportunity to blog about the cool things they are working on and get some interviews done to raise the profile of their work a bit. Like many (all?) teams in KDE, they need more help to progress at an even faster pace and to help us all get the most out of *.kde.org. So if you’re interested, keep an eye on the Planet and the Dot for more information

Over at the Blue Mint, KDE contributor James Cain is asking for help in collating information on enterprises (including non-profits) using KDE software. He aims to gather material to relaunch our outdated enterprise site with current information showing how KDE software can help businesses and other organisations give their staff better software, save money and take control of their IT infrastructure.

So please, head over to the Blue Mint and help if you can.

ALERT Newsletter

The ALERT Project, as already explained, aims to improve bug tracking and resolution in free software communities. KDE is participating as a project partner by providing expertise on how free software communities work and by providing testing and feedback for the ALERT software.

Newsletter highlights include accounts of free software conferences visited by the team and a summary of the results from a survey carried out that looked at the practices of bug tracking and resolution in free software communities.

The project team has recently released its first newsletter which provides details of work done so far and ways to follow the project.

The project has also released a leaftlet that provides general background information.

The KDE Promotion Team Sprint ended yesterday, in a pub in Southampton.

Over three days, we tackled such issues as improving the Join the Game website, had a discussion with some of the GNOME guys about promotion at and before the Desktop Summit, reviewed the KDE website itself and worked on cleaning up the Promotion Team wiki to make it more useful for new and existing contributors and started work on a glossary of KDE terms. As usual, the sprint is not just about completing things, but getting people together to agree future directions and many of these projects are ongoing.

The sprint also gave us the opportunity to all meet in person, making it the first KDE sprint for Damien Tardy-Panis and Lukas Dzikaras. It was also the first time we had managed to get Leinir and Agustín and Pau at a promotion team sprint and we called upon their experience from other teams in KDE many times. Above all, we got to know one another better, which always helps future collaboration. Of course, there were many other promotion team members who could not attend, but we had discussions on IRC and managed to get all the Dot editors together to discuss the state of the Dot. You will see few changes there in due course.

Overall, it was a busy, but invigorating weekend. It was great to have such an event in the UK and show a few of my KDE friends a bit of Southampton. We are also very grateful to Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science for not only hosting the sprint but also giving us some very nice lunches each day – with particular thanks to Joyce Lewis of ECS for making all the arrangements. It was great to chat with a few people from the department about our software and our community. An extended fire alarm on Sunday that saw us eventually decamp to a local pub only served to give us a pleasant break sitting outside in the sunshine (it is always sunny in Southampton, whatever the other attendees may tell you).

The KDE Promo Sprint now has it’s own logo, courtesy of the SERPENT Project (which Southampton University is involved in through the National Oceanography Centre).

So, here it is – the rather cute piglet squid:

Image © courtesy of the SERPENT project. www.serpentproject.com

Otherwise, we’re enjoying the Southampton sunshine, have settled on our agenda and are getting stuck into work on KDE’s Join the Game campaign.