Stuart Jarvis

Just a quickie:

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

Tags: artwork, branding, get invovled

A while ago, we asked for designs to accompany our KDE Software Labels.

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.

Tags: artwork, branding, get invovled

This is a bit of a follow up to my previous post but it’s going to wander around a bit.

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).

Tags: community, get invovled, promotion

A while ago I asked “what’s stopping you from joining KDE?”. It was really a rhetorical question but, thinking about it, it is something I’d be interested to hear answers to.

There’s an interesting blog post (thanks to Lydia for sharing this on Identica) that points to some possible reasons. It seems the top ones are:

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.

Tags: busy, community, get invovled, help needed, promotion