Stuart Jarvis

Yeah, so I’m at Akademy. It’s awesome. But there are plenty of other blog posts saying that and I don’t feel I have a lot to add really, nothing that hasn’t already been on the Dot anyway.

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.

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that leads to a distant in invisible future – with a good chance that when it is finally delivered it has been superseded by something else.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

Tags: akademy, branding, community, promotion

I do hope Google Translate has got those right – and I love German for its abundant use of the letter K (for the curious they are, hopefully: Portugese, Hindi, Russian, Spanish, Chinese (simplified), English/French and German)

So, what’s this all about?

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).

Tags: akademy, communicating, community, international, promotion

Are you a (student, grad-student, post-doc, lecturer, professor, working in the big bad private sector) scientist?

Do you use KDE software?

Do you use KDE software for your science?

If you can answer ‘yes’ to two or more of the above then I would love to hear from you.

Update: Well, actually, I have plenty of answers now Thanks very much. I don’t need any more responses, but if you’d like to let me know what you think then by all means go ahead (probably won’t make the article though).

There are (I sense) a few scientists in KDE land and some of us (Luca and myself at least) are beginning to ponder how we can achieve world domination for KDE through the sciences.

We have some pretty cool sciencey apps already:

• Kile (LaTeX)
• Cantor (young, but promising)
• KBibTeX (I crave a Platform 4 port)
• LabPlot (Platform 4 port in progress)
• Kalzium
• Kalgebra
• KStars
• Marble
• Rocs
• KmPlot
• Step

We also have external projects such as SciDAVis that are working with KDE projects (LabPlot in that case).

So, if you can spare some time for me, here’s a mini open interview for you:
(Edit: made it an ordered list for easier answering and added questions 9 and 10 from Luca)

1. Who are you and what field to you work in? (Add where and for whom if you’re happy to do so)
2. What KDE software do you use in general?
3. What KDE software do you use specifically for science?
4. Were you aware of all the applications I listed above?
5. If not, are there any you weren’t aware of that could be relevant to you?
6. What is missing among KDE software for you?
7. Would you be interested in a dedicated mailing list/website area for KDE software for scientists?
8. What else would you like to tell me?
9. If you developed scientific software/algorithms, did you ever consider KDE users/platform as a target? If not, why?
10. Did KDE software help you with your research in general? For example, do Kontact or Plasma widgets help keep things orrganised?

I’d like to make you comments up in to some kind of Dot article – they may be edited and it is likely that not everything will be used. You can either drop a comment using the form here or mail me directly at myfirstname.mylastname at gmail.com (if that isn’t obvious then go to the about page and solve a captcha to reveal my email address). If you use the comment form then please use your genuine email address (it is never disclosed) if you’d be willing for me to come back with some follow-up questions.

Also, if you’re making it to Akademy, there are at least a couple of KDE-science things that you can attend: Luca’s BoF at 1500 on Tuesday (see the wiki page) and my lightning talk at 1030 on Sunday.

Tags: akademy, Dot, education, help needed, promotion, Science

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