The Board of Directors of KDE e.V. met again in Berlin from 14-15 October, 2017 for their autumn sprint. That was the first Eike's participation as a board member, after taking over, at Akademy 2017, the position of the KDE e.V. Treasurer, previously occupied by Marta Rybczynska. The group discussed topics such as KDE's 21th anniversary, staff and contractors, office inventory, events, community goals, strategic opportunities, fundraising infrastructure, websites, board self-assessment, and general budget. As for the events, KDE's presence at Qt World Summit 2017 has been reviewed, identified things that went pretty well and defining improvements opportunities for future KDE participations. Initial steps for announcing Akademy 2018 in Vienna, defining sponsoring opportunities, and preparation of KDE e.V. Annual General Assembly have also been discussed. In addition, possible sprints for the upcoming months have also been identified. Regarding the ongoing "Evolving KDE" initiative, the board discussed the means by which community members would vote for the proposed goals and how to support goals' proposers in their task to make them a reality in the next two-three years. Also, strategic opportunities for KDE in the fields of mobile and automotive have been discussed.
+The KDE e.V. Board of Directors met again in Berlin from 14th to 15th of October, 2017 for their autumn sprint. This sprint marked Eike Hein’s first participation as a board member, having taken on the position of the KDE e.V. Treasurer at Akademy 2017. The position was previously occupied by Marta Rybczynska. The group discussed topics such as KDE's 21th anniversary, staff and contractors, office inventory, events, community goals, strategic opportunities, fundraising infrastructure, websites, board self-assessment, and general budget. On the topic of events, the board reviewed KDE's presence at Qt World Summit 2017 and identified things that went pretty well, as well as defined opportunities for improving future KDE participation in such events. We also discussed initial steps for announcing Akademy 2018 in Vienna, defining sponsoring opportunities, and preparing the KDE e.V. Annual General Assembly. Furthermore, we also identified possible sprints for the upcoming months. Regarding the ongoing "Evolving KDE" initiative, the Board discussed the means by which community members could vote for the proposed goals, and looked at ways to support the proposers in their task of making the goals a reality in the next two to three years. Finally, we discussed strategic opportunities for KDE in the fields of mobile and automotive.
From 13-14 May, 2017 the KDE e.V. Board of Directors met for their in-person spring sprint at KDE e.V. office in Berlin. At this sprint, the KDE e.V. marketing contractors (Paul and Ivana), the assistant of the board (Petra) as well as Sebastian Kügler, joined the team to discuss actions to leverage KDE's marketing efforts and improve community's public visibility. Topics discussed included: planning the events where KDE has a presence, checking of progress of 2016's KDE e.V. goals and defining goals for 2017/2018, finishing the KDE e.V.'s mission, planning of 2017 annual report, better community engagement in KDE e.V., and improving finances' tracking. As for KDE events, besides the habitual discussion and planning of Akademy (the KDE annual summit), the group discussed actions not only to narrow relationships to community partners ‒ for example, with the big KDE presence at 2017's Qt World Summit ‒ but also to expand KDE user and contributors base in regions like Asia (in conferences such as FOSSASIA and Hong Kong Open Source Conference) and Latin-America (with the first edition of QtCon Brazil).
+From 13th to 14th of May, 2017 the KDE e.V. Board of Directors met for their in-person spring sprint at KDE e.V. office in Berlin. At this sprint, the KDE e.V. marketing contractors Paul and Ivana, the assistant of the board Petra, and Sebastian Kügler joined the team to discuss actions to leverage KDE's marketing efforts and improve the community's public visibility. Discussion topics included planning the events where KDE has a presence, checking the progress of 2016's KDE e.V. goals and defining goals for 2017/2018, completing the KDE e.V.'s mission statement, planning the 2017 annual report, advancing community engagement with KDE e.V., and improving finance tracking. As for KDE events, alongside usual discussion and planning for Akademy (KDE’s annual summit), the group discussed actions for strengthening relationships with community partners ‒ for example, with the big KDE presence at 2017's Qt World Summit ‒ but also for expanding the KDE user- and contributor base in regions like Asia (through conferences such as FOSSASIA and Hong Kong Open Source Conference) and Latin-America (with the first edition of QtCon Brazil).
Regarding KDE e.V. goals for 2016, the board checked the progress of recent KDE e.V. actions, such as the creation of KDE e.V.'s Advisory Board and Fundraising Working Group, the "Evolving KDE" effort for setting community goals, and accounting improvements.
+Regarding KDE e.V. goals for 2016, the Board checked the progress of recent KDE e.V. actions, such as the creation of KDE e.V.'s Advisory Board and Fundraising Working Group, the "Evolving KDE" effort for setting community goals, and accounting improvements.
On the marketing side, Paul, Ivana, and Sebastian analyzed results from popular applications pools on social media, discussed how to make better use of available data about KDE community, started planning outreach actions for Akademy 2017, and talked about defining guidelines for publishing content on dot.kde.org.
+On the marketing side, Paul, Ivana, and Sebastian analyzed results from popular applications pools on social media, discussed how to make better use of available data about KDE community, started planning outreach actions for Akademy 2017, and talked about defining guidelines for publishing content on dot.kde.org.
Back in the summer of 2015, we announced Plasma Mobile as a community effort to bring Plasma and other KDE technologies to handset devices. This was a big step towards building a free operating system for smartphones. Following on from the ramp-up tasks and learning experiences of those first few years, in 2017 we saw major revisions to the architecture of Plasma Mobile OS images for supported devices. As a result of those efforts, users are now porting Plasma Mobile being ported to a wide variety of phones. Closely related to this is the new collaboration with the wider community of users and developers of Free software and operating systems for mobile devices. The community has greatly helped us with porting Plasma Mobile.
On the frontend side, the Plasma Mobile components use open standards to interface with the rest of the system. For example, we use OpenGL to render the user interface. However, current devices often require proprietary OpenGL drivers. Many of those drivers are developed for Google's Android operating system, and only work in the context of that system. For this reason, in Plasma Mobile's original architecture the frontend was run inside a container on a stripped down Android host system adjusted to a particular device.
This architecture turned out to be difficult to operate in practice. It also kept too much of the basic operating system from under our direct control. Eventually, we decided that the right way to go about this is to flip everything on its head: the only Android bits we really care about are the kernel and drivers needed to run the device. Therefore, in a modern Plasma Mobile device image, we run a traditional Linux host system with the Android tree for the device containerized within it. This allows us significantly more freedom on the side of the host system, in fact it helps everybody, assince images based on multiple different Linux distributions have been implemented since. The new approach also helps with KDE's goals of privacy and security, since the foreign Android code can be sandboxed away.
Plasma Mobile is not the only Free device OS project that currently needs to tame Android to run on existing hardware. It makes obvious sense to share the work on this tooling between the communities sharing this need. For one, this gives the community a central target to join in porting all of those Free systems to additional devices. The Plasma Mobile project acts as a founding member of Project Halium. The initiative was set up in 2017 to maintain this approach to reusing Android drivers in alternative operating systems for mobile devices. Project Halium has proven enormously successful at implementing its goals since. Ports of Halium and Plasma Mobile to many new devices are now in varying stages of completeness, and most of them were created by new contributors.
2017 also saw the inception of postmarketOS, a project started by Oliver Smith, an independent developer. postmarketOS aims to provide devices with what vendors fail to offer: a 10-year software lifecycle. Since its announcement in the spring of 2017, the project has garnered significant attention. postmarketOS is interested in providing the Plasma Mobile user interface to its users. Unlike Project Halium, which is about making use of vendor-provided binary blobs to support as many existing devices as possible, postmarketOS makes a point of using open drivers and avoiding binary blobs where it can. As per its founding motivation, the project tries to help with mainlining as much driver code as possible to keep older devices supported well into the future. postmarketOS' device images are based on the Alpine Linux distribution.
The Plasma Mobile team has been working closely with the postmarketOS developers to make their dream a reality. Early successes of the collaboration include getting Plasma Mobile to run on postmarketOS' base system, and demonstrating a device image that uses a mainline kernel to run on actual hardware, free of proprietary binaries.
With the previous two stories focusing on the software side of things, another exciting development in late 2017 was the announcement of dedicated hardware Plasma Mobile could run on. Purism, a company known in the community as the maker of Linux-focused laptop PCs, concluded a successful crowdfunding campaign for a security- and privacy-focused smartphone: The Librem 5. Already during the campaign, Purism announced a formal collaboration with the KDE community, committing to help develop Plasma Mobile for the planned device. The Librem 5 hardware will be based around the Freescale NXP i.MX6 or i.MX8 ARM CPU and Vivante GPU, both of which are supported by Free software drivers on Linux.
Quickly after the funding campaign ended, Purism engineer and Debian developer Matthias Klump already demonstrated Plasma Mobile running on Purism's i.MX6 development board.
A KDE project closely related to Plasma Mobile is the user interface framework Kirigami. Kirigami focuses on providing application developers with tools to create convergent applications, that is, applications that easily run on both desktop and handset devices, smoothly adapting to each form factor. Application developers, both by KDE contributors and by other parties, started adopting Kirigami in 2017. Kirigami-based applications target Plasma Mobile, but also Android and iOS, Plasma Desktop, Microsoft Windows and other platforms.
Inside the KDE community, developers of the group chat application Konversation started revamping its user interface using Kirigami, with support for Plasma Mobile listed as an explicit motivation. Ruqola, Calligra Gemini, Koko, Kamoso and other Kirigami ports join this pattern of moving to Kirigami to modernize their user experience and provide first-class support for mobile devices.
Developers of external projects have also started building on Kirigami, and are therefore getting ready to run on Plasma Mobile. Some examples include Kaidan, a modern XMPP/Jabber-based messaging client; Subsurface, a diving log tool; and Vvave Media Player. 2017 was the most productive and exciting year for Plasma Mobile since its inception, and 2018 looks poised to surpass it in every way. Thanks to initiatives like Project Halium and postmarketOS, we expect Plasma Mobile to become available on many new devices. Purism's Librem 5 is shaping up to provide Plasma Mobile with hardware specifically created with Free software in mind. Finally, thanks to Kirigami, Plasma Mobile is quickly evolving into a vibrant application ecosystem for users to enjoy.
At the very last day of QtCon ‒ one of the biggest Qt events in Europe, held at Berlin Convention Center in 2016 ‒ a group of three Brazilian KDE contributors started wondering about organizing the first Qt conference ever held in Latin America. As a result, from 18th to 20th August 2017, QtCon Brazil brought together almost 200 participants from IT industry, universities, and governmental entities. The conference happened in São Paulo, the major financial hub in Brazil and the headquarters of big corporations, banks, universities and research centers. The first day of the conference was dedicated to training sessions. Sandro Andrade presented a session on "Developing Android Applications with Qt" and Cleiton Bueno was responsible for the session on "Developing Embedded Applications with Qt" with the valuable support of Toradex, one of the conference's sponsors. The training sessions were carried out in two groups of 20 participants, focused on hands-on activities about how to use Qt to power modern embedded and mobile applications. The training sessions were heavily demanded by attendees and have been totally sold out in only two weeks.
+At the very last day of QtCon ‒ one of the biggest Qt events in Europe, held at Berlin Convention Center in 2016 ‒ a group of three Brazilian KDE contributors started thinking about organizing the first Qt conference ever in Latin America. As a result, from 18th to 20th of August 2017, QtCon Brazil brought together almost 200 participants from the IT industry, universities, and governmental entities. The conference happened in São Paulo, the major financial hub in Brazil and the headquarters of big corporations, banks, universities and research centers. The first day of the conference was dedicated to training sessions. Sandro Andrade presented a session on "Developing Android Applications with Qt" and Cleiton Bueno was responsible for the session on "Developing Embedded Applications with Qt" with the valuable support of Toradex, one of the conference's sponsors. The training sessions were carried out in two groups of 20 participants, and focused on hands-on strategies for using Qt to power modern embedded and mobile applications. The training sessions were in high demand, and were totally sold out in only two weeks.
QtCon Brazil 2017 happened with the valuable support of The Qt Company, KDE, Stone, Toradex, openSUSE, and JetBrains. The second and third days were devoted to keynote talks, invited talks from prominent Qt players in Brazil, and community talks coming from the call for participation. On Saturday, in the opening session, representatives from the sponsors and the organizing committee welcomed all participants and provided an overview of QtCon Brazil's goals and motivation, followed by a panel about "What's Qt About?". Then, there was a technical session about embedded Qt, where Cleiton Bueno talked about "Initializing and Handling Qt Applications in Linux" and Sergio Prado talked about "Creating a GNU/Linux distribution with Qt support for embedded devices". QtCon Brazil continued after lunch with a technical session about "Qt Successful Use-Cases". Lamarque Souza (Petrosoft) started by talking about "Scientific Computing with Qt" and João Jardim presented the Stone's experience in using Qt to develop POS (Point Of Sale) applications in a time span of only six months.
+The second and third days were devoted to keynote talks, guest talks from prominent Qt players in Brazil, and community talks selected from the Call for Participation applications. In the opening session on Saturday, representatives from the sponsors and the organizing committee welcomed all participants and provided an overview of QtCon Brazil's goals and motivation, followed by a panel titled "What's Qt About?". Next on the schedule was a technical session about embedded Qt, where Cleiton Bueno talked about "Initializing and Handling Qt Applications in Linux", and Sergio Prado gave a presentation on "Creating a GNU/Linux distribution with Qt support for embedded devices". After lunch, the conference continued with a technical talk about "Qt Successful Use-Cases". Lamarque Souza (Petrosoft) introduced "Scientific Computing with Qt" and João Jardim, from Stone, presented their firm's experience in using Qt to develop POS (Point Of Sale) applications in a timespan of only six months.
Next, three talks about mobile development with Qt were presented. Sandro Andrade (IFBA/KDE) talked about the challenges and current Qt solutions for developing mobile applications. Gustavo Boiko (SUSE) talked about "Using Telepathy and Qt to create instant messages applications" and Tiago Salem presented "10 lessons on telephony/messaging application development with Qt". The day finished with a "Meet and Greet Reception", kindly sponsored by The Qt Company. The last conference day started with the keynote talk "Convergent applications with Kirigami", by Aleix Pol i Gonzàlez (Blue Systems/KDE), followed by the keynote talk "From to production in one year", presented by Victor Kropp (JetBrains). Filipe Saraiva (UFPA/KDE) presented his experiences in "Extending Qt applications with KDE Frameworks 5" and Daniel Nicoletti (INDRA) presented the history and current status of Cutelyst, a high-performance Qt-based framework for developing web applications.
+Next, there were three talks about mobile development with Qt. Sandro Andrade (IFBA/KDE) talked about the challenges and current Qt solutions for developing mobile applications. Gustavo Boiko (SUSE) talked about "Using Telepathy and Qt to create instant messaging applications" and Tiago Salem presented "10 lessons on telephony/messaging application development with Qt". The day finished with a "Meet and Greet Reception", kindly sponsored by The Qt Company. The last conference day started with the keynote talk "Convergent applications with Kirigami", by Aleix Pol i Gonzàlez (Blue Systems/KDE), followed by the keynote talk "From Hackathon to production in one year", presented by Victor Kropp (JetBrains). Filipe Saraiva (UFPA/KDE) presented his experiences in "Extending Qt applications with KDE Frameworks 5" and Daniel Nicoletti (INDRA) presented the history and current status of Cutelyst, a high-performance Qt-based framework for developing web applications.
The conference proceeded with the talks submitted to the event's call for participation. Flávio dos Anjos (UNESP) talked about "Using Qt to leverage the discovery of new drugs" and Rodrigo Coimba (Brazilian government's Tribunal Superior Eleitoral) presented how Qt has been used to support Brazilian elections. Eliakin Almeida (IFBA/KDE) talked about his experiences in using Qt and Python to extend applications. Gabriel Fedel (LNLS) talked about how Qt has been used to develop the basic control systems which support the Brazilian particle accelerator project. Lucas Lellis talked about wiRed Panda - a Qt-based teaching software for simulating digital circuits. Last but not least, Luis Barreto (O.S. Systems) talked about his experience in using Qt to develop embedded infotainment systems for cruise ships. This first edition of QtCon Brazil was a quite fruitful endeavor, which has set the underpinnings to grow Latin-American Qt user base and foster relationships between continent's Qt actors. Check here the complete photo set of QtCon Brazil 2017!
+The conference proceeded with talks from community members. Flávio dos Anjos (UNESP) talked about "Using Qt to leverage the discovery of new drugs" and Rodrigo Coimba (Brazilian government's Tribunal Superior Eleitoral) presented how Qt has been used to support Brazilian elections. Eliakin Almeida (IFBA/KDE) talked about his experiences in using Qt and Python to extend applications. Gabriel Fedel (LNLS) talked about how Qt has been used to develop the basic control systems which support the Brazilian particle accelerator project. Lucas Lellis talked about wiRed Panda - a Qt-based teaching software for simulating digital circuits. Last but not least, Luis Barreto (O.S. Systems) talked about his experience in using Qt to develop embedded infotainment systems for cruise ships. This first edition of QtCon Brazil was a fruitful endeavor that has set the underpinnings to expand the Latin-American Qt user base, as well as to foster intercontinental relationships between Qt actors. Check here the complete photo set of QtCon Brazil 2017!
+QtCon Brazil 2017 was made possible thanks to the valuable support of The Qt Company, KDE, Stone, Toradex, openSUSE, and JetBrains.
A friendly autumn gathering doubling as a productive developer sprint, Randa Meetings 2017 took place from 10 to 16 September in Switzerland. Prior to the sprint, the KDE Community ran a fundraiser to help cover the organization costs. The main theme of Randa Meetings 2017 was accessibility. Crucial but often neglected, accessibility benefits everyone, not just people with disabilities. That is why the developers set out to improve the navigation and assistive features in KDE software.
The developers of Kube worked on speeding up email synchronization, explored the options for making Kube cross-platform, and implemented a visualization in the configuration dialog that warns the user about invalid input. Kdenlive received color correction improvements, and the developers focused on porting Kdenlive to Windows and macOS, improving the usability of its features, and bringing back the popular TypeWriter effect.
The results of their efforts greatly increased the quality of KDE software. KMyMoney received improvements to keyboard shortcuts, and the Plasma panel can now be controlled using voice feedback and the keyboard. The Krunner launcher supports integration with Orca Screen Reader, and the KWin team created a plugin that simulates different types of color blindness to help developers understand users' needs. Another experience that helped shed light on different types of users and their perspectives was a visit from Manuel, a deaf user from Italy. Manuel explained all kinds of problems that hearing-impaired users come across when using software. His feedback was extremely valuable in the context of the sprint's theme. As always, a lot of work was done outside of the main sprint theme. The KDE PIM team ported the entire Kontact codebase away from the obsolete KDateTime component, and worked on improving the stability of KMail's search features. All plugin KCM modules for KMyMoney were ported to KF5, and the backup functionality was revived. Marble Maps got a new splash screen, and the entire interface of the Bookmarks dialog was made responsive to touch. The Public Transport Plasma applet was completely rewritten as a Kirigami application, and is now much easier to adapt to mobile interfaces.
Over the past 21 years KDE community has been a synergistic space for sharing knowledge, creating innovative technology, and improve people's lives under the precepts of Free Software. In spite of such quite long history, with each passing year KDE becomes better at supporting the contributors' spontaneous interests while yet attentive to the need for community-wide articulation and medium/long-term goal definitions.
+Over the past 21 years, the KDE community has been a space for sharing knowledge, creating innovative technology, and improving people's lives following the principles of Free Software. During our quite long history, with each passing year, KDE has become better at supporting contributors' interests and setting goals that benefit the community.
In 2017, KDE presence has been considerably expanded in Asia (FOSSASIA and Hong Kong Open Source Conference) and Latin-America (QtCon Brazil). conf.kde.in has reached its 7th edition and we had a remarkable presence at Qt World Summit. Also in 2017, KDE had the pleasure of having Private Internet Access joining our esteemed group of KDE Patrons, which already includes Blue Systems, Canonical, Google, SUSE, and The Qt Company.
+In 2017, KDE's presence spread in Asia, thanks in part to FOSSASIA and Hong Kong Open Source Conference, as well as in Latin-America ‒ QtCon Brazil was a great success. conf.kde.in has reached its 7th edition, and we had a remarkable presence at the Qt World Summit. Also in 2017, KDE had the pleasure of having Private Internet Access join our esteemed group of KDE Patrons, which already includes Blue Systems, Canonical, Google, SUSE, and The Qt Company.
As for KDE e.V.'s administrative and PR infrastructure ‒ in addition to the excellent work already done by Petra Gillert as the assistant of the KDE e.V. Board of Directors ‒ in 2017 we had two marketing contractors joining our team. The result is a considerable uplift in the way KDE communicates to our partners, users, and contributors.
+As for KDE e.V.'s administrative and PR infrastructure ‒ in addition to the excellent work already done by Petra Gillert as the assistant of the KDE e.V. Board of Directors ‒ in 2017 two marketing contractors joined our team. The result is a considerable uplift in the way we communicate to our partners, users, and contributors.
This report brings together the most relevant achievements of KDE in 2017. KDE is a global and diverse community. As such, we strive not only to sustain the contributions pace in places with well-established KDE culture, but also to foster the seed of FOSS initiative in regions until then out of KDE radar.
+This report brings together the most relevant achievements of KDE in 2017. KDE is a global and diverse community, and as such, we strive not only to sustain the pace of contributions in places with a well-established KDE culture, but also to foster the seed of FOSS initiatives in regions previously outside of KDE's radar.
In addition, we went through the process of asking for proposals, selecting, and announcing the winners of the KDE community's goals for the upcoming years. We believe this a quite important effort to bring back unity and catalyze a uniform mindset over different KDE projects.
+In addition, we went through the process of asking for proposals, selecting, and announcing the winners of the KDE community's goals for the upcoming years. We believe this is a quite important effort to bring back unity and catalyze a uniform mindset over different KDE projects.
Have an excellent reading!
Sandro Andrade
for the KDE e.V. Board of Directors
The annual WikiToLearn India Conference 2017 took place for the first time at The LNMIIT, Jaipur on January 18-19. A big thank-you is owed to the university that hosted us, and to all the speakers - Riccardo Iaconelli, Tony Thomas, Harish Navnit, Davide Valsecchi, Sagar Agarwal, Abhimanyu Singh Shekhawat, Haritha Harikumar, Chaithanya Krishnan, Jaminy Prabaharan, Amit Kumar Jaiswal, Jayaditya Gupta, Arnav Dhamija and Vnisha Srivastav - and all the participants who made this conference an awesome experience. The Conference was a single track event, so there was no distribution of audiences at the talks.
The Keynote of the conference was given by Riccardo Iaconelli. He talked about the motive behind Richard Stallman’s idea of Open Source. He then briefed on how WikiToLearn is being adapted at European Universities and making it easier for students and professors for collaborative learning. He spoke on how the project is having powerful impact not only in Europe but also in the world with many universities involved and also organizations like KDE, Wikimedia Foundation and the CERN, about the power of collaboration and its impact in academia with the help of WikiToLearn.
Sagar, Abhimanyu, Jay, and Arnav talked about their Google Summer of Code projects, walked through the basic architecture of their projects, how it works, and how could one contribute to it and also gave have a fair idea of how much rewarding and fun it was to work on open source the entire summer. Tony’s talk was titled as Engaging and Bringing in new contributors to a community rather he focused on talking about how to really get started with contributions since the conference had lot of enthusiastic beginners who were willing to start contributing to open source. Harish’s talk was entitled as ‘Modern Day Makefile Generators’ where he imparted a basic familiarity to how large projects handle their dependencies and how a build system functions, in general. He talked in depth about Cmake and qmake, and how they are used in handling large projects.
Davide joined us through a hangout session straight from Italy to give us a brief introduction on the WikiToLearn infrastructure and introducing TeXLa which is a minimal and easily extensible LaTeX parser to the participants. The rest of the day was just as eventful, with Haritha and Chaithanya along with Vnisha, speaking about the Wikimedia engine and on the social topic of connecting rural women on the internet, respectively, to mark the culmination of two days of enlightening knowledge exchange.
On the final day, post dinner, the speakers and participants were provided entry to a musical concert of local folk singer Mame Khan which turned out to be a truly new and unique experience and that was a nice way to end the first ever WikiToLearn India conference.
KDE e.V. Board Autumn Sprint
QtCon Brazil 2017
Randa Meetings 2017
WikiToLearn India conference
