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.

WebWorld continues, but not for much longer...

UserBase

The UserBase team has been doing great stuff, fixing issues, working with Eugene on a new logo (that should make it more obvious that UserBase is a user-editable wiki). They’ve also been working on improving the translation infrastructure and little issues like making it easier to insert oxygen icons into content. The visbility of help information has also been improved, hopefully encouraging users to take their first steps as contributors by adding their knowledge to the wiki or by translating existing content.

Will you start contributing at UserBase today? If not, what can the team do to change your mind?

Websites

As Tom already blogged we have been comparing some CMS options for the KDE website – Tom has been researching those and looking at the impact using each different backend.

Eugene and Ingo have meanwhile done some work on the design aspects, in particular the menu navigation, leading on from intial work reviewing the main site navigation that was done at the Promo Sprint.

I’ve been playing a bit with the test WordPress install and also doing some interviews with the sprint attendees. Those will appear on Behind KDE at some point.

Group Discussion and Socialising

We’ve also been able to get everyone together to discuss the issues and get fresh viewpoints on the things we are looking at. It’s all too easy when you have worked intensively on something for a couple of days to begin to miss obvious issues that are clear to someone taking a fresh look. It’s also a chance for everyone to chat some more and get to know each other even better – although several of us stayed up into the early morning yesterday, enjoying a beer or two and chatting about KDE, free software in general and comparing cultures.

The sun is still shining, so we’re enjoying one last barbecue this evening before people have to start heading off tomorrow. It will be a shame to leave.

Please use KDE software. You wouldn't like to upset me, would you?

And here we see some action from the ongoing Fussball tournament.

Tom and Hans 4 - 0 Ingo and Eugene

I’ll have to keep a bit of an eye on what these are doing to my traffic usage, so enjoy them while they’re hot/still here.

WebWorld continues...

More on the websites

Today we have been looking at content management systems to see if one can fit our needs for kde.org. As part of this I have played with Joomla for the first time (having used only WordPress and Drupal before) which takes a little bit of getting used to.

It is also quite scary, going through the kde.org pages to see which ones are out of date or at least not as good as they could be. Hopefully if a CMS works out for us it will be easier for more KDE contributors to go right in and update pages as needed (no knowledge of SVN/Git or PHP needed, just basic HTML and an account on identity.kde.org).

WordPress plugin for identi.ca?

On another webby note, my plugin for syndicating my posts to identi.ca seemed to have stopped working (it was “Network Publisher”, I’ve just switched back to “Identica Tools”, which may or may not work for this post). Does anyone have a recommendation for a plugin that syndicates WordPress blog posts to Identi.ca?

Food

Eugene has once again come up trumps with the food. He should start a KDE catering team…

KDE Time

Apart from the WebWorld tasks, I’ve also been able to spend a bit more time on KDE tasks, including being a bit more active on KDE.News than I have been recently.

Energy

It’s hard to put into words what it is like to be at a KDE sprint, if you have never been. The best way to sum it up is “energy”. Many of us were working until around 11pm last night and ready to go again at 9am this morning. There are few things better than working with fellow KDE enthusiasts on doing awesome and getting away from the distractions of “real life” boosts KDE productivity immensely.

Userbase

Part of the team has been working hard on Userbase, fixing issues, changing editing guidance, exploring anonymous editing, improving translation tools and tweaking the look and feel.

The Main KDE Website

The rest of us worked on the kde.org website, considering how the ideal layout should look, what links are really necessary and how they should best be arranged. We also considered the best backend means for supporting the website and making it easier for contributors to keep pages relevant to their areas up to date, while also not wasting time re-inventing the wheel for each of our websites.

We also spent an enjoyable 30 minutes or so critiquing the websites of other free and proprietary software organisations.

Other Websites

KDE has an obscene number of *.kde.org subdomains, many of which contain outdated content or content that is duplicated – or easier found – elsewhere. We worked on criteria for when subdomains should be granted and started collecting more statistics to see how people are using our websites.

A snazzy logo

After much harassment, Eugene has proved once again that he is not only an excellent at organising a barbecue, but also a talented artist. Unveil… drumroll.. the WebWorld Sprint Logo:

KDE WebWorld Logo

Sunshine

And it’s still sunny and warm here in Essen. In contrast to Randa where it all seems to have gone a bit quiet. Has the weather in Randa left our intrepid KDE contributors cold and sluggish?

The WebWorld Sprint has begun at the Linux Hotel near Essen in Germany. All the attendees arrived throughout Wednesday and – in contrast to conditions in Randa the sun has been shining on us. Yesterday evening we had a barbecue in the hotel garden, enjoyed some evening sun and then got to the first of the meetings about the extravagant number of KDE subdomains and our plans for the sprint.

The real work starts today, but already we have got everyone together, everyone has learnt a lot of new faces and we have had some general discussion about the challenges facing KDE’s assets on the web and how we can overcome them. With 3-4 days of the sprint remaining – depending on individual leaving times, we expect to get a lot done.

In the meantime, we just wait for resident artist to sort us out with a snazzy sprint logo to illustrate our blog posts…

Web, by Curt Smith

We had a combined sprint back in 2009 when the current version of the main KDE website was designed in consultation between the two teams and KDE’s artists. The result was a site that much improved on what we had before, but there is still more to be done.

The last few years have also seen the growth and improvement of KDE’s wikis, from the phenonmenal UserBase that should be the first stop for any user of KDE software experiencing difficulties to TechBase and our Community Wiki. However, these could integrate better with one another and with the main website and – importantly – all look like they belong together.

The Web Team comprises many of KDE’s unsung heroes, so in addition to building links between them and the Promotion Team, I’ll also take the opportunity to blog about the cool things they are working on and get some interviews done to raise the profile of their work a bit. Like many (all?) teams in KDE, they need more help to progress at an even faster pace and to help us all get the most out of *.kde.org. So if you’re interested, keep an eye on the Planet and the Dot for more information

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).

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