I also agree with @colomar
In any case, just to keep in mind the current official status of document format handlers in okular:
https://okular.kde.org/formats.php

Agreed, I didn't mean to start a whole new branch of the conversation. Just mention that it might be beneficial to also to focus on basic productivity software as a part of this goal.

I'm happy that there is a lot of discussion happening here, but maybe the discussion about annotations in Okular is getting a bit too much into detail for this point in the process.
So let's maybe summarize it for now as "There are potentially some issues with compatibility of Okular annotations, so if this goal gets selected, this could be one of the things we look into, together with academic / research users.

Usually I fill in very simple PDF's forms and annotate pdf with okular. I also exchange them with colleges and secretaries at the institute where I work. They work mostly with Win and to a lesser extend with mac. So far I have had very few problems in terms of rendering the information or the annotations, really very few. However, it might be due to the kind of very simple forms and annotations I'm processing in Okular.

In T6895#113154, @ngraham wrote:

Actually Xournal also has PDF annotation features. But there's a broader point: as a former Mac user, let me bring up the unfortunate truth that Okular can't hold a candle to Apple's Preview, *especially* in the annotations department. That's the standard Okular needs to aspire to. Right now Okular's annotations have a major problem: they aren't consistently compatible with viewers that aren't Okular. Annotations are often not visible when printing or viewing with another problem. This is of course tracked by many bugs:

In T6895#113154, @ngraham wrote:

Right now Okular's annotations have a major problem: they aren't consistently compatible with viewers that aren't Okular.

In T6895#113166, @ngraham wrote:

I don't know the technical details. All I know is that I can't remember the last time in the past 16 years of being a (prior) full-time macOS user when a PDF I annotated didn't print properly or display properly in Acrobat Reader, Foxit Reader, or anything else I happened to use to open it.

does apple's preview implement an open standard when it comes to annotations? if there is one in the PDF specs (i'm not an expert on this) it should be implemented. if apple uses its own proprietary standard, it would be a waste of time, because apple often changes those and leaves you stranded (like the multiple times they broke OpenPGP support in mail, and still do from time to time).

In T6895#113154, @ngraham wrote:

Right now Okular's annotations have a major problem: they aren't consistently compatible with viewers that aren't Okular. Annotations are often not visible when printing or viewing with another problem.

Beside the scientific-oriented software, we could list some general software with great application in science. I am talking about Okular because the feature of write/read annotations in the PDF is unique in free software world;

In T6895#113086, @filipesaraiva wrote:

Reading the thread, KBibTex was not cited. It is an interesting bibtex manage software, in KDE4 times there was an integration with Kile. KBibTex was ported to Qt5/KF5.

CCing this thread to @thomasfischer, the KBibTex author.

I like the idea of improve the penetration of KDE software in research and academia. Maybe it is not suitable as an effort from all community, but see it as an effort from a specific subgroup is interesting.

In T7124#112443, @ngraham wrote:

We shouldn't try to jam mobile UI conventions into a desktop platform except in the very small number of limited cases where they make sense for specific, well-understood reasons.

I think it's important to keep in mind our users and their use cases. 10-15 years in the future, current trends will reach their logical conclusions, and most casual computing (media consumption, communication, playing games) will probably be done with large phones or tablets because they're more convenient. So why would anyone still use a boring old laptop or desktop? Productivity. These are still the best platforms for accomplishing real work, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. So any design changes we make for the desktop can't compromise productivity or ergonomics for intensive work. We have to remember that people who are trying to get work done *hate* change for change's sake. They don't want high fashion design, they want to be able to create at the speed of thought. That means things like better ergonomics and responsiveness, more consistent keyboard shortcuts, more consistent visual design, and greater ease of learning new software. A really excellent example of this is the ability to search for menu items present in Unity's HUD and the macOS Help menu. We should be willing to mine other *desktop* platforms for ideas, not mobile platforms.

In T6895#112961, @meikm wrote:

FWIW, there's some ubuntu PPAs with daily builds of the KF5 port. i'm using one for work for quite some time now. if you have something particular on your mind, we're always happy for suggestions. we know that a stable release is overdue (the latest stable 0.6.5 still uses KDE 4). please help us find issues that still need fixing. i guess we should keep it about broader strategy here, and discuss particular technical issues someplace else, right?

In T6895#112935, @ngraham wrote:

If we can broaden the scope to include some of those use cases, with the knowledge that this will pay dividends for academic users in non-STEM fields, then I would be willing to climb aboard and put work into this.

I think in this regard KDE could collaborate with the document foundation to strengthen the integration of Libre Office and the desktop,

I agree with ngraham it would be nice if KDE somehow can address to those academics in the humanities and social science institutes. Word processor, slide presentations, and a reference manager (e.g. Zotero) are the main tools used here. As many her know right now MS office provides the common tools for that purpose, even when the interfaces are not friendly. It is a matter of custom and market pressure. I think in this regard KDE could collaborate with the document foundation to strengthen the integration of Libre Office and the desktop, along with what it is mentioned as campaigning the use of KDE at academic conferences in the humanities and social sciences. University and city libraries is another place to go bc usually fresh-students get their introduction to those tools in those places.

In T6895#112936, @GreatEmerald wrote:

RKWard really needs more work porting to KF5!

I am interested in this, and specifically for the case of amd64 tablets (I'm biased because I have one :D And have been looking forward to something like this since the age of Plasma Active). Right now GNOME is really far ahead in that use case, since Plasma Mobile assumes a phone (and so portrait mode, dialer, etc.). Also DPI scaling needs more work. And the ability to switch between Mobile and Desktop would be sweet (as it is, I need to uninstall Desktop to be able to access Mobile, seemingly).
I've also written a post on my impression of the current state of Plasma Mobile in comparison with other mobile UIs on my blog.

That's a nice idea. I'm involved with a course that introduces Linux and programming concepts to students and I'd love to see more KDE representation. Last year we used XFCE, this year we'll most likely be using GNOME Flashback.

So far it looks like this goal does a good job of targeting the STEM fields. But I don't see as much attention being paid to the needs of fields in the humanities and social sciences. Folks in these fields aren't as technical, which is a blessing and a curse: they don't need as many esoteric pieces of software (Kile, RKWard, Cantor, KAlgebra, Step, KStars, LabPlot, etc), but they are more demanding of user-friendliness in the basic software and in greater need of a high-quality interoperable office suite (particularly the word processor). This is where Apple currently has a disproportionate market penetration owing to their strong focus on user-friendliness, an integrated hardware/software package, and compatibility with Microsoft Office.

This is hugely important, from an accessibility, internationalization as well as usability perspective. That's why I'd be happy to help with UX design and testing.

@meikm @asemke @sgerlach @evpokp It would be great if you could edit the task description and add your name in the "I am willing to put work into this" section, just to have the list of people.

I agree that we first need more insight what R&A really wants to define the goals more precisely. I can easily put my name under "willing to work on this" because i already work on LabPlot and plan to continue it anyway and my job is in R&A.

In T6895#112887, @asemke wrote:

In T6895#112620, @colomar wrote:

In T6895#112448, @lydia wrote:

Right now there is unfortunately no-one added under "I am willing to put work into this". Is that reflecting reality?

It's a bit strange / sad (?): There are 8 subscribers, but nobody in the "Willing to work on this" and only Bhushan in the "Interested" section of the description.

In T6895#112778, @colomar wrote:

Good point, being easily available on macOS and especially Windows is indeed key for establishing our apps in new sectors.
From your experience, how important is macOS compared to Windows?

In T6895#112789, @ngraham wrote:

In my experience, macOS is heavily over-represented in academia here in the USA. Much less so in Europe.

FTR I'm one of these people @colomar describes ;-)

In my experience, macOS is heavily over-represented in academia here in the USA. Much less so in Europe.

In T6895#112625, @evpokp wrote:

I would be interested to see development on this and I could help with some evangelism, but right now I don't use a lot of KDE software for academic work apart from using Plasma as my DE and I don't expect this to change soon, as the relevant (cited) soft are lagging behind the competition, at least for my areas of interest.

In T6895#112766, @meikm wrote:

i'm working on proposal 1) already (team RKWard). for instance, i was given the opportunity to do a software presentation at the 50th DGPs congress in 2016. the fact that i was given a full 90 min slot in the second largest hall can be seen as an indicator that there's actually a growing interest in software alternatives. i handed out USB sticks with a KDE live system, RKWard and various R packages, not only to invite participants to try it, but also to demonstrate that you are allowed to just give the software to all students and staff. it would already make a lot of sense to have a RKWard booth at such a conference. i'd gladly do that, so i guess you can count me in on "willing to put work into this". but without funding you can only do so much.

In T6895#112701, @neofytosk wrote:

I wonder if KDE people working on projects related to R&A are aware of this proposal. It would be great to hear their opinion. Can we get them involved?

In T7126#112488, @ngraham wrote:

A venn diagram of "People who care about privacy" and "people who buy and use smart home devices" doesn't have a lot overlap, I fear.

If you buy a device that monitors everything about your behavior, house, and life, haven't you already lost the battle by deciding that you don't really care about your privacy? I don't see how we can salvage this situation for people who aren't very interested in the concept. We might want them to care about privacy, but if they did, that would have an always listening spy gizmo in their house in the first place.

gregormi, I've added your suggestions.

Hi! my name is Paco and I've started developing for kde two months ago and I'm just getting started... I had worked in other open source project with a smaller scope and, when starting to work with kde what I've missed is:

• when working in little projects and know someone (specially someone who has experience with the project) get stuck is less common and, when getting troubles, you allways have someone with whom have a relationship to ask often without feel dumb
• when working in little projects/hackatons you can easily know more people who is starting as you and you feel you're not the only who is a bit lost in the project...
• when working in little projects is easy to find something you can do and to organice with others to avoid working in the same thing than others, and also is easy to ask 'ey, I'm interesting in this, can you suggest me some issues/tasks to do?' instead of seeing a lot of projects and issues finding something to do.

i'm working on proposal 1) already (team RKWard). for instance, i was given the opportunity to do a software presentation at the 50th DGPs congress in 2016. the fact that i was given a full 90 min slot in the second largest hall can be seen as an indicator that there's actually a growing interest in software alternatives. i handed out USB sticks with a KDE live system, RKWard and various R packages, not only to invite participants to try it, but also to demonstrate that you are allowed to just give the software to all students and staff. it would already make a lot of sense to have a RKWard booth at such a conference. i'd gladly do that, so i guess you can count me in on "willing to put work into this". but without funding you can only do so much.

@knauss One of the major thrusts of my Akademy talk was how this goes beyond "I don't speak/write such languages needing these", though - even if you're writing in English or German, for example, you can benefit from input methods such as word completion, spell correction or emoji input, and probably use them on mobile already (which we also target in KDE/FOSS, and are currently woefully inadequate at). Improving our input story can benefit everyone. It's a chicken/egg problem that we don't have more people using this yet because our support for it is so shoddy.

@hein: thx for the clearification. I have no hands on fcitx, and don't speak/write such languages needing these. But was just courious if you aware of these issues.

@knauss Yes, that's within the scope of this as well.

I'm I right, that you mean to improve things like this:
https://www.csslayer.info/wordpress/fcitx-dev/gaps-between-wayland-and-fcitx-or-all-input-methods/

What about the possibility of offering these courses online the way Coursera/Edx do it? This way everything can be accessible always by people across the world.

I wonder if KDE people working on projects related to R&A are aware of this proposal. It would be great to hear their opinion. Can we get them involved?

As a math teacher, I am interested, but "willing to work on this" unfortunately has always failed because of time constraints. Additionally, my preference is in educational tools for students ages 12-16, which probably is outside the goals of this discussion.

I like 3, 6 and 7 with a slight preference for 6. Other opinions?

I would be interested to see development on this and I could help with some evangelism, but right now I don't use a lot of KDE software for academic work apart from using Plasma as my DE and I don't expect this to change soon, as the relevant (cited) soft are lagging behind the competition, at least for my areas of interest.

In T6875#112622, @chfanzil wrote:

And I totally agree in regards of the 'Possible additional target groups', I don't know if I can still add new things like more target groups to the Goal. (lydia, Can I?)

gregormi, Thanks for joining! You're experience as a teacher of GNU/linux would contribute a lot.

lydia, What do you think about these titles:

In T6895#112448, @lydia wrote:

Right now there is unfortunately no-one added under "I am willing to put work into this". Is that reflecting reality?

In T6895#112553, @gregormi wrote:

Is this goal also include undergraduate schools or should this be a separate goal?

I think good and stable bindings to Python (see e.g. https://phabricator.kde.org/D7736) can help to attract new contributors. Python is often used in educational contexts. It can be used for quick prototyping, could be used to write small productivity tools with Python/Qt on top of KFrameworks or extending existing applications like Kate with Python-based plugins. This could serve as a low level entry to get familiar with Qt and KDE related technologies.

There are people of _all_ ages (elder people even more than younger ones) who care about privacy and know that it has implications on our democratic society. Or want to use their old computer hardware as long as it breaks. In my experience, teaching the mere existence and values of GNU/Linux/KDE software can be an eye-opener. Possible additional target groups: elder people, teachers, environmental protection groups.

Is this goal also include undergraduate schools or should this be a separate goal?

I don't feel strongly about the word we replace it with, but I do agree that we should combine both statuses into one.

I mentioned a previous discussion about states in bugzilla, but I didn't link the archives. This is the starting point of the thread:
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2016q4/003262.html

Regarding the 'NEW' status: We used that instead of 'CONFIRMED' earlier, see https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=195305

I am interested on working on this as well, I think there is always a choice for people who care about privacy on what smart products and devices they buy and trust as there are many smart electronics manufacturers following open APIs to allow developers to make use of there upcoming tech. Always listening devices do not need to always be listening or transmitting but as currently everyone till now in the smart devices market has only seen propitiatory implementation of these devices so there is a general negative outlook built up towards digital assistance and smart home systems when it comes to privacy.

A venn diagram of "People who care about privacy" and "people who buy and use smart home devices" doesn't have a lot overlap, I fear.