EduCode is an event where teachers, school directors, parents and students, researchers and anyone interested in teaching and technology as well as in continuing education reflect on how to best use digital education and teaching through technology at all levels (primary, secondary, higher education, and social promotion).
KDE Promo got in touch with the EduCode association (organizers of the event). KDE was subsequently kindly invited to participate in the 2018 edition of the event. EduCode 2018 was held on the 27th and 28th of August in Brussels, Belgium at Bozar and at the Royal Academy.
As KDE has a whole suite of educational software we distribute under the KDE-Edu banner, we thought this would be a good opportunity to raise awareness of our software among a non-technical audience that could make the most of it, too.
We thought that GCompris, which contains arguably the most comprehensive and best collection of activities for pre-schoolers and primary school students, would be especially interesting for attendees. We also wanted to push WikiToLearn as a solution for pooling and converting notes into reusable class materials.
The first day was exhibition day at EduCode. The organisers kindly gave us a booth, and we rented a large 42'' screen on a two-meter high stand to showcase GCompris, probably the most eye-catching of the applications. We also set up a chair on the public side of the booth and invited visitors as the walked by to sit and try some of the activities.
We had in-depth conversations with 26 people, 15 of whom were teachers. 24 adults played with GCompris, and a child from the Lego robotics booth gave GCompris a 4-star rating! Apart from teachers, we also talked to an educational events organiser who would like us to take our booth to his events. We also handed out several dozens of stickers with the KDE Edu, GCompris and WikiToLean URLs in the hope that attendees would visit the sites, and consider using KDE software in their classrooms.
On day two, we hosted an hour-long workshop that mostly focused on GCompris (since the majority of attendees were primary school teachers). Still, we also managed to demo the usefulness of WikiToLearn and showcased a few other KDE Edu applications.
As there were 11 simultaneous workshops going on at the same time, and fewer than 100 attendees in total, attendees were spread out pretty thin. Nine people visited our workshop, so our attendance was more or less average. Six of our attendees were primary school teachers, one was a speech therapist, and two were businesspeople working within the educational sector.
Some of the attendees had worked with GCompris before, but those that hadn't were impressed and there were a few "Oooh" and "Aaah" moments. There were some feature requests, like being able to save individual profiles for students in GCompris, and attendees were interested in the upcoming admin module. The admin module will allow teachers to control a classroom of computers and monitor students' progress.
WikiToLearn was also popular - the teachers saw how useful it can be, and were impressed with the dynamic PDF rendering.
Attending EduCode 2018 was a positive experience for us. We picked up some leads that we are looking into. As always, it is not easy to evaluate the impact a single event may have on the overall project.
That said, our participation in EduCode 2018 helped confirm that our plans of going to where non-technical end users congregate, especially those in a specific niche, is not at all harebrained. People know little of our work outside the FLOSS community, but are interested and even surprised when we tell them about what we do. It is a good way to raise awareness of our software beyond our immediate bubble, and thus expand our user base.
ELC Europe 2018 was quite a big event that congregated engineers and companies working within the embedded device sector. The 2018 edition was held in Edinburgh in October simultaneously with the Kernel Summit and the Open Source Summit, so a large chunk of the open source industry was in attendance.
Our aim at ELC was to attract several groups: sponsors, developers to boost the community, and companies that would want to pre-install KDE software. The Linux Foundation - organizers of the event - kindly provided us with a booth. Jonathan Riddell, Adriaan de Groot and Paul Brown staffed the booth, with extra support provided by Kenny Coyle and Agustín Benito.
Although we managed to grab the attention of device vendors and developers (as was our plan), we also found that many attendees were interested in Plasma and KDE apps as end-users. For them, we shifted the focus to Plasma and how it allows you to have your cake and eat it: you could have a beautiful and feature-rich desktop environment, but it would also be functional, configurable, light and snappy.
Conversations with attendees provided valuable feedback that we used to promote other KDE software, too. When one developer pointed out that most developers work for mobile platforms (which is statistically true -- the best kind of true), this allowed us to point out that the fundamentals of Plasma Desktop and Plasma Mobile were essentially the same. More importantly, we explained that Kirigami makes the distinction between both kind of apps irrelevant: you can develop one app for multiple platforms in one go.
We had Nexus 5 and Raspberry Pi running Plasma Mobile to prove that point, and then KDE Slimbooks 1 & 2, a Pinebook and Pine Rock64, all running KDE neon to illustrate how manufacturers could rely on KDE software for OEM devices. The other point we were out to make is that, despite the wide range of hardware, from low-powered SBCs to sophisticated ultrabooks, Plasma Desktop and Plasma Mobile work well on all of them. The variety of gadgets on display attracted a constant flow of visitors, allowing us to reach a lot of people. The organizers had set up a booth-bingo that required attendees to visit all booths to opt to a big prize, which worked in our favor.
Companies, however, were not the ones we were looking for. Neither Samsung, nor LG, nor Huawei, nor smaller manufacturers were there. This has changed from prior ELC editions, so we still have to identify the events they attend.
Although the developers attending were mostly focused on deeply embedded systems and only superficially interested in front-end, user-friendly interfaces, we still achieved some goals. We worked on convincing more users to adopt Plasma and other KDE software. We got ourselves into the news, and hopefully enticed other manufacturers to talk to us. Last but not least, we made contact with a major tech-event organizer that was interested in having us at their events, and with an electronics DIY manufacturer that may be interested in pre-installing Plasma on one of their kits.
The FOSSASIA Summit 2018 took place in March in Singapore. Attending the summit was a great experience, and the best part was that I had a chance to give a talk titled "How GCompris is impacting school education".
GCompris is one of the projects developed by the KDE Edu team. Essentially, it is a suite of high-quality educational applications mainly aimed at children between the ages of 2 and 10.
GCompris contains many activities designed as games, which helps young children learn in a fun way through animations and graphics. I presented that and much more in my talk, which is available on YouTube. You can also check out my slides from the talk.
Representing KDE at such an important event was an incredible experience. I look forward to contributing to KDE again, and thank the KDE community for their support.
On May 17th 2018, Krita developers and artists from all around the world came to the sleepy provincial town of Deventer to discuss all things Krita-related and do some good, hard work. After all, the best cheese shop in the Netherlands is located in Deventer - as are the Krita Foundation headquarters! We started the sprint on Thursday, and the last people left on the following Tuesday.
Events like these are very important: bringing people together, not just for serious discussions and hacking, but for lunch and dinner and rambling walks. It makes interaction much easier when we go back to our IRC channel, #krita. Also, we didn't have a big sprint in 2017, so the last event like this was in 2016.
So...what did we do? We first had a long meeting where we discussed the following topics:
We received about €2000 a month in donations and have about eighty development subscribers. This is pretty awesome, and goes a long way towards funding Dmitry's work. Fundraisers are always a fun and energizing way to get together with our community. However, Kickstarter is out: it's a bit of a tired formula. Instead we wanted to figure out how to make this more of a festival or a celebration. The 2018 fundraiser didn't have feature development as a target, because…
...2018's focus was zero bugs! Over the prior couple of years we had implemented a lot of features, ported Krita to Qt5, and in general produced astonishing amounts of code. But not everything was done, and we had way too many open bug reports, way too many failing unit tests, way too many features that aren't completely done yet. Our goal for 2018 was to work on that.
We identified a number of areas with "unfinished business" that we needed to get back to. We asked the artists present at the sprint to rank those activities, and this was the result:
Boudewijn would work on:
Dmitry would work on:
Jouni would work on animation leftovers such as:
Wolthera would work on:
Krita 4.1.0 was released on June 27th and we continued doing monthly bugfix releases. We asked the KDE system administrators whether we could have nightly builds of the stable branch so people can test the bugfix releases before we actually release them. Krita 4.1 had lots of animation features, animation cache swapping, session management and the reference images tool, and more.
We also discussed the resource management fixing plan, and worked really hard on making the OpenGL canvas work even smoother (especially on macOS, where it wasn't that smooth). We added ffmpeg to the Windows installer, fixed translation issues and improved autosave reliability. We also fixed animation-related bugs and implemented support for a cross-channel curves filter for color grading.
At the same time, people who weren't present worked on improving OpenEXR file loading (it's multi-threaded now, among other things). They fixed issues with the color picker, simplified its code, and added even more improvements to the animation timeline.
Wolthera, Timothee and Raghukamath also finished porting our manual to Sphinx, so we can generate offline documentation and support translations of the manual (which is over 1000 pages long!).
There were three people who hadn't attended a sprint before: artist Raghukamath, ace Windows developer Alwin Wong, and Valeriy Malov, the maintainer of the KDE Plasma desktop tablet settings utility. Valeriy worked on improving support for Cintiq-like devices during the sprint.
Krita's autumn development sprint coincided with the last week of the fundraiser, in which almost 5 months’ worth of bug fixing got funded.
Eight people attended the sprint: Boudewijn, the maintainer; Dmitry, whose work is being sponsored by the Krita Foundation through our fundraiser; Wolthera, who works on the manual, videos, code and scripting; Ivan, who did the brush vectorization Google Summer of Code project this year; Jouni, who implemented the animation plugin, session management and the reference images tool; Emmet and Eoin who started coding on Krita a short while ago, and who have worked on the blending color picker and kinetic scrolling.
We did a ton of work! Wolthera solved the last few problems in Michael Zhou's Google Summer of Code rewrite of the palette docker. That was merged to master, so it's now part of the Windows and Linux builds. We did some pair programming so the text tool now creates new text with the currently selected color.
Jouni made a lot of progress with the implementation of animation clones and cycles. This allows a set of frames to be "cloned" and appear in several places in your animation.
Then we sat down and distributed bugs to the coders present, and we got rid of over 20 bugs in one session.
We continued to fix bugs for the rest of the week, and also experimented a bit with streaming. We managed to live-stream bug fixing on Twitch! During the stream, we answered questions sent by our users.
Users also voted on what we should concentrate on during the sprint:
Topic | Votes |
---|---|
Papercuts | 164 |
Brush Engine | 103 |
Animation | 88 |
Vector Objects and Tools | 56 |
Layers | 51 |
Text | 36 |
Photoshop layer styles | 28 |
Color Management | 21 |
Resource Management and Tagging | 18 |
Shortcuts and Canvas Input | 12 |
The only real change with prior votes is that Resource Management dropped below Color Management in priority. For the rest, the order is pretty stable.
Wolthera made a cool video showing off gamut masks and the new palette docker, created by two new Krita contributors. We had people from the US, Mexico, Russia, Finland and the Netherlands at the sprint. For three of the attendees, it was their first Krita sprint ever. All in all, it was great to be together again, and we look forward to our next gathering!