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.

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.

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).

I'm going to Akademy

A big thanks to everyone on the organising team for their efforts so far and for all that they still have to do In their wisdom they have decided that I get to talk at you for a bit. I was a little surprised by that (in a good way) as I thought at least the main topic I chose might have been picked up by someone a lot better qualified, so now I had better crack on and get something decent written…

Getting there – I’m a hypocrite

Tampere looks like a great place to be, but unfortunately it is not the easiest place to get to without flying (which is bad due to carbon dioxide emissions, air pollution around airports and getting stranded every time a volcano erupts…). I found various options for getting from the UK to Finland, but the quickest would take three days each way and costs two-three times more than flying, so I’m doing the latter. However, if you live in northern or eastern Europe there are some other possibilities by train, coach and ferry so please take a moment to consider those before booking your flight. Yeah, I know – I’m flying and most of you are probably flying too – lecture over

By the way, if you are flying then Skyscanner is a pretty excellent flight finder that I’ve used a number of times (and this time too).

Plans for before and after

I’m arriving in Helsinki in the evening on Friday, hoping to get to Tampere by bus or train around midnight and perhaps meet a few people in Tampere or at the hostel. After Akademy I plan to head to Helsinki on Saturday morning and then stay there for a night (somewhere) before catching a flight back on Sunday evening. So, if anyone else plans on doing similar, has recommendations for accommodation or sights in Helsinki – or nearby – please let me know.

Get some guidance

Growing our mentoring programs

One of the common themes was not being sure where to start and needing some guidance. Justin suggested extending mentoring in KDE, which seems like a great idea.

We already have Season of KDE which has been very successful as we explain on the Google Open Source blog (thanks to the many people, students and mentors, who responded to my questions about this and helped me put the summary together).

Perhaps less well known is our list of mentors already available for you at any time of the year (see the list at the bottom of the page – thanks to annma for the pointer). Hopefully, with Justin’s suggestions, this can be made more visible.

Improving documentation

A recurring theme in reply to the posts by Justin and I was that a lack of good documentation makes getting started with hacking on KDE software harder than it needs to be. Techbase tries to address this but it seems there is plenty more to do. However, there are a couple of problems. Can we really expect our volunteer contributors to spend time writing docs when they could be coding? It might bring great benefits in the medium-long term but the results are not as readily apparent for the contributor as a bug fix or a new feature. Also, are our coders good documentation writers? Being good at doing something doesn’t necessarily make you good at explaining it.

So here’s a suggestion: if you ask a question on a mailing list about something that you couldn’t find in the documentation (or if you provide an answer to such a question) please consider uploading the answer to techbase. If you can rewrite it to make it as good as possible, that’s great, but even a start is better than nothing.

Contributing without coding

I often come across some problem, wish there was an app to solve it and – after a bit of digging in Google – find that there is one, often built upon the KDE Platform or at least Qt. As Apple might put it, “there’s an app for that”. However, a lot of our apps don’t really get the attention or publicity they deserve, simply because we don’t have time to write about all of them.

As an example, KMid (a KDE MIDI player, now with backends for Windows and Mac too) had a new release last week. It’s exactly the kind of application that might benefit from a bit of exposure on the Dot, but none of us had time to pick it up and write a release story.

If you have a favourite application that isn’t getting the attention it deserves, consider writing a story for its next release – or perhaps do an interview with its developers (check the Dot Guidelines first).

It could be you... (Image: victoriapeckham CC-by)

1. Not enough time
2. Not sure where or how to contribute
3. I’m not confident enough in my own skills

What stopped me?

Thinking back, there were a few things that delayed my own involvement with KDE. Time was a big one: I didn’t want to be that guy who turns up, makes some suggestions and promises but never delivers, so I waited for when I might have more time. I knew where I would start (Dot articles) but there was a bit of a lack of confidence in my own knowledge too – that I’d get found out writing about stuff I don’t understand as well as all you guys. I still get that , but hopefully it just makes me do my research a bit better

There is never a good time

Eventually, I realised that I will probably be busy for the rest of my working life. Actually I realise now that I had far more time when I thought I was too busy than I have now. The result is that I am that guy who turns up, makes suggestions and promises to do things but doesn’t deliver Most of us are. But the thing I realise now is that a lot of people doing some of the things that need doing some of the time can achieve quite a lot. It really is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.

You don’t know enough, but then – who does?

When you start contributing, you’ll likely realise you don’t really know what you’re doing and chances are you will screw up (but people are nice about that, generally). But you will be bringing in some skills that others don’t have. Perhaps you’re a native speaker of a language we need to use for a press release (so you can instinctively see when something doesn’t sound quite right) or you have language skills that allow you to translate useful information or act as a bridge to KDE communities around the world. Perhaps you have useful contacts in education, among artists or in science that allow you to put (potential) users in touch with developers.

Start where you want to start

The possibilities for contributing to KDE are vast. Jos (and us other promo peeps) would like your help, but there are plenty of other options too. There can be few application teams that wouldn’t welcome more developers and we always need artists. Whatever you want to do, you can get involved.

So, why not contribute?

If you would like to help out, but there is something holding you back then why not tell us? We need people and if there are things we can do better to make contributing easier it would be great to know.

Ada Lovelace

KDE does relatively well among free software communities when it comes to attracting female contributors, but that shouldn’t hide the fact that compared to the wider world we still do pretty badly. The issues are likely complex and will take a long time to change, but I’m sure we can all think of a few examples of possible causes. None of the ones I can think of actually came from KDE or its contributors, which is a good sign.

So, female or male, what’s stopping you from joining KDE?

Social Media confusion, by Damien Basile under CC-by-sa

Social Media tools suck

On the one hand, it’s kind of nice that interoperation is possible at all, but on the other it’s a silly chain with many unnecessary points of fail. I can use WordPress to blog and that plays quite nicely with Identi.ca – I can syndicate the posts to Identi.ca and likewise list my dents here – things talk to each other. I can also syndicate from Identi.ca to Twitter, but Identi.ca (and therefore I) know nothing about replies at Twitter. From Twitter posts get passed to Google Buzz, but I know nothing about what happens there unless I happen to log in to the GMail web interface. Chances are that there are some people on Twitter wondering why I’ve @replied to them about something they never posted – markey on Twitter != markey on Identi.ca for example.

Identi.ca is made usable and useful by the KDE microblog widget – I simply wouldn’t use it if I had to actually visit the website and log in – that takes longer than the dent. Web interfaces suck. Similarly, I can interact with GMail via KMail (or I could, actually I prefer to have Google forward my mail to another server, a throwback from the days when GMail either didn’t support IMAP or it was a bit funky). GMail’s web interface, while better than other webmails, sucks. Twitter and Buzz, without convenient desktop interfaces that I use already, simply do not get visited by me on even a weekly basis.

In terms of Social Networking, I have Facebook (which I got bullied in to years ago and kinda use, infrequently), LinkedIn (dunno if I’m going to do much with that, another sucky web interface) and Flickr (only for KDE promo). Facebook and Flickr are made more bearable by the excellent digiKam image export tools

Infrastructure for KDE Promo sucks

Similarly, the KDE community wiki sucks – as a collaboration tool (it’s fine for storing info and userbase and techbase are both awesome). I need to discuss things by mail, then open a browser, log in (which requires a round trip to my openid provider if I want the same account on all the wikis). Then I need to remember how to use wiki markup. That’s my excuse for the various things I should have done on the promo wiki and haven’t done. There are things we can do better with the wiki, but the basic problems remain.

Collaborative writing tools suck too. Email is rubbish for actually keeping track of stuff. Google docs is amazing in its way, but it’s another web interface, doesn’t work in Konqueror (or does it nowadays?), is not free and is slow compared to a desktop app. Kobby (and Gobby) also don’t meet our needs – yet…

Really, I want a single “KDE Promo” app that deals with all the above. I’d like a pony too, please You can call it Kommunicator or Kollaborator if you like. The app, not the pony. He’s called Shergar.

There is hope…

Sorry if all that sounds a bit gloomy. There are some good points too The KDE microblog widget rocks. Kopete sorts out my soup of instant messaging accounts, making MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, and Facebook Chat not suck to the extent that I don’t need to care or even know what network I’m chatting to someone on. Kontact makes my email, calendars and contacts portable thanks to the magic of Kolab PIM data structures.

Ok, the point I’m trying to get to is that all these amazing new social tools we have are limited because they don’t interoperate by open standards, only allow some limited syndication. I want to operate my Identi.ca and Twitter and Buzz accounts as one. I don’t want to have to point Google Buzz at Twitter because they didn’t implement the Identi.ca API yet. I want my Facebook stuff and my Linked in stuff in a single view in Kontact or a Plasma Widget, not in some web browser or web browser widget.

Frank Karlitschek covered some similar ground a bit more coherently in his Camp KDE talk – be sure to check out the other talks too. Together with grappling with the Promo pages on the community wiki and discovering Google Buzz, that’s what has really prompted this post. The new services we’re seeing are exciting and can be useful and Google are helping to remove some of the suck from browser-based apps, but you have to wonder why they fix the browser rather than just using the desktop. ownCloud may have some of the answers, complemented by KDE software (reimplementable by anyone else by using open standards too). Perhaps we can even succeed in, as it were, “freeing the web from the browser”. Only time will tell.

Design KDE swag

KDE has a new spreadshirt store with a couple of nice t-shirts by Sebas and some badges including some work by Ingo.

Under construction by Ingo

One of my suggestions - help needed

So, what’s in it for you? Well, you get to say you contributed to KDE and might get to see your creation wandering around Akademy, plus there is talk of giving the designers a free copy of the t-shirt, or whatever, containing their design.

Here’s some additional info courtesy of Justin on the kde-promo mailing list:

1. We do have some existing logos and things you may want to use or at least be aware of which are stored on the Community wiki. Logos are in the KDE clipart link at the top.
2. Spreadshirt allows for both “vector” and “pixel” designs but due to the nature of of the t-shirt medium it is highly advisable to design in a program that produces the vector graphics so we can scale them as needed without distorting your images. Though I think in some cases if we only have “pixel” versions we might be able to work with it if the resolution is high enough.
3. Since this is printed media you should design everything in CMYK colorschemes rather than RGB.
4. More details about the Spreadshirt “design” uploading process can be found on the Spreadshirt site
5. “Be Creative”…”Be Inspired”….”Be Free”

Provide your science photos for LabPlot

Something I started working on a number of months ago and have recently come back to is working on a website redesign for LabPlot.

The current draft is at lp.asinen.org (there’s still a lot to do, integration of the logo in the header definitely needs a lot of work). One of the things I want to have is a rotating image in the sidebar. I have a few already – one is displayed and the rotator is implemented but I’ve lost the copyright info for the others so only displaying one at present. It would be great to get photos from actual KDE people in Science – I’m after things that are fairly simple, optionally quite abstract from any branch of science. You should be prepared to license the image under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike (or something more liberal). You can send images to me at stua…@gmail.com (click on the dots to solve the CAPTCHA) or just put a link to an online image in the comments. Please specify the license and make it clear that you’re the copyright holder in your comment or email.