diff --git a/reports/ev-2018/GSoC.html b/reports/ev-2018/GSoC.html index 40874fd..c3c97be 100644 --- a/reports/ev-2018/GSoC.html +++ b/reports/ev-2018/GSoC.html @@ -1,69 +1,68 @@

KDE at Google Summer of Code

By Valorie Zimmerman

The Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit flies by quickly - it usually happens over a weekend, and in 2019 it was held from October 12 to October 14. The organization was, as always, on a high level: the hotel prepared the "hospitality room" full of food and drink and shy first-time attendees. Eventually dinner was served there too, followed by the opening session. During the opening session, everyone introduced themselves with "4 words describing your interests" - not as easy as it may sound! With over 300 attendees, it was a great way to let everyone be heard in a meaningful way.

On Friday night, everybody started populating the Chocolate Table. There was so much chocolate that it had moved from one large round table to two long ones by Saturday! Fábián Kristóf from the KDE project Labplot attended as well.

After breakfast on Saturday, sessions began. GSoC Mentor Summit is always organized as an Un-Conference. For those readers who have never attended such an anarchically-organized gathering, it is surprisingly orderly and valuable. My plan was to attend talks and gatherings by others, but I soon began noticing a through-line I thought we should address. The feeling became stronger during Sunday morning, so I added a card on the schedule board with the words in all caps - “BURN OUT”. Only the largest room was left open so I put it there, and it ended up standing-room only.

Thanks to the information Lydia has shared through the years, I was able to give a short story of my own experience and then open it up to the audience. We ended up with 3 runners with 3 microphones so everyone else could unburden themselves, and then reflect on how this experience could help us be better mentors and better organization admins. Burnout is so destructive on an individual level, but it can poison a whole team, too. That large room was going to be the farewell session, but there was so much interest that we were allowed to extend it. The whole experience was incredibly powerful, with everyone sharing their stories so openly and helpfully.

Between Saturday morning and Sunday evening, the weekend was packed with small and large sessions, great small groups and private conversations, good food, a fun party, and some tearful farewells. I had wonderful conversations about Windows and Mac builds, and even had time to eat some delicious chocolate from around the world. This is organized every year by Robert Kaye from Metabrainz, and it is genius!

Some of the lightning talks from this year are especially worth highlighting. Since this is student work from hundreds of organizations around the world, it's just amazing to see the variety. The one that blew me away was about the project of Rimjhim Bhadani who wrote an Android game for teens that encourages them to think about how to help a girl who got her period when she was unprepared. The game was designed under the auspices of Systers.org, and can be downloaded from the aforementioned link. Seeing the game on the screen was really impressive, but the gutsiness of the student to choose this and bring it to fruition was simply mind-blowing. If you ever get a chance to attend a GSoC Mentor summit, dive in and revel in the experience!


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diff --git a/reports/ev-2018/LAS.html b/reports/ev-2018/LAS.html index f2382da..bd3c3a2 100644 --- a/reports/ev-2018/LAS.html +++ b/reports/ev-2018/LAS.html @@ -1,89 +1,88 @@

Libre Application Summit

Based on a blog post by Albert Astals

Early in September, Aleix Pol and Albert Astals attended the Libre Application Summit 2018 in Denver.

The Libre Application Summit intends to bring together all people involved in making Free Software applications so they can meet and share ideas. Although it is somewhat biased towards GNOME/Flatpak (it is, after all, organized by GNOME), there was a strong presence of KDE developers, too.

The Summit kicked off with a motivational talk on how to make sure developers enjoy the fact that "Open Source has won", even though there are people who don't know it. The introductory talk was followed by some Flatpak related talks, ranging from the new freedesktop-sdk runtime, to some very technical details about how OSTree works. The session also included a talk by Aleix on how KDE is planning to approach the release of Flatpaks.

The next day, Albert started the cycle of talks by explaining how he and Christoph Feck are managing the KDE Applications releases. The audience appreciated the good work KDE is carrying out in this department and Albert got some interesting follow-up questions.

The session continued with talks on how to engage the "non-typical" Free software people, like designers, students, teachers, and other groups. After lunch, the Elementary people gave a few talks, followed by another talk from Aleix. In this talk, he focused on which apps will run on Plasma devices (spoiler: all of them!). The second day wrapped up with a quiz sponsored by System76.

The last day of talks started again with Albert speaking, this time about how the many advantages of Qt can help developers build apps. Again there were some interesting questions, this time from people worrying if QtWidgets was going to be discontinued. Albert reassured the audience that this was not the case, although it seems that the Qt Company may need to address these concerns at some point.

Next up, there was an intriguing talk about a Fedora project that intends to create a distribution built exclusively with Flatpaks. The final talks of LAS 2018 covered a wide range of topics, from how to fight vandalism in crowdsourced data, to the status of Librem 5, and including an engaging chat about the status of Free Software in research.

Overall, the conference was really enjoyable, although a bit small and slightly too GNOME-centric to appeal to a wider crowd. Still, this was only the second edition of the event, so no doubt it will improve in all aspects.


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diff --git a/reports/ev-2018/PIM_sprint.html b/reports/ev-2018/PIM_sprint.html index 250bee1..9682490 100644 --- a/reports/ev-2018/PIM_sprint.html +++ b/reports/ev-2018/PIM_sprint.html @@ -1,75 +1,74 @@

KDE PIM Sprint, April 2018, Barcelona

Compiled from notes made by Dan Vratil, David Faure, Kevin Ottens, Volker Krause, Sandro Knauß and others

Like every year, in 2018 the PIM developers met in Toulouse for a bit of bugfixing. We mended things in Kontact, Akonadi, Kmail, and beyond. We also had time for non-coding business, like handling outstanding review requests from new contributors.

Here's a list of things we managed to cover:

Memory hole support

The big issue here is that we need to update the headers outside the mimetreeparser, like Subject or From/To fields. That's why mimetreeaparser should get an interface, so plugins can change headers. Another header that would benefit from that interface is a DKIM signature check on the mail that would update the DKIM status based on actual data.

KMail

We improved security when encountering encrypted emails with external references. We also discussed header validation support (memory hole, DKIM) and how to integrate it into mimetreeparser, as well as how to feed that into the mail renderer.

Akonadi

We improved Akonadi Console to simplify debugging notifications and monitors, and added a new Logging tab with logs from all Akonadi apps. The Debbugger view was also improved, and the Akonadi Search now supports searching for encrypted emails.

We finished Notification Payloads - a change that will hopefully result in a substantial performance boost and IO reduction by easing on the amount of SQL queries we do, especially during sync. The idea is to send the changed entities as part of change notifications, so that clients don't have to query the entity from Akonadi after they receive the notification.

KItinerary, Kontact's new trip-planning software, received improvements and new features.

KItinerary

The newcomer to the Kontact suite, KItinerary, helps you plan your travels and now tries harder to extract boarding times from pkpass files. We actually carried out a live test of the itinerary app passing manual and automatic boarding pass inspection on two airports. To supplement the live test, we acquired more test data from sprint attendees, and thanks to this, managed to make EasyJet IATA BCBP data parsing work. We also fixed the Iberia boarding pass extraction.

We implemented the handling of merging codeshare flight data, and reworked the data extraction in KMail when multiple data elements are found. This is now all merged together to further improve the data completeness.

The boarding passes/tickets for trains and buses are accessible in the app, too. In theory, this will enable the app to help you travel on SNCF when booked via trainline.eu. Finally, all the reservation data now gets attached to ical events created from it, so it's fully synced to other devices.

General Improvements

One of our ongoing efforts is migrating the PIM libraries to KDE Frameworks. We have removed dependencies on old libraries in the applications within Kontact.

In the annoying bugs department, we fixed the issue that caused the IMAP resource to get stuck if the connection was lost between the OK and Login steps, as well as during Login. We also fixed the bug that could cause data loss when the connection was lost.

In other departments, we created prettier icons for the Kontact side pane, corrected bugs in the OAuth login and Ruqola (the Qt-based RocketChat client), handled outstanding review requests from new contributors, and worked on integration the data generated in Kontact (calendars, tasks, etc.) with Android devices.

We would like to thank all our sponsors and donators for making this sprint possible.


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diff --git a/reports/ev-2018/QTCon_Brazil.html b/reports/ev-2018/QTCon_Brazil.html index 9ce4ca6..3fe09c7 100644 --- a/reports/ev-2018/QTCon_Brazil.html +++ b/reports/ev-2018/QTCon_Brazil.html @@ -1,65 +1,64 @@
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QtCon Brasil

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QtCon Brasil

By Kai Uwe Broulik (Original post)

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In Early November, I had the chance to give a keynote speech at QtCon Brasil in São Paulo, Brazil. It was the second leg of a three weeks long trip across the Americas that began with a company meeting in the US.

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In Early November of 2018, I had the chance to give a keynote speech at QtCon Brasil in São Paulo, Brazil. It was the second leg of a three weeks long trip across the Americas that began with a company meeting in the US.

After a ten hour flight on the Airbus A330 pictured, I arrived at Guarulhos airport in the morning. I was lucky to have found myself on a half-empty plane with an entire row of seats for me alone. The conference lasted Thursday to Sunday with the first two days reserved for embedded programming and 3D development trainings. Not having signed up for any of these, I took the opportunity to explore the city on Friday. I visited the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) and walked over to the district of Liberdade which is home to the largest Japanese community outside Japan. Unfortunately, I couldn't visit the Museum of the Japanese Immigration as they didn't accept credit cards.

Saturday and Sunday is when the main talks happened. With my rudimentary Latin and Spanish knowledge I tried to make the most of them, since they were all held in Portugese. Nonetheless, I quite enjoyed the talks about Qt for Python, a live demo of a setup using Boot to Qt, and Qt "for Robots".

My speech was Sunday morning. Entitled "Plasma for Device Creation", I explained to the audience what Plasma is, how flexible it is, and that it can be virtually anything you want it to be. An important part of the presentation was to present ways to get in touch with the KDE Community and who to approach when you want to realize this amazing product vision you might have. While there was no recording of my talk, you can download the slides as a PDF.

Many thanks to the organizers of QtCon Brasil for hosting the event, spreading the word about Qt down there, and inviting me over to my first trip to the South American continent!


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diff --git a/reports/ev-2018/XDC.html b/reports/ev-2018/XDC.html index 4d613e7..38040f4 100644 --- a/reports/ev-2018/XDC.html +++ b/reports/ev-2018/XDC.html @@ -1,157 +1,156 @@

X.org Developers' Conference

By Roman Gilg (Original post)

In September 2018, the X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC) was held in A Coruña, Spain. I participated as a Plasma/KWin developer. My main goal was to connect with developers from other projects and companies working on open source technology to show them that the KDE community can be a reliable and valuable partner, both now and in the future.

Instead of recounting chronologically what went down at the conference, let us look at three key groups of attendees who are relevant to KWin and Plasma: the graphics drivers and kernel developers, upstream userland developers, and colleagues working on other compositor projects.

Graphics drivers and kernel developers

If you search YouTube for videos of talks from XDC conferences, you will notice many speakers are graphic drivers developers directly employed by hardware vendors. The reason is that hardware vendors have enough resources to employ open source developers and send them to conferences. They benefit greatly from contributing directly to open source projects.

At the conference, I had the opportunity to talk to Nvidia engineers. They were friendly and eager to discuss their technical solutions, despite the fact that there were things that they could not disclose because of the proprietary nature of Nvidia's technologies. They did say they would provide us with some hardware for testing purposes, however. This is something we appreciate and our KWin contributors received some Nvidia hardware which allowed them to troubleshoot some of the problems our users may experience with Nvidia cards.

The situation looks completely different for Intel and AMD. Intel has a long-standing track record of open development of their own drivers and contributing to generic open source solutions supported by other vendors. Not too long ago, AMD decided to open source their most commonly used graphics drivers on Linux. In both cases, it is a pleasure to work with their latest hardware, and talking to their developers at XDC was as great as I had imagined. They genuinely care about boosting the whole ecosystem and finding suitable solutions for everyone. I want to explicitly mention Martin Peres from Intel and Harry Wentland from AMD. During our in-depth discussions, they showed great interest in improving the collaboration between engineers working on the low-level code and us developers working in userland.

We have yet to mention ARM. Although they were "Gold Sponsors" of the event just like Nvidia, Intel and AMD, their contribution to the conference in terms of content was minimal (most likely because their technology is mostly closed-source). However, several extremely talented hackers that provide open-source drivers for ARM Mali GPUs presented their work at XDC, and I have the highest respect for their efforts.

X.Org and freedesktop.org upstream developers

Linux graphics drivers are cool and all, but without XServer, Wayland, and other auxiliary cross-vendor user space libraries, there would be not much to show the user. After all, it is the X.Org Developer's conference. X.org is most notably the home to the XServer, and maybe in the future, governance-wise, to freedesktop.org as well. So after looking at low-level driver development, what role did these projects and their developers play at the conference?

Of course, the dichotomy from the previous paragraph is not that pronounced. Several graphics drivers are part of mesa, which is again part of freedesktop.org. Many graphics drivers developers are also contributing to userland, or are involved in organizational aspects of X.Org and freedesktop.org.

One of the more prominent organizational aspects is project hosting. Daniel Stone gave a talk about the freedesktop.org transition to GitLab; a rather huge project that was still ongoing at the time of writing.

There were not that many technical presentations about XServer, Wayland and other high-level components. After seeing some lightning talks on the first day of the conference, I decided to hold a lightning talk myself about my Xwayland GSOC project from 2017. You can watch a video of my presentation online. Among other interesting talks, Drew De Vault presented a demo of wlroot's layer shell. In the future, we hope to increase the amount of talks on the topic of higher-level user space graphics stack.

Compositor developers

We were a somewhat special crowd at XDC. Some attendees were from wlroots; there was Guido from Purism, and me from KWin. We were united by the fact that, to my knowledge, all of us were attending XDC for the first time.

Looking at previous conferences, the involvement of compositor developers was marginal. My proclaimed goal - and I believe the goal of many others as well - is to change this. From people working on embedded to desktop developers, everyone will benefit from working together where possible, and from exchanging information with each other, with upstream and with hardware vendors. I believe X.Org and freedesktop.org can be a perfect platform for that.

Final remarks on organisation

The organisation of the conference was great. I would like to extend a huge thanks to Igalia for hosting XDC in their beautiful hometown. The conference schedule was really accommodating, with three long breaks every day and long pauses between the talks, allowing the attendees to talk to each other. On the downside, all the attendees were spread out over the city in different hotels, which made post-conference gatherings a bit inconvenient. Following the Akademy approach - meaning, recommending a reasonably-priced default hotel for everyone - could make the next XDC even better.


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diff --git a/reports/ev-2018/abwg.html b/reports/ev-2018/abwg.html index 84bb777..be3e331 100644 --- a/reports/ev-2018/abwg.html +++ b/reports/ev-2018/abwg.html @@ -1,52 +1,51 @@

KDE Advisory Board Report

By Thomas Pfeiffer

The KDE Advisory Board is a group of representatives of KDE e.V.'s patrons and other select organizations that are close to KDE's mission and community. It currently has 13 members, and there is a KDE e.V. working group with community members acting as direct contacts for our partners. The Advisory Board holds three calls every year to report on KDE's activities, receive feedback, and discuss topics of shared interest.

One of these shared topics in 2018 was the planned change to the EU Copyright Directive. The plans contained some clauses particularly concerning for Free and Open Source Software projects because of the so-called "upload filters" in Article 13. This change would have made hosting of source code repositories and free sharing of code difficult or even impossible.

One of the results of the Advisory Board discussions was that KDE e.V. got engaged in the "Save Code Share" initiative, resulting in an open letter to EU policymakers where KDE e.V. is one of the signatories. The results are positive, as it seems we managed to prevent the worst consequences of the original plan.

The Advisory Board is a place and a symbol of KDE's collaboration with other organizations and communities firmly standing behind the ideals of Free and Open Source Software.


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diff --git a/reports/ev-2018/akademy.html b/reports/ev-2018/akademy.html index 0861181..b4f8fc8 100644 --- a/reports/ev-2018/akademy.html +++ b/reports/ev-2018/akademy.html @@ -1,273 +1,272 @@

Akademy, August 2018, Vienna

By Devaja Shah, Ivana Isadora Devčić and Paul Brown

Akademy 2018 got off to a wet start with rains accompanying all attendees pouring into Vienna for KDE's largest annual community conference. Although the Pre-Registration event was held on Day Zero (Friday, August 10) and it was a fun-filled affair, Akademy kicked off in earnest on Saturday, with talks, panels and demo sessions.

Day 1

Dan Bielefeld, the Technical Director of the Transitional Justice Working Group kicked off the event with a sobering talk on the work they do to identify North Korean locations of mass burial and execution sites using mapping technologies. He also delivered insight into how North Korea and the Kim regime operate, and how his organization gleans information both from interviews with refugees and from studying satellite imagery.

Dan Bielefeld explains how they help map atrocities performed by the Kim regime at Akademy 2018.

Although the topic of the suffering of North Koreans is grim, there is a silver lining, says Dan: One day there will be a transition, there will come a day when the Kim regime will end and North Koreans will regain the freedom that they have been denied for over 70 years. The work of the Transitional Justice Working Group will also help with that. Finding out what happened to loved ones and bringing those responsible for the atrocities to justice will be a crucial part of helping the nation heal.

And it makes sense, says Dan, for the Transitional Justice Working Group to work with both Free Software and Free Software communities. The software offers the group a degree of security and control they cannot find in closed source applications; and Free Software communities uphold the same values Dan's group is fighting for; that is, the right to privacy and personal freedom.

Quite appropriately, after Dan's keynote, Adriaan de Groot ran a panel where members discussed the matter of privacy. Developing privacy-respecting software is one of KDE's main goals, and the panelists explained how developing Free and open Personal Digital Assistants like Mycroft was crucial to protecting users from snooping corporations.

Another thing we rarely think about, but is a source of concern with regard to personal information, are trip planners. The amount of sensitive information that we unwittingly share by letting opaque apps tell us when and where to catch our flight is staggering. Since the 2017 Randa sprint, there are KDE developers actively working on a truly open and private solution that will help solve this problem.

The panel also discussed the state of GnuPG in Kmail. GnuPG is the framework that allows users to encrypt and decrypt email messages that would otherwise be sent in clear text -- a big privacy concern. At this stage of play, GnuPG is tightly integrated into Kmail and is not only convenient for end users, but has also proved to be immune to recent vulnerabilities that have affected other email clients.

Combined with the underlying policy of all KDE apps of never collecting data subvertly or otherwise, KDE is sticking strictly to its goal of preserving user privacy.

Neofytos Kolokotronis explains how to facilitate the onboarding of new members into the community.

Neofytos Kolokotronis talked about the progress of another of KDE's main goals, namely the onboarding of new users. Neofytos explained to attendees the progress the working group had made so far and where they wanted to go to. He had some advice on how to help new users join KDE, such as having good and clear documentation, mentoring new contributors, and building connections outside your immediate niche.

In his talk titled Winds of Change - FOSS in India, Wrishiraj Kaushik spoke about the current scenario of FOSS in India, his experience leading the SuperX project, and integrating KDE with it.

The Indian union government has a nation-wide recommendation in place for the use, promotion and development of Free and Open Source software. Despite this, FOSS adoption has remained low in the country. The decision taken by some state governments to not adopt these recommendations in conjunction with the aggressive marketing carried out by proprietary software vendors in India has seriously hindered the use of Free Software. SuperX, however, has managed to find a place within the government and a few Indian universities thanks to its user-centric approach. SuperX has deployed 30,000 KDE shipments -- one of the largest deployments in the world, and there are 20,000 more in the works.

This was followed by a panel discussion by Lydia, Valorie and Bhushan in which they told the community about our KDE student programs and explained how to help with maintaining them. It was a talk of high relevance, given our community-wide goal to streamline the onboarding process for new contributors, and the fact that a large part of our new contributor base comes through our organized mentoring programs, namely Google Summer of Code, Google Code-in and Season of KDE.

Mirko Boehm presented a talk on the genesis of Quartermaster, a toolchain driven by Endocode and supported by Siemens and Google. Quartermaster implements industry best practices of license compliance management. It generates compliance reports by analyzing data from the CI environment and building graphs for analysis, primarily performing a combination of build time analysis and static code analysis.

Atelier/AtCore allows user to control their 3D printers from the comfort of their desktops.

Lays Rodrigues talked about Atelier, a cross-platform application designed to help you control your 3D printer, with support for most printers with open source firmware. Lays demoed the various features of Atelier during her talk, including video monitoring of the printer, 3D preview of the print design, temperature graphs and more.

Zoltan Padrah gave a talk on KTechLab and explained how he discovered it as a student of electronics engineering in 2008. KTechLab is a program that helps simulate electronic circuits and programs running on microcontrollers. It was migrated to the KDE infrastructure and joined KDE as a project in 2017. The developers' upcoming plans are to release KTechLab for Qt4 and Qt5, and to port it to KDE Frameworks 5, as well as add new features like support for simulating automation systems for mechanics, and KiCad import/export.

Since Day 1 of Akademy was so full of content, this is just a summary of a few of the sessions we enjoyed. There were many more talks on all topics, ranging from containerizing KDE's graphical apps, to an end users' perspective of using Kontact in a professional environment.

Day 2

Sunday started with a wonderfully insightful keynote by Claudia Garad, the Executive Director of Wikimedia Austria. She focused her talk on some of the challenges that organizations like hers face when trying to bring about more inclusivity and diversity within their communities.

Claudia Garad from Wikimedia talks about the challenges of inclusivity within open communities.

She emphasized the importance of making underrepresented communities feel more welcome and heard within the organization, then went on to speak about how she perceived KDE as being quite ahead of Wikimedia in some aspects, especially when it came to reaching these goals.

One of the things she thought brought a positive vibe to the KDE community was that "KDE embraces cuteness", she said while displaying a slide with the "pile of Konquis" picture. On a more serious note, she said that through events such as Akademy, sprints and gatherings around the world, you can bring together people from immensely diverse backgrounds and have them work towards building a stronger community.

Speakers covered a wide variety of topics in the afternoon. Alan Pope from Canonical, for example, told us about Snapcraft, a web-based tool that makes it incredibly simple to build a Linux package out of code just pushed onto git. Meanwhile, Oliver Smith, the project lead of postmarketOS, spoke about the experimental phone OS based on Alpine Linux and plans for integration with Plasma Mobile.

Meanwhile, David Edmundson was not only predicting where KDE's Plasma desktop would be going next, but also numbering the potential pitfalls it would have to avoid on its way getting there. One of the things in store for Plasma users is full browser integration.

Kai Uwe Broulik explained what was working, and how you would be able to control every aspect of your web browser with Plasma's integrated tools. At that point controls for playback of videos and music on many popular sites using desktop widgets, including the likes of KDE Connect was already workinmg.

Talking of playing music, Camilo Higuita told us about the progress of VVAVE, a next-generation audio player that is fully convergent (it integrates both with your Plasma desktop and your mobile phone), and is but one part of Camilo's idea for an open audio streaming service.

Volker Krause demonstrates Plasma Mobile on an embedded device.

Andreas Cord-Landwehr gave a talk on Yocto and how to use it to build images and SDKs and to create KDE-powered devices with Yocto. In a a similar vein, Volker Krause showed off a Raspberry Pi-based device running Plasma Mobile, also on Yocto. The excitement of the KDE developers when it comes to running KDE software on mobile devices is electric, and the audience was buzzing during these talks.

The day ended with Sponsor Talks by The Qt Company, BlueSystems, Canonical, openSUSE, CodeThink, and Mycroft.

Finally, there was the Akademy Awards ceremony. The Akademy Awards are a way of honoring members that have done outstanding work for the benefit of the whole community.

The Application Akademy award went to Aditya Mehra for their work on the Mycroft integration providing KDE with a Free speech assistant that is Free as in freedom.

The Non-Application Akademy Award went to Valorie Zimmerman for their work on driving KDE's mentoring programs and the Community Working Group, and being one of KDE's good souls.

There were three Jury awards this year. They went to Sebastian Kügler for their many years of relentless hacking and more (Plasma, KDE Marketing, years in the KDE e.V. Board); David Edmundson for their work on Telepathy, porting applications to Frameworks 5, Plasma, KWin, KWayland, and being the crazy guy around; and to Mario Fux for supporting KDE over many years through organizing the Randa meetings.

The Akademy Team were thanked with the Organizational Award to Stefan Derkits and the whole team responsible for putting together Akademy 2018.

Days 3 to 7

During the rest of the week, attendees held BoFs (Birds-of-a-Feather meetings), more informal presentations, meetings and coding sessions, where they tackled all sorts of topics.

The Plasma and Plasma Mobile team, for example, discussed not only technical issues, but also covered ways of recruiting more contributors to the team.

How to build up the KDE community is a common theme at Akademy, and Sandro Andrade led a BoF on "KDE in the Americas". The attendees discussed events and activities in the all parts of the American continent, and tried to identify issues that hinder the growth of the community there.

There were also sessions about KDE Applications on Android. Designers discussed the look and feel of Plasma and its applications, and the Promotion and Communication team wondered how they could best let the world know about all the great things going within our community.


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diff --git a/reports/ev-2018/board.html b/reports/ev-2018/board.html index 96b3eab..ff5367e 100644 --- a/reports/ev-2018/board.html +++ b/reports/ev-2018/board.html @@ -1,70 +1,71 @@

KDE e.V. Board of Directors


Lydia Pintscher
President

Eike Hein
Treasurer and Vice President

Aleix Pol i Gonzàlez
Vice President

Thomas Pfeiffer
Board Member

Sandro Andrade
Board Member (until August)

Andy Betts
Board Member (from August)

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diff --git a/reports/ev-2018/board_meeting.html b/reports/ev-2018/board_meeting.html index 5d9356a..11cff07 100644 --- a/reports/ev-2018/board_meeting.html +++ b/reports/ev-2018/board_meeting.html @@ -1,82 +1,81 @@

KDE Board Meeting, April 2018, Berlin

By Thomas Pfeiffer and Andy Betts

From left to right: Sandro, Thomas, Aleix, Eike and Lydia.

On the last weekend of April, The KDE e.V. Board met in our new office in Berlin for 2018's only Board sprint.

The complete Board, Lydia, Aleix, Eike, Sandro and Thomas, attended and Petra, the Board's Office Manager, joined us on Saturday.

We discussed strategic topics such as generating ideas for spending the large donation we had received from the Pineapple Fund. We also worked on opening the call for locations for Akademy to continents other than Europe. We worked on operational topics, like creating a list of KDE e.V.'s inventory and optimizing the process for getting printed promo material to conferences, and discussed administrative duties resulting from the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

A big topic was the KDE Community Goals and how the board could support the goal teams even better. We noted we were missing clear criteria for choosing which organizations to engage in a strategic partnerships with, or whom to hire, so we started working on guidelines.

Other things we worked on were getting rid of blockers to KDE e.V.'s optimal functioning, such as kicking the process for the KDE website redesign into higher gear; solving the problems with our supporting membership management solution, CiviCRM; or finding ways to motivate KDE e.V.'s working groups to be more active.

All in all, we had a very productive weekend, solved many tasks and got started on many more.

The weekend wasn't all work, though, as we also had a small housewarming party for our new office and were joined by some KDE e.V. members who were in town.


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diff --git a/reports/ev-2018/educode.html b/reports/ev-2018/educode.html index caa1bd0..ad278dc 100644 --- a/reports/ev-2018/educode.html +++ b/reports/ev-2018/educode.html @@ -1,71 +1,70 @@

EduCode

By Paul Brown

View of EduCode's exposition area.

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.

KDE booth showcasing GCompris at Educode 2018.

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.


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diff --git a/reports/ev-2018/elc_eu.html b/reports/ev-2018/elc_eu.html index 26cb72e..d2b3a15 100644 --- a/reports/ev-2018/elc_eu.html +++ b/reports/ev-2018/elc_eu.html @@ -1,51 +1,50 @@

Embedded Linux Conference - Europe

By Paul Brown

ELC Europe's expo area.

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.

KDE booth showcasing GCompris at Educode 2018.

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.


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diff --git a/reports/ev-2018/featured-article.html b/reports/ev-2018/featured-article.html index 51f6582..acfe416 100644 --- a/reports/ev-2018/featured-article.html +++ b/reports/ev-2018/featured-article.html @@ -1,153 +1,152 @@

Featured Article ‒ KDE Goals

By Paul Brown

One of the most appealing things about being a volunteer in a Free Software community is that you can work on whatever you feel like. However, communities need to not only provide an umbrella for the free spirit of its participants, but also have common goals that move everybody in the same general direction and fulfil the shared ambitions of the whole.

So, how does the KDE community decide where it wants to take the project? Every once in a while, we hold a Request for Goals. KDE members are encouraged to submit their grand ideas that will lay out the long-term objectives for the rest of community. Proposals are voted on democratically, again, by the community. This ensures it is truly the people that guide the KDE project to wherever it wants to go.

Back in 2017, the community made such a vote and set the goals for KDE for the following three to five years. The three most voted goals were:

  • Improve the usability and productivity for basic software
  • Offer users a complete software environment that helps them to protect their privacy
  • Streamline the onboarding of new contributors

Let's look at the progress that the community has made in each of these areas.

Improve the usability and productivity for basic software

The productivity and usability team work constantly fixing bugs and papercuts so that Plasma offers a consistent and pleasurable experience for users.

Nate Graham proposed improving the usability of KDE's software to make it more accessible and user-friendly for a wider variety of users. Nate argued that, although KDE apps and environments in general boasted a "long list of features that are genuinely useful for normal people's typical use cases", small but noticeable inconsistencies and niggling usability issues sometimes marred KDE's semblance of maturity with casual users. Focusing on irksome details of the most common and commonly used KDE software, such as Plasma, Dolphin, Okular and Discover, would be the first step towards polishing the whole user experience.

To achieve this goal, developers are encouraged to focus not only on adding new features, but on refining existing ones. An example is making sure that applications in the KDE family share common keyboard shortcuts. Something as trivial as having the [Ctrl] + [L] shortcut taking the focus to the URL bar in the Dolphin file manager as well as in KDE's default image viewer, Gwenview, gives a sensation of consistency and boosts the user's productivity since they don't have to train their muscle memory for each individual KDE app.

Nate chronicles the progress by publishing weekly reports on his blog, explaining the changes made to solve those “papercut” issues. Every new release of KDE Applications now lists the usability and design upgrades alongside new features. Taken separately, those upgrades may seem minor, but they substantially improve the users' experience and the general impression of KDE’s sofware among new and long-time users alike.

Protecting users' privacy

KDE aims to protect users' privacy and uphold their digital rights through Plasma, Plasma Mobile and KDE applications.

In synch with KDE's vision statement, Sebastian Kügler noted that "KDE is in a unique position to offer users a complete software environment that helps them protect their privacy". Being in that position, Sebastian explained, KDE as a FLOSS community is morally obliged to do its utmost to provide the most privacy-protecting environment for users.

This is especially true since KDE has been developing not only for desktop devices, but also for mobile - an area where the respect for users' privacy is nearly non-existent. Sebastian argued that the intrusion on users' personal lives is very dangerous. Users can have their livelihood and even personal safety put at risk when their confidential data makes its way into the hands of unscrupulous companies, scammers, or hostile government agencies.

To make sure that KDE’s environment and apps protect users' privacy, developers have been working on several measures, such as stopping applications from exposing private data by default or defaulting to using privacy-protecting protocols when communicating with the outside world. Applications are being re-written to require the bare minimum user information to operate, and only use it when it is essential.

Concrete measures the privacy team is carrying out range from the very simple - like inserting a tray icon to indicate the microphone is in use, so you can actually see when it is active - to much deeper changes that affect the whole desktop, like "Torifying" all communications from all native applications. This would have the effect of making it difficult for snoopers to track petitions and messages back to the emitter. Also in the works is a proxy that will control what leaves your system, as well as protections for when you are on the move and may find yourself interacting on an insecure or hostile network.

The work being carried out on Plasma Mobile, KDE's mobile device-enabled environment, is moving in the same direction as that of the Plasma Desktop. Indeed, most Plasma developers are also working to some extent on the mobile version. Furthermore, KDE frameworks such as Kirigami are designed to allow app developers to produce utilities for both platforms (as well as Android, iOS, Windows and macOS) simultaneously. Besides, working as we are with hardware manufacturers, KDE expects to be instrumental in the creation of a secure and privacy-respecting mobile phone with a user-friendly environment and a full suite of applications in the next few years.

Streamline the onboarding of new contributors

Although we have made many improvements to KDE's development infrastructure and tools over the years, there are still several things we can do to streamline the access for contributors. Thinking of ways to get more people involved in the development, Neofytos Kolokotronis proposed measures to simplify newcomer participation within KDE.

Thanks to Community onboarding efforts, nearly half the attendees were new KDE members at Akademy 2018.

A year on, "the biggest achievement of the Onboarding goal is that it has been adopted by the wider community as a long-term task" says Neofytos. "[I]t is an aspect that contributors nowadays consider when making decisions within their projects". The degree to which onboarding policies have been adopted has had clear effects. At Akademy 2018, nearly 1 in 2 participants were new contributors and there was a notable increase in new e.V. member registrations compared to the previous year. These are but two signs that the onboarding team are contributing to building a wider, more engaged community.

As long as a community grows, it has to establish mechanisms to accommodate the new people who join. The onboarding team is well aware of this, and has formed a KDE Welcome team that acts as the first contact for people interested in contributing to KDE. The members of the Welcome team respond to newcomers’ questions, offer them the much-needed help to go through their first steps of getting involved, and connect them with various KDE projects and teams.

The onboarding team is also putting in place the technical means by spearheading a migration from Phabricator to GitLab. They are also supporting a move to a Matrix-based instant messaging system; a move that will hopefully satisfy both the users of the classic IRC system and those who prefer more modern IM services, such as Telegram.

The team has also taken on the task of updating KDE community's web pages - another way of facilitating entry into the community. The Get Involved page on our Community Wiki has been updated, and is actively maintained to successfully guide newcomers to the projects they would like to contribute to. The Wiki page now provides all the necessary information and documentation to get started. Furthermore, a documentation specialist has been hired in order to assess the state of KDE’s documentation, prioritize our needs, and pave the path for follow-up projects to execute the work.

Looking towards the future, the team is also planning an onboarding sprint [8]. One of the things they plan to tackle is making it easier for newcomers to set up a development environment and start coding on KDE projects.

Conclusion

The goals selected by the KDE community have resonated with its members and given KDE something to work towards as a group.

Of course, this does not mean that individual ambitions are hindered in any way. It is more like the elements of the goals get woven into the fabric of each project. Hence the usability team inspires project leaders to create user-friendly and consistent interfaces for their applications; the work of the onboarding team ensures continuity and protects against burnout by helping projects recruit new contributors; and the protection of users' data is not an afterthought, but is worked on from the start.

These goals contribute to giving the KDE community its focus, and make our overarching aim of building "a world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy" more attainable.



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diff --git a/reports/ev-2018/fiwg.html b/reports/ev-2018/fiwg.html index 8996496..29511e1 100644 --- a/reports/ev-2018/fiwg.html +++ b/reports/ev-2018/fiwg.html @@ -1,135 +1,136 @@

Financial working group

By Eike Hein, David Edmundson and Neofytos Kolokotronis

In 2018, KDE e.V. received several large one-time donations raising our annual income to a record 591,000 EUR. In addition the growth of our income through regular sponsorship and donations exceeded our expectations.

Also in 2018, we increased our spending on development sprints by 12,000 EUR and provided financial support for more people to attend our Akademy conference than in any previous year.

These are strongly linked developments: As our community and ecosystem experience growth, so does the overall profile of our financial activities. The expanded activities then enable our community to attract additional sponsors and benefactors.

In 2019, we continue to drive forward this virtuous cycle. We will put a larger percentage of the organization's accumulated savings, which grew in 2018 by 381,000 EUR, into the community's activities, e.g. its elected long-term goals, than in 2018.

2016 Financial Data

Given the way KDE e.V. operates ‒ getting sponsorship deals and fundraisers at different times of the year, organizing Akademy in a different quarter every year, getting money before or after events the money is for ‒ we present herein the KDE e.V. financial information for 2017. Therefore, data for 2018 will be available in the 2019 report.

Income (€):
Individual Supporters: 41.900,00
Donations (excluding large donations): 74.281,00
Google Summer of Code: 11.055,00
Akademy: 36.844,00
Other Donations: 427.536,00
Total: 591.616,00

Expenses (€):
Sprints and meetings (sans Akademy): 61.054,00
Akademy: 68.459,00
Personnel costs: 28.363,00
Other: 52.152,00
Total: 210.028,00

Financial Support: If you or your company are interested in financially supporting the KDE Community on an ongoing basis, please visit the Supporting Members page on the KDE e.V. website.
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diff --git a/reports/ev-2018/fossasia.html b/reports/ev-2018/fossasia.html index d2c538a..4fa7675 100644 --- a/reports/ev-2018/fossasia.html +++ b/reports/ev-2018/fossasia.html @@ -1,57 +1,56 @@

FOSSASIA

By Nitish Chauhan (Original post)

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.


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diff --git a/reports/ev-2018/highlights.html b/reports/ev-2018/highlights.html index 40b0f46..3498e96 100644 --- a/reports/ev-2018/highlights.html +++ b/reports/ev-2018/highlights.html @@ -1,188 +1,187 @@
By the Promo Team

Plasma does Hardware

Manufacturers took notice of Plasma's adaptability in 2018 and started installing KDE's desktop on their devices. Slimbook took the lead and released a KDE version of their sleek ultrabook back in January 2017. Then they upped the ante in February 2018 with the KDE Slimbook II, which came with more powerful hardware and a customized KDE neon operating system.

While Slimbook aimed for the higher end of the ultrabook market, Pine64 decided to go with "affordable" when they released the Pinebook. This thin and light netbook is built around their ARM-based single-board computer, and costs only 99 USD. It turns out that Plasma is perfectly adapted for that too, and developers collaborated with Pine64 to make sure everything worked smoothly out of the box.

Pine64 was not done, though. Towards the end of the year, they announced they were working on a Linux-based mobile device, dubbed the PinePhone. The PinePhone will run the postmarketOS Linux distribution and Plasma Mobile as its graphical environment.

Purism also announced its Librem 5 in 2018. This mobile phone is designed to protect users' privacy. Purism and KDE developers are working together to guarantee that Plasma Mobile will also work on the device.

Finally, Mycroft, creators of the successful open source IA personal assistant, are building the version 2 of their Mark device, and KDE is developing the interface. The original device used LEDs to display information, but Mycroft Mark II comes with a touchscreen. Plasma developers started collaborating with Mycroft engineers in November 2018 to bring KDE goodness to the intelligent speaker.

Kdenlive Lives...

New developers and team members breathed new life into KDE's full-featured video editor, Kdenlive, in 2018. The team released no less than four versions throughout the year. At the same time, the developers were working on a major refactoring of the back-end code that culminated in version 19.04, released in April 2019.

Kdenlive team members also worked hard on community outreach and promotion, organizing virtual Kdenlive Cafés. In the Cafés, users asked about anything Kdenlive-related, commented on features, and pitched suggestions. The team also held sprints, delivered talks and ran workshops.

All this work has resulted in Kdenlive becoming one of the best and most well-known open source video editors in the field.

Updating Userbase

Documenters have been updating Userbase since September 2018. Userbase is the wiki aimed at KDE users and enthusiasts. The old screenshots from the KDE 3 and KDE 4 eras are now gone, and Userbase pages show the improvements of the new versions of Plasma and KDE applications. Writers have added several new tutorials, and plenty of other content has also been updated.

This effort is part of the ongoing goal to provide more helpful information for KDE users.

KDE's Influence Grows

Most of KDE's success stories are incredibly impressive, but would go less noticed if it weren't for the contributors who spread the word outside the KDE community.

The Promo team ramped up the social media activity in 2018 - and it paid off. KDE's Twitter was started in September 2008, and in nine years it reached 48 600 followers. That is 5400 followers a year, which is not bad at all. However, in the last two years, the Promo team has averaged over 9000 followers a year, pushing the total readership well over 65 000 followers.

Likewise, in September 2018 the Promo team took over KDE's LinkedIn account. The aim was to reach an audience of business-oriented people. We doubled the number of followers in 4 months, and the growth has continued constantly ever since.

As for appearances in press, in 2017 KDE was mentioned slightly less than 80 times. In 2018, mentions grew to 120 times. KDE's environments, applications and technologies are mentioned in influential online publications regularly now.

This has also helped to increase the number of contributions. More contributors allow us to set up our own events better, sponsor developers so they can attend sprints, deploy contributors to conferences and fairs, and provide travel, accommodation and materials for all those things.

Beyond the purely monetary aspect, having a strong promo activity ends up helping everyone: it helps developers and contributors gain recognition for their work; the community can receive more support and the number of its members increases; users can discover our software and start enjoying the advantages of using a friendly, full-featured graphical environment and applications; and businesses can discover spectacular tools that allow them to create beautiful and maintainable applications in less time.

To summarize: 2018 has been a successful year for KDE in general. We laid down the ground work for more successes to come in the future.


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diff --git a/reports/ev-2018/kdeconnect_sprint.html b/reports/ev-2018/kdeconnect_sprint.html index 8cc5b87..ac1c5e3 100644 --- a/reports/ev-2018/kdeconnect_sprint.html +++ b/reports/ev-2018/kdeconnect_sprint.html @@ -1,75 +1,74 @@

KDE Connect Sprint, March 2018, Barcelona

By Albert Vaca

Between the 23rd and 25th of March 2018, KDE Connect developers gathered in Verse's offices in Barcelona to work together for a weekend. It was the first meeting KDE Connect had in a while, and it was very productive!

We kicked off the sprint by going through our backlog of ideas to decide what was worth implementing. That helped us set the focus for the sprint and resume some blocked tasks.

One of the most requested features for KDE Connect is the ability to send SMS from the desktop. We already supported SMS to a certain degree, but some crucial features such as conversation history were not yet there. During the sprint, Simon and Aleix started working on a fully-featured interface for sending SMS easily from the desktop that includes full conversation views and a full contact list.

Aleix and Nico polished the Run Commands interface to make it more discoverable, so that we can easily configure KDE Connect to do anything we want.

Matthijs improved the functionality of multimedia controls, making it possible to display the album art from the desktop on users' Android devices (both on the lock screen and in the new multimedia notification). Meanwhile, Aleix and Nico started paving the way towards better integration with PulseAudio control, sharing some code between KDE Connect and the Plasma volume control.

A less visible but crucial part of what makes KDE Connect so useful is its integration with the system. Albert Vaca worked on a KDE Connect plugin for Nautilus, so people who don't use Plasma and Dolphin can also have a great user experience.

Another very important but often-overlooked task is documentation. Matthijs invested some time in improving the onboarding process for new contributors.

Last but not least, we fixed some ugly bugs during this sprint. Albert Astals fixed a long-standing crash in KIO, the KDE Framework used by KDE Connect for transferring files. Simon and Albert Vaca took care of some compatibility problems with Android Oreo, while Matthijs fixed a connectivity issue and even made some progress on Bluetooth support.

All in all, the sprint was a pleasant event. It was nice to meet the developers working on KDE Connect, to connect faces with nicknames, and agree on a common path we will follow in future development.February 2018 was a big month for the Promo team - we held a long-awaited sprint in Barcelona, Spain from the 16th to 18th. The aim of the sprint was to look at information we had collected over the prior years, interpret what it meant, and use it to discuss and plan for the future. The activities we came up with should help us accomplish our ultimate goal: increasing KDE's visibility and user base.


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diff --git a/reports/ev-2018/kdenlive_sprint.html b/reports/ev-2018/kdenlive_sprint.html index d051a2a..a243e72 100644 --- a/reports/ev-2018/kdenlive_sprint.html +++ b/reports/ev-2018/kdenlive_sprint.html @@ -1,114 +1,113 @@

Kdenlive Sprint, April 2018, Berlin

By Paul Brown

Kdenlive is KDE's advanced video-editor. In spring of 2018, members of the Kdenlive project met up for a five-day sprint (from 25th to the 29th of April). The developers Jean-Baptiste Mardelle and Nicolas Carion, along with professional community videomakers Farid Abdelnour, Rémi Duquenne and Massimo Stella, got together at the Carrefour Numérique in Paris to push the project forward.

Despite a busy agenda which included pitching Kdenlive to the general public, the attendees managed to work some new features into the code, such as the feature that automatically separates video and audio tracks by default. This saves time, since the workflows for editing video and audio are substantially different, and editors often have to separate tracks to work on them individually anyway.

The toolbar that overlays monitors got a makeover, and now supports multiple layout guides. The toolbar is translucent, so you can still see what is going on in the clip, and only appears when you move the mouse to the upper right corner of the monitor. This not only looks cool (very important!), but also makes it practical and more usable.

Apart from developing new features, the team held two public sessions. First they talked with potential contributors, which had an immediate effect. Camille took it upon himself to update the project's wiki, and Elie submitted a patch for the option to manage and download keyboard shortcut templates of other video editors (such as Avid, Final Cut and Adobe Premiere Pro). Thanks to this option, an editor used to working with closed-source alternatives will immediately feel at home with Kdenlive. The second public event was with video-editing enthusiasts. The audience had the opportunity to see Kdenlive in action, learn more about it, and talk to the developers.

During the sprint, the developers also agreed on a roadmap of where they want to take Kdenlive next, and prioritized incorporating Advanced Trimming and Single Track Transitions into the upcoming releases.

This is what a multicam workflow looks like in Kdenlive.

Advanced Trimming allows you to roll, ripple, slip or slide a clip between two existing ones. When you drop a clip onto a track, the surrounding clips can behave in different ways, cropping or displacing frames automatically according to what you want to do. With Single Track Transitions, you can overlap one clip onto another on the same track and apply a transition between the two, instead of having to figure out transitions across several tracks.

Longer-term goals include Multicam Editing. This comes in handy when you have filmed the same event from different angles with multiple cameras. Kdenlive will help you sync up the action so you can cut from one to the other seamlessly. Another goal is to support faster renders, splitting the workload between multiple cores that most modern computers come with, as well as sending heavy workloads off to the GPU.

One final thing to look forward to is the integration of Kdenlive with other Free Software video- and audio-editing tools. The developers are looking at Blender, Natron and Ardour, as well as graphics-editing tools like GIMP, Krita and Inkscape. The plan is to incorporate their special and specific features into Kdenlive, and make sure they can all work seamlessly together. This would mean, for example, that you could create a 3D text effect in Blender and bridge it into Kdenlive without having to go through time-consuming exports and imports. Or you could edit a sequence in Kdenlive and frameserve it to do the compositing in Natron.

Kdenlive is already a highly capable video-editor, but the work the team is carrying out promises to make it a world-class tool that both hobbyists and professionals can use. The latest version of Kdenlive is available in many distributions, as well as in AppImage and Flatpak formats. Vincent Pinon is also working on the Windows port, which is currently in Beta stage.


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diff --git a/reports/ev-2018/krita_sprints.html b/reports/ev-2018/krita_sprints.html index 9c3462f..cdc11ad 100644 --- a/reports/ev-2018/krita_sprints.html +++ b/reports/ev-2018/krita_sprints.html @@ -1,344 +1,343 @@

Krita Sprints, May & October 2018, Deventer

By Boudewijn Rempt

May Sprint

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:

The 2018 Fundraiser

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.

Unfinished Business

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:

  • Masks and selections
  • Improving the text layout engine for OpenType support, vertical text, more SVG2 text features
  • SVG leftovers: support for filters and patterns, winding mode and grouping
  • Layer styles leftovers

Jouni would work on animation leftovers such as:

  • Frame cycles and cloning
  • Transform mask interpolation curves

Wolthera would work on:

  • Collecting information about missing scripting API
  • Color grading filters

Releases and Improvements

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.

October 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.

Adventures in Live Streaming

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!


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diff --git a/reports/ev-2018/lakademy.html b/reports/ev-2018/lakademy.html index 4c6dc83..714550f 100644 --- a/reports/ev-2018/lakademy.html +++ b/reports/ev-2018/lakademy.html @@ -1,80 +1,79 @@

Lakademy, October 2018, Florianopolis

By Sandro Andrade

LaKademy - the Latin American Akademy - took place from 11th to 14th of October 2018 at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) in the city of Florianopolis, Brazil. Members of the local Free and open source software community gathered at the event. It was a fantastic opportunity for everyone to work on KDE projects, but also on other unrelated projects that each person contributes to. The participants strengthened their friendship bonds and shared experiences about creating, using, and maintaining software.

On the first day, more than 20 participants, including Karina Mochetti and six students of Computer Science from the Federal University Fluminense (UFF, Niteroi) started resolving the issues in translation scripts used by the localization team. A lot of work was done on restructuring the translation process, and on preparing guidelines and tutorials for newcomers to the translation team.

The participants also worked on the KDE Edu software - the educational suite for everyone from age 5 to 95. It was the first time that the project had this kind of help - from a formal partnership between a university and its students - and also the first LaKademy with so many attendees from all corners of the continent.

Workshop at LaKademy.

More development work happened during the event; namely, cryptography was added to Konsole History file. Participants also overhauled Atelier Core compatibility and added support for new technologies. Last but not least, they updated the KDE Timeline website with additional significant events.

On Saturday, October 13th, the traditional promo meeting took place, where the future of the Latin American KDE community was discussed. The meeting covered a wide range of topics: from communication tools, KDE's presence at Brazilian events, and the promotional materials to the proposal of migrating the KDE Brasil site to Wordpress.

Finally, on Sunday (October 14th) everyone celebrated the 22 years of KDE with a cake. Konqui was there, too! The community also considered potential host cities for LaKademy 2019, and shared some thoughts on making it happen outside of Brazil as a way of reinforcing the "Latin-American-ness" of the event.


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diff --git a/reports/ev-2018/linkat_neon_sprint.html b/reports/ev-2018/linkat_neon_sprint.html index bb5942b..f556ae3 100644 --- a/reports/ev-2018/linkat_neon_sprint.html +++ b/reports/ev-2018/linkat_neon_sprint.html @@ -1,80 +1,79 @@

Linkat-Neon Sprint, September 2018, Barcelona

By Jonathan Riddell

In October 2018, developers from the KDE neon and Plasma teams visited Barcelona. We were there to meet with KDE-related software projects in the Catalan government and schools that we had heard about. Aleix Pol lives locally and works on Plasma and Discover. He invited Plasma release manager and KDE neon developer Jonathan Riddell, KDE neon continuous integration master Harald Sitter, and hardware enablement guru Rohan Garg to meet the teams evaluating our software and supporting our users.

Meeting with Pablo of Catalan Generalitat distro Linkat.

We first met Pablo, who runs the Linkat project for the Catalan government. Linkat is a Linux distribution they offer to schools, and it currently runs lightweight, simple desktop environments. As Plasma 5 now tends to use as little or less memory and resources than many lightweight Linux desktops, the Linkat team is interested in trying it. We met with the officials from the education department and discussed accessibility needs, looking at Mycroft for voice control and integrating with phones using KDE Connect.

The next day we visited the largest technical school in Catalonia, the Escola del Treball (”school of the workers”). Within their impressive Gaudí-inspired building, they run a few thousand computers on which they are trying to reduce the costs. They showed us the setup they had developed using thin clients with a simple Atom computer or Raspberry Pi. The thin clients use a remote desktop protocol to talk to virtual machines on a central server. The technically-minded teachers can customize what's running on the virtual machine with a range of distributions and operating systems available. Their server has hosted over 3000 virtual machine images just on the trial computers, all for the individual use-cases of the teaching staff. Unlike with proprietary setups, this means they do not have to ask for a budget to install software.

They discussed some problems their virtual machine software was having with Plasma and tested some fixes made by Aleix. Rohan was interested in finding the best machines they could use for their thin clients.

In the evening, we met with developer Angel Docampo and talked about the deployment he worked on for the Ajuntament (city council) of Barcelona. The Ajuntament is also interested in moving towards Free Software on their computers. This deployment is based on Kubuntu, and it is currently in trial by about 30 employees. Angel reported they are happy with the setup; however, taking it further will likely depend on the politicians' will to drive the change forward.

As we were about to leave, we learned about a project called openUAB at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. They are making a KDE neon-based system for their own uses. We expect to find out more about this project after Aleix meets with them in the upcoming weeks.

This was an exciting trip that opened our eyes to the increasing number and variety of users and use-cases of KDE software. The insights we collected will help us deliver better software, and strengthen the bonds between our community and the rest of the world.


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diff --git a/reports/ev-2018/new-members.html b/reports/ev-2018/new-members.html index 5fe6213..07c5ad8 100644 --- a/reports/ev-2018/new-members.html +++ b/reports/ev-2018/new-members.html @@ -1,66 +1,67 @@



The Organization

New Members

KDE e.V. is happy to welcome the following new members:
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diff --git a/reports/ev-2018/plasma_sprint.html b/reports/ev-2018/plasma_sprint.html index 4df2592..dfb6510 100644 --- a/reports/ev-2018/plasma_sprint.html +++ b/reports/ev-2018/plasma_sprint.html @@ -1,91 +1,90 @@

Plasma Sprint, April 2018, Berlin

By Jonathan Riddell

In April 2018, the developers of Plasma, KDE's featureful, flexible and Free desktop environment, held a sprint in Berlin, Germany. The developers gathered to discuss the forthcoming 5.13 release and the development of Plasma. Of course, they didn't just sit and chat - a lot of coding got done, too.

During the sprint, the Plasma team was joined by guests from Qt and Sway WM. Discussion topics included sharing Wayland protocols, input methods, Plasma Browser Integration, tablet mode for Plasma's shell, porting KControl modules to QtQuick, and last but not least, the best beer in Berlin.

The effort to port Plasma to work on Wayland rather than X continued at a fast pace. Wayland protocols define how applications interact with the display, including tasks essential to Plasma such as declaring which "window" is really a panel. These protocols have to be defined by the Plasma team and preferably standardized with other users of the Linux desktop.

One newcomer to the field is SwayWM - a Wayland version of the i3 window manager. Drew DeVault, the lead developer of the project, joined our Plasma sprint to discuss where Wayland protocols could be shared. The team looked at their Layer Protocol, which covers much of the work of the current plasmashell protocol. We found that this protocol contains some nice ideas and suggested some improvements for the SwayWM developers.

The Plasma Output Management Protocol was also discussed. This protocol defines how external monitors are used, and Sway currently just reloads configuration files as needed. The team will consider this solution if the need for such a protocol arises. Protocols for Remote Access were compared and reviewed along with Pipewire as systems for managing audio and video. Drew wrote a blog post with more information on this topic.

Shawn Rutledge, the lead developer of Qt's new input stack, also joined us for a few days of the sprint. Together, we reviewed the new API and looked at how some of the unique use-cases of Plasma would work with it. The conclusion was that "some parts, including complex drag-and-drop actions, went surprisingly smoothly".

A bunch of design changes were suggested and improvements submitted. Working with Qt developers at this early stage is a great win for both projects, as it saves KDE developers a lot of time when they come to use the new features, while the Qt world gets a nicer result.

Plasma Browser Integration is a fun feature that was shipped with Plasma 5.13 in May.

It makes Firefox and Chrome/Chromium use Plasma's file transfer widget for downloads, and native Plasma notifications for browser notifications. Moreover, media controls work with the task manager.

The browser extensions were tidied up, translations fixed, and accounts on the relevant browser store websites set up. We decided to make it our collective duty to ensure KDE's new web browser Falkon is at feature-parity in terms of Plasma integration.

Plasma running on the $99 Pinebook.

The team continued to work on convergence with other form factors - in other words, on making Plasma run seamlessly on a variety of devices, both desktop and mobile. Bhushan worked on Plasma Mobile images for devices which supports upstream kernel, which is essential for security and more up-to-date system on mobile devices.

Rohan worked on making Plasma run smoothly and with all Free drivers on the low-end Pinebook laptop. This showed that Plasma can function as a lightweight desktop environment without losing its features. Lastly, Marco got Plasma working on a convertible laptop with support for switching into tablet mode, illustrating how we can actively shift between form factors.

Throughout the week, we also gave talks to our host company Endocode who kindly lent us their central Berlin offices. Special thanks to long-term KDE contributor Mirko of Endocode, who impressed us with his multi-monitor multi-activity high-definition display Plasma setup.

We also hosted an evening meetup for the local group of Free Software Foundation Europe members and gave some talks over burritos. Having checked off all the items from our to-do list, we concluded another successful Plasma sprint.


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diff --git a/reports/ev-2018/promo_sprint.html b/reports/ev-2018/promo_sprint.html index 5945a50..7ec95c0 100644 --- a/reports/ev-2018/promo_sprint.html +++ b/reports/ev-2018/promo_sprint.html @@ -1,87 +1,86 @@

KDE Promo Sprint, February 2018, Barcelona

By Paul Brown

February 2018 was a big month for the Promo team - we held a long-awaited sprint in Barcelona, Spain from the 16th to 18th. The aim of the sprint was to look at information we had collected over the prior years, interpret what it meant, and use it to discuss and plan for the future. The activities we came up with should help us accomplish our ultimate goal: increasing KDE's visibility and user base.

Nine members of the team made it to Barcelona: Aleix Pol, Ivana Isadora Devčić, Jure Repinc, Kenny, Łukasz Sawicki, Lydia Pintscher, Neofytos Kolokotronis, Paul Brown, and Rubén Gómez. We met at Espai 30, an old factory converted into a social center for the neighborhood. Coincidentally, that is one of the places where the Guifi.net project started -- rather fitting for a meeting that comprised Free Software and communication.

During the informal afternoon meeting on the first day, we discussed the plans for improving the KDE.org website; both visually and content-wise. The consensus was that the website should inform the general public about what KDE is - not a desktop, but the community that creates, maintains, documents, translates, and promotes a large body of multi-purpose software. We should also make sure the website caters equally to the tech savvy and unsavvy, since KDE's software is meant for everybody. The new site should clearly direct users to our products, allowing end users to simply download and use them. At the same time, the website should ease the way for potential contributors to join the community.

The second day of the sprint started with a recap of Promo's main activities over the last year or so, revisiting funding campaigns we promoted and communication tactics we implemented. Next we looked at hard, cold data, collected from social media accounts, web statistics, and distro popcons (application popularity contests). The data helped us pinpoint wins and fails in our approach to communicating with the outside world, and revealed some correlations between our efforts and the traffic to our outlets. We identified several ways to make our social media posts more attractive, and then shifted our focus to events. Apart from discussing plans for Akademy 2018, we also talked about visiting other technical and not-so-technical events in order to increase our user base, attract new contributors, and reach audiences that are currently not aware of technologies that KDE develops.

We had a look at hard, cold data to try and figure out the effect of Promo activities on uptake, community growth, etc..

Another important topic covered during the Promo sprint were the long-term community goals; especially the goal of streamlining the onboarding of new contributors. The Promo team is trying to identify where people struggle in the process of joining Promo, and is working on eliminating those obstacles. One concrete example is creating a list of simple tasks for beginners.

The last day of the sprint was dedicated to classifying and assigning the variety of Promo jobs to smaller groups of people with the best skills to carry them out. We also discussed different methods of promoting KDE software; for example, publicity stunts like full page ads in prominent newspapers, or messages on public transport. We started brainstorming a list of "influencers", journalists, and publications that could help us with indirectly increasing the popularity of KDE. We also decided to take a step back and work on a market research project that will provide us with solid information on which to base our actions. Last but not least, we realized we could improve our videos and help them reach a wider audience by adding subtitles in multiple languages.

This was an intense and intensive sprint. The full list of topics we discussed is longer than this report, but we managed to devote enough time to the most pressing issues. We came up with ideas for targets and ways to work towards them that will translate into real results. Developing KDE's software is super-important, but so is spreading the message that the software exists and that everybody, regardless of their level of computer-literacy, can and should use it. That is what the Promo team is all about, and we will keep practicing what we preach.


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diff --git a/reports/ev-2018/sysadmin_wg.html b/reports/ev-2018/sysadmin_wg.html index bc61080..c526fdd 100644 --- a/reports/ev-2018/sysadmin_wg.html +++ b/reports/ev-2018/sysadmin_wg.html @@ -1,103 +1,102 @@

Sysadmin working group

By Ben Cooksley

2018 has continued the trend of previous years in being another busy year for the Sysadmin team. This year we've benefited substantially from the work done in prior years to modernize and rebuild our systems. It has become easier to deploy new and updated software when needed, especially considering the numerous security vulnerabilities which were announced in 2018. We have also continued to archive and shutdown sites that are not going to see further updates or which are no longer needed.

We've continued to work on improving the accessibility of our systems this year, with the generation of static websites using tools such as Jekyll, Hugo and Sphinx all shifting to the Binary Factory. This allows us to provide convenient and easy access to the logs of the generation process to those who work on these websites. In addition there is the benefit of no longer running the generation on our production servers. It also allows us to support use of newer versions of these tools (which aren't available on the LTS distributions we run on our production servers) and reduces the maintenance burden of supporting static website generation on the Sysadmin team.

We also completed the migration of our mail handling to a new system, Letterbox. This continues our migration away from Ubuntu 14.04 and the updated software we now have access to has already been utilised to improve our email filtering. As a consequence of these filter updates it is now possible for us to block outright forged emails in some circumstances. We also migrated the hosting of Neon's repository archive to a dedicated virtual machine, improving it's security in the process.

We made incremental improvements to other services during the year. The jobs on the Continuous Integration system were reorganised into folders, allowing the state of an individual application to be more easily monitored, and new views were added to improve visibility at the platform level. We reworked how CGit and WebSVN were hosted, which improved the reliability of both the Anonymous Git service as well as the repository browsers. In response to community conversations, we changed how permissions are handled on Bugzilla, with greater access given to the broader community as a result. During the year we also began an evaluation of Gitlab as an outcome of discussions and feedback on Phabricator which was received at Akademy 2018.

Service Created Disabled Modified
Subversion accounts 83 3 0
kdemail.net aliases 4 1 1
kde.org aliases 0 0 20
kde.org mailing-lists 3
falkon
purism-contact
kde-teaching		 4
kde-guidelines
rekonq
kde-teaching
berlin2016-team		 0

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