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that leads to a distant in invisible future – with a good chance that when it is finally delivered it has been superseded by something else.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.

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

We’ve already got some excellent ideas on the wiki and there will be a Dot article quite soon with one last call for artwork and setting out the process for choosing the best. In the meantime, it’s not too late to add your design.

If you submitted a design already, then hopefully you got a message from me thanking you and providing some additional guidance – in particular we’d like some horizontal web-banner like variations. If you are the Ivan who submitted an idea or you know who he is please get in touch (drop a comment here is fine or you can find my email address on the About page here). If you’re about to submit a design please give us a way of contacting you.

Well here it is: If you used to use “KDE” don’t just replace it with “KDE SC”

At least, not always… I’ve noticed a few people – and even your KDE Promo team is not immune from this – apparently being a little confused about what terms to use. People are trying to be good and not use “KDE” alone but in some instances this leads to a little overuse of KDE SC when that’s not really what is meant.

Be Happy, by Ana Cotta (CC-by)

We want KDE SC to be usefull for everyone in the world. So, do our icons and our terms work for everyone in the world?

So, what’s wrong with that? Not necessarily anything. The question is, does he really mean we want only the SC to be useful for everyone in the world? We’ll never do a usability survey for Amarok icons? So perhaps the better term would be “KDE software” rather than “KDE SC”.

Björn’s post is a case in point because the error (if any) is very small and subtle, but there are a few other examples I’ve seen that do appear to show more confusion. I won’t pick on anyone here, but here are a few examples of sentences using old and new terminologies to show that we don’t want to just replace “KDE” with “KDE SC”:

Old: “I use KDE”
New: “I use KDE software” or “I use KDE SC (4.4)” or “I use KDE Plasma Desktop (4.4)”

Use whichever one you really mean.

Old: “KDE is great – just look at how cool Digikam is”
New: “KDE software is great – just look at how cool digiKam is” or “KDE (community) is great – they made digiKam”

Just think – are you talking about the community or the software?

Old: “KDE is the best, it has Kontact, cool widgets and desktop effects”
New: “KDE software is the best – for example Kontact, the Plasma Desktop widgets and desktop effects” or “Plasma Desktop is the best – you have all those cool widgets and desktop effects” or “KDE Software Compilation is the best – it comes with all the Plasma Desktop widgets and effects and great apps like Kontact”

Old: “I want to make an app, should I use KDE or Gnome or plain Qt?”
New: “I want to make an app, should I use the KDE Platform, or Gnome or plain Qt?”

Old: “KDE 4 sucks and I’m switching to Gnome until there’s a KDE 4 K3B”
New: “KDE SC 4 sucks, I can’t even get a KDE Platform 4 version of K3B to fit in with it, Gnome forever” or “KDE Platform 4 sucks, no K3B yet, Vista for me” or “Plasma Desktop 4 sucks, there isn’t even a complementary version of K3B. I’m going back to CDE.”

See, you can even use the right terms when trolling

Old: “Nepomuk is one of the most exciting developments in KDE 4″
New ” Nepomuk is one of the most exciting parts of the KDE Platform 4″ or “Nepomuk is one of the most interesing things in KDE SC 4″

Old: “Amarok is an awesome KDE app”
New: “Amarok is an awesome KDE app”

Some things change, but some things stay the same

So, this is really an internal thing – perhaps you post to the Planet or write about KDE elsewhere. If so, and you support our efforts at clarifying our branding, please try and think about what it is you mean and use the right terms. If we simply replace “KDE” with “KDE SC” then we won’t have achieved anything. We don’t want KDE SC used everywhere, if we did we’d have given it a catchier name

There is, as always, more to do. Nathan Ogden has done some really great work (with assistance from others on KDE-Promo) putting together a guide for distros on how to use our brands in their communication. We need to get the word on that out to our distro contacts (something I should be helping with – perhaps you can help?) so that it’s as easy as possible for us all to work together and present things in a consistent way.

Any other examples? Queries about the above? “I hate the rebranding” rants? Please post below

Vote, by Theresa Thompson (CC-by)

So go to KDE Apps, vote and help us choose.

I must say that I’ve been very encouraged by the response – on the Dot at least. Lots of questions (most of which I think we’ve been able to answer quite well as the majority of them are things that already came up in our discussions), a healthy dose of skepticism (I like that, as a scientist skepticism is good as long as it is open to reasoned argument) and a general sense that we haven’t really changed that much. The latter point is important because it suggests that we are succeeding in simply being more clear about defining things in a way that many of us already see them: KDE is the people and we produce some cool stuff. So it’s not so much about rebranding as simply making our brands fit better with reality.

I particularly liked Lydia’s post about what KDE means to her and Nuno’s nice summary:

We are KDE

I’ve also become briefly (in)famous as the “KDE spokesperson” who said all this stuff about our brands. I wonder if the person who used that phrase gets that KDE doesn’t really have appointed spokespeople, though I guess we’re all spokespeople when we’re writing about KDE in public, particularly in places like the Dot that the news sites read. I suspect that they just need to present to their (business oriented?) readership that the news is somehow official and perhaps “community member” would not have been understood. One news site of dubious quality even called me “KDE representative royalty”

So, we’ve finally made the announcement, now we need to crack on with the hard of work of getting this structure out in our communications, talking to our downstream distributors to advise them how to refer to our software and a myriad of other things, some of which we probably haven’t even thought of. Work is ongoing on the kde-promo mailing list and on the community wiki. Come and join us if you’d like to help.

Why do this?

So, a lot of that text is not mine (although I endorse it fully – it’s only not mine because I didn’t manage to describe things that well). One of the things I did do was put together that diagram of the brand map for the Dot article. After doing that, I wondered how it looked under the old branding structure – well, you can see the results below (old brand names first, new ones below). Hopefully that indicates how the old branding structure has been ambiguous and made it really difficult for us to present the products in any kind of coherent way.

Old brand map

New brand map

It was messy and a lot of those KDE/KDE 4 names were used interchangeably (and often we still had K Desktop Environment too). Writing anything quickly became a mess of KDEs and you could only tell from the context – and some prior knowledge about what we do – what each of them actually meant. The new brands make my job a lot easier and if we make the job of promoting KDE products easier then we should get better promotion of KDE products. Of course, it is also desirable to split the Plasma Desktop and Plasma Netbook from the apps a little so that people not running one of those should not be put off trying out Amarok, KOffice or K3B.