For the first half of this week, I was in Brussels for the first Annual Review of the ALERT project, in which the project partners – including KDE in the shape of yours truly – presented the work done so far to expert reviewers appointed by the European Commission (the project is part funded through the EU Seventh Framework Programme).

The meeting was very informative, as it was the first time I’d seen in one go what everyone has been working on for the past year. ALERT aims to improve bug tracking and collaboration in open source communities and the technical presentations included demos of the technology. At present, a lot of this happens at the command line, but it is already possible to monitor various data resources, including Bugzilla, and get some interesting updates. There are also some good results in indentifying developers and their particular areas of expertise (to suggest to developers for bugs or bugs for developers) and in semi-automated identification of duplicate bugs.

I got back to England last night, had a quick meeting at my university today and then tomorrow I’m off to the KDE e.V. sprint in Berlin. There, we’ll be spending the weekend working on various issues needed to support KDE contributors worldwide, including attracting more people and companies to our Individual and Corporate supporting membership programs.

By the way, if you lack the time to help KDE, but support our objectives (free software – and all the benefits that entails – for everyone) and have the money then why not Join the Game? That’s a serious question by the way – what’s lacking right now that stops you? Leave me a note in the comments.

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).

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.

The Promo Sprint Venue

The attendees include some well known KDE contributors and some enthusiastic relative newcomers that I am looking forward to meeting in person for the first time. We have a whole load of things to work through, including preparing for the Desktop Summit, planning for the second year of our Join The Game campaign to attract individual supporters, reviewing the performance and management of the Dot (I think it has been a great year, but there is always more to do) and considering the KDE websites ahead of the KDE web team sprint.

We will be enjoying the hospitality of the University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science, who are kindly sponsoring the sprint with both meeting rooms and food. We should also have a chance to chat to interested students and staff there.

Later today, I will be meeting three early arrivals: KDE e.V.’s Claudia Rauch (who also attended the previous promo sprint), Agustín Benito Bethencourt of KDE Spain and quite a new contributor, Lukas Dzikaras.

We may not have a snazzy sprint logo, but you can expect frequent updates over the next few days on Planet KDE to make up for that

You might be wondering what happens to Thomas’s money. He might be too. So here is my personal perspective.

Some things Thomas and I did at Akademy

KDE e.V. has financially supported me by assisting with travel expenses on a couple of occasions – most recently by meeting just over half of my costs of getting to this year’s Akademy. Without that support, it is unlikely that I could have attended for the whole week.

Going to Akademy meant that I could write several Dot articles while there, help with other articles and edit and publish the articles to the Dot. It also enabled me to get KDE featured on Distrowatch Weekly and in LinuxFormat magazine and TechRadar, take quite a few photos that were used in the above stories, chair a talks session and give a couple of presentations.

That would all have been either impossible or very much harder without being at Akademy. Financial contributions like those from Thomas make it possible.

Sprints Thomas has helped to make possible

Editing on the Dot, it seems now that a month never goes past without news of some KDE contributor sprint or attendance at a conference. These are sometimes supported by local sponsors, but often KDE e.V. assists with travel and/or accommodation expenses. Here are just a few of the sprints from the past six months, found by quickly searching Dot articles:

• KDE software on mobile devices
• Telepathy
• Solid
• KDE financial applications
• KOffice
• Multimedia and education

If you have a read through of those articles, I think you’ll find that they were pretty worthwhile for the future of KDE software.

Join the Game

KDE depends on the time and efforts of hundreds of active contributors. You can get involved, but if you have not got time to contribute, you can still help others to contribute for you, without them having to worry about extra costs.

In return for 100 Euros per year, you get a membership card and a little numbered playing piece. But much more than that, you get to know that every time you see KDE praised in the press or you use our software, you helped to make it happen. You get to be a part of KDE and that is pretty special.

To Thomas, and our other individual supporting members: thank you for being part of KDE and making awesome stuff possible.

If you can, please Join the Game.

1. To be free to try
2. To be free to fail
3. To be given the support to succeed
4. To be welcomed
5. To be treated as an equal
6. To learn from the best
7. To be thanked
8. To help people beyond KDE, working for the same goals
9. To use old skills and gain new ones
10. To meet your neighbours from the other side of the world
11. To become a pragmatist
12. To remain an idealist
13. To get it done
14. To Join the Game, not only watch it

Or, in short, to be Free. Whether that is a means, an end or an effect, for me it describes everything we do.

I mean will it continue to grow, will people renew their subscriptions and ‘normal’ people join (by ‘normal’ I mean people who are not early adopters – people techie enough to have a PayPal account perhaps).

In case you don’t know, the principle of Flattr is that you pay monthly fee (minimum 2 Euro). Flattr take 10% of that and the remainder is divided between people you ‘Flattr’ by clicking on a Flattr button on their website. You can only receive income from Flattr is you are a paying member. So there are a couple of reasons for joining:

• You believe that you will get Flattred more than 2 Euro per month and therefore will make a profit
• You would like to pay for stuff that you currently get for free

When you factor in Flattr’s 10% cut then have need ~11% more coming in to the system than gets distributed to people joining for profit. If some of the profit seekers do not Flattr other content then their subscription goes to charity and there is a need for a greater ratio of incoming to outgoing payments.There are a couple of things that Flattr needs to do to attract and keep users:

• Attract enough donators to allow most profit seekers to at least break even – if you’re not losing money then you’ll probably stick with it
• Attract enough content providers to persuade donators that they will see enough things to Flattr to justify their 2 Euro per month – if you don’t Flattr anything then you’ll feel like it’s a waste of money (although in that case the subscription goes to charity)

That’s my personal view anyway. I could be motivated by either option. If enough sites that I care about start displaying Flattr badges then I’ll happily join and start splitting my 2 Euro (1.80 Euro net) per month. I also, with friends, have a couple of half developed content providing sites that we’d be happy to put the work and bandwidth into if we thought it wouldn’t cost us money – i.e. if we could break even or perhaps even make a bit of a profit with Flattr.

For what it is worth, I hope Flattr succeeds. The principle of easy micropayments is good and I think it could be helpful particularly to small free software projects – i.e. the ones with one or two contributors. The likes of KDE can attract larger donations and supporting members but there are many applications, artists, cartoon sites outside of KDE that I would happily give a share of 24 Euro per year. The problem is that under payment options before Flattr a typical payment of – what? – 50 cents would get swallowed up in admin fees and take a few minutes to process.

Flattr’s 10% cut looks eye wateringly high at first, but compare it to PayPal where the fee is 3.4% plus 0.20 GBP for transactions under 1500 GBP. On a micro payment of 1 GBP that would come to 23.4%. If Flattr becomes as ubiquitous as PayPal with the associated economies of scale then I hope the fees will drop.

Rationally, I would wait until I see Flattr badges around more often (to make Flattr an effective donation system for me) or until I have content that I think might generate a profit. But as I can test it for a month for 2 Euro I’ll probably just give it a go and set up an account when I have a spare minute.

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.