Neomantra.org

Thanks to Sandro Andrade we’ve got some very cool SVG templates for promoting the upcoming release parties.  I’ve customized the text a bit for our party.  Hope to see anyone living in the DC metro area out there on the 12th.  Full details can be found on the Promo wiki pages along with all of the other upcoming release parties.  Have you found one in your area?  If not, go to the wiki, add some details of a time and place, and start spreading the word!

Come join the party!

LinkedIn has become one of the more popular professional networking sites out there in recent years.  It’s a great way for co-workers to stay connected with each other after they part ways and also a nice platform for marketing your resume to what could be your future co-workers.

In addition to that, there is a nice section on the site for groups where you can post questions and discussion topics.  With that in mind I wanted to point out that on LinkedIn there are several KDE-related groups.  In particular, I’d like to invite all of you who are on LinkedIn to join the “KDE User” LinkedIn group and participate in the discussions there.

So far there are over 500 members but despite this there is not a whole lot of active discussion.  I’m not sure if everyone is shy or busy or what but generating some lively discussions about KDE in front of a large group of interested onlookers could only be a good thing for promoting KDE.  LinkedIn seems to have a very strong presence in North America and also in the business community in general.  So I’m also hopeful that this could be a good avenue for attracting a larger KDE community on this side of the pond as well as developing a stronger user base in the business sector.   Then everyone’s desk at work might eventually be as awesome as mine

Kubuntu w/ KDE 4.3 SC on my office computer

Hi everyone.  Just 4 quick things I wanted to point out to the community regarding various Promo activities.  If you’re one of those people lurking about Planet KDE who’s been itching to start contributing, here are some ideas for you to get started.

First, not too long ago I made a YouTube video about a use case for Marble, one of our KDE Education applications.  This has now been posted on the official KDE YouTube channel.  Go check it out!  And make sure you check out all the other cool videos there while you’re at it.  James Cain (our recent Camp KDE “Be Free” award winner) has done a fabulous job reworking the look of the site and accumulating some new videos lately.  You can even subscribe so that you get an alert when new videos are posted.  Very cool stuff.  However we can always use more videos.  I created mine simply using Kdenlive in less than an evening.  If you think you’d be interested in giving this a try just drop me a line and I’ll help you get up and running.

Second, I wanted to mention is that we’re still working on the formation of an awesome KDE apparel store.  Right now we need two things relating to this project.  If you have an idea for a design that you’d like to see on a KDE shirt/hat/etc drop me a comment below and I’ll add it to the list for consideration.  In the end we’ll be picking the best ideas and then searching out artists to design them. We’ve already received some excellent proposals and I can’t wait to hear some more ideas.  So don’t be shy, let us know what you want to be wearing.  Also,  if you’re an artist who’s interested in helping out with actually creating these things please let me know that as well!

Third, the Promo team is still working away on the 4.4 SC Feature Guide.  If you have some spare time to contribute towards helping us with this document just drop a line to kde-promo at kde dot org and say you want to help with the guide.  We’ve got a handy how-to guide that Jos kindly wrote up which we can send you on how to get started right away.

Fourth, we could still use some help if anyone has some time to work on the kde.org relaunch.  Check out Lydia’s post on the subject for more info on how you can contribute.

Unfortunately yesterday was my last day out at Camp KDE.  Vacation is sparse for me right now after blowing it all over the holidays and on the wedding and GCDS/Akademy.  So real life calls…

I neglected to post my slides in my day 1 review so here they are.  In case you didn’t know from the Dot article my talk was about simple and practical ways to get involved in KDE.  The idea was that even if you don’t know much about writing code (like me) you can still be a contributor in our community.  I provided information on  different areas that people can get started in and then listed the web sites to go to or people to contact to get up and running.  Getting people besides developers to help in these areas is critical.  It allows developers to focus on what they do best, writing code, rather than triaging bugs, writing documentation, doing user support, and so on.  As great as our developer community is we can’t expect you to do everything all by yourself, and this opens up a whole new world of opportunity for users to become contributors.  So if you’re a user, please have a look and see what you can do to help.  If you’re a developer, take a look as well as it’s a great resource to get your non-developer friends involved in KDE projects with you.

Switching gears a bit…as someone who has taken an interest in the promotional side of KDE one of the things I’ve been trying to do lately is  identify things we do well and things we can improve on with regards to hosting or participating in meetings, conferences, sprints, etc.  To this point I’ve been to Akademy once, the 4.0 release event, a promo sprint and now Camp KDE.  I’ve also got a pretty large array of professional conferences under my belt from my day job so there’s plenty I could compare us to.  Overall I think we tend to do pretty well in hosting these things but of course there is always room for improvement.  While it’s fresh in my head I wanted to touch on some things that stood out to me:

• Information organization and distribution
  • The links which gave directions to the venue were sort of hidden in the Camp KDE web site.  Looks like it’s probably a stylesheet related issue but the links didn’t stand out at all on the page which made it tough to easily find the directions (just a detail, but I think an important one)
  • Signs or even having some organizers hanging out near the exteriors of  the building directing people to the right place would also be a nice touch next go-round.  UCSD seems to be an especially confusing campus…but in general anything we can do to make it easier on people to find the right building and right room can only be a good thing.
  • Conference content is scattered.  There are so many valuable things being created at the meeting…we’re video recording all the presentations, people mostly had slides for their talks, lots of people were taking photos.  All of that is great!  But to make it even better I think next time we should try to setup a section on the conference web site before the meeting that could serve as a portal for aggregating all of these things so that people don’t have to search all the Planet KDE posts, Dot posts, identi.ca feeds, etc to track all of this down.
• Logistics and event execution
  • It’s always hard to find the best of all worlds for lodging (usually balancing cost + convenience is the tough part).  But the hostel was not too close to the meeting location and also seems to have gotten mixed reviews in terms of the quality of the rooms, etc.  This is especially difficult in the United States because hostels are just not a part of our culture and therefore are often run down or in sketchy geographic areas.  In the future I think we should continue to look for alternative ideas to help ensure it’s easy for people to get to the event, but also be cost effective.  I don’t have a better solution readily available and believe that our organizers made the best of the options they had…I’m just saying I think we should continue to strive to improve on this in future events held in the US.
  • Perhaps this will change as the students return to class from the holiday weekend, but it seemed that we had a fair number of people register that did not show up the first two days.  This one is tricky to resolve.  We don’t want to discourage interested people from coming because they can’t afford a registration fee or something, but at the same time it’s hard to plan properly to accommodate a group when you don’t know how many are really coming.  I know that personally I drastically began to cut back on efforts to recruit more attendees when we had 90+ registrants and found out the room capacity was 100 people.  I think if we’d had a better grasp of the situation with no-shows we could’ve continued promotion efforts a bit further.  I’m tempted to suggest that a small registration fee might make sense to ensure people who register are likely to actually show up.  This fee could be used to provide people with swag (shirts, etc) or cover snack/drink costs.  So it could be extremely cheap, yet still somewhat effective at ensuring only serious people register.  Maybe $10-25 or something for the whole event?
  • For setting up the order of the talks, I think we should put keynotes in the afternoon in case people show up late.  In particular with Frank’s talk we had to delay the start of things quite a bit because of transportation issues with getting attendees to the meeting on time.  While that is unfortunate no matter what, I think it would be better to have regular talks scheduled at the beginning and end of the day and to situate the keynotes in the middle (probably right before lunch rather than right after) when it’s most likely that the most people would be at the event.

All of this said, I’d especially like to emphasize that most of this is relatively minor and only geared towards trying to continually improve future events.  I think Jeff has done a tremendous job at spearheading the organization of Camp KDE this year, along with all of the great help from the rest of the Camp KDE organizers including some fantastic local support from Andrew at UCSD.   I’m very much looking forward to hearing about all the things you do the rest of the week and hope that you don’t get too waterlogged with all the rain you’re getting out there!

Woohoo, Camp KDE is finally here!  After a somewhat of a dizzying ride to find the building we eventually arrived…believe it or not there are something like 8 streets all called “Voigt Dr” on this campus.  Who designed this place? Geez!   Anyhow finally we found the meeting space and it’s extremely nice.  All the high tech gadgetry you’d expect for a proper conference (check out Jos’s entry for some pictures).

Today we got to listen to a whole bunch of great talks.  Early on we got a nice intro to the conference from Jeff and an update on KDE’s growth in the past year.  We had a great keynote from Phillip Bourne on open access to data.  Especially interesting for me since I work in informatics…I might have to give his SciVee site a test spin next time I present a poster or something at a conference.  Then we got down to KDE business for the afternoon.  Everyone’s talk was really great, and each topic generated some good discussions.  Be sure to keep an eye out because everything is being recorded for those who couldn’t be here in person.  Links will surely follow in the coming days but I don’t have details yet.

That’s about it for day 1…time to think about dinner and social time!

The promo team is overloaded work once again!  (aren’t we all?)

However, should you be one of the lucky few who might be interested in finding something to keep you busy, as Jos mentioned in one of his previous blog posts we really need more help with writing the Feature Guide for the 4.4 Software Compilation (SC) release.  Yeah, I know…that link is mostly about release parties…now you see where the minds of us promo people really are I suppose.

Anyways, some of you might be wondering what exactly this Feature Guide is.  I guess it’s mostly obvious that it’s about features but what is the scope of the document, you might ask?  Well for those of you that are newer to the community like I am, I’ll explain what I’ve learned.

So when we do releases of the SC one of the things we (the whole community) do is have a plan for what features will be in the next release (http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.4_Feature_Plan).  One of the things the Promo team does is write up a nice document for end users who are interested in all of the new features for the upcoming SC to translate into simple terms what all of this means to them.  It’s a great way to tell the world all the awesome things that our developers are doing in greater detail than what you’d find in a typical, and much more brief, release announcement.  That said, if you took a second to look at the feature plan you can see that all of you crazy developer types keep quite busy!  And that means there is lots for us Promo folks to write about.  So if any KDE users are out there reading this and want to help support your favorite application please know that you can do this simply by taking the bullet points in that Feature Plan I linked above and turning them into sentences for part of this feature guide.  Contact the Promo team, email me, or leave a comment and we can get you access to the Feature Guide document to see what still needs to be done.

Changing gears, I’d like to remind everyone that Camp KDE is now nearly upon us at last and from what I hear we’ve got over 80 people coming!  There’s still some space left so if you can make it out to sunny San Diego, CA for some or all of Camp KDE be sure to register and come join us.

I remember sitting around at the Promo sprint back in November and hearing Cornelius say how we only had 12 people registered so far and that if we can’t get 100 people to an event in the USA (without just sending our whole European community overseas) we might want to reconsider the idea of a yearly North American conference.  Well…we may not hit 100 North Americans this time but that’s at least partially because the venue can only hold 100 people.  I know at least personally I have started to tone down my efforts to get more people to register a little for fear of bringing in more folks than we can handle.  Next year I say we think bigger all around.  With several months lead time, another good location, and a venue to hold 200 people I’m totally convinced we could exceed his expectations

In less successful news, I’ve gotten very little response from anyone who is willing to help design some new KDE gear (shirts/hats/coffee mugs/etc) for our official store.  I’m really surprised by this actually.  If I had any artistic ability whatsoever I would definitely be creating some cool KDE gear.  Hell, I may give it a try anyways even though I’m terrible at graphic design.  I mean how awesome would it be to visit Akademy this year and see everyone wearing around clothes that I had designed.  Again, let me know if anyone wants to help with this.

Last but not least the mailing list cleanup is still happening…just very, very slowly.  So if you haven’t heard from me yet about your potentially outdated or unused mailing list…just wait longer   I will write a follow up post whenever this activity is complete summarizing the results of what we’re going to get rid of and providing information about how we’ll notify people that would potentially be affected.  Where possible we’ll definitely refer people to other lists that allow for the same discussions.  Though in some cases it’s clear that there was just no need to have even created a list for it in the first place.

Back when I was first getting into contributing with KDE one of the places I started out was attempting to find the right mailing lists to follow.  In doing this I noticed there were a TON of lists out there.  As I started to look into this more closely I also realized that a large number of lists were outdated or never even used.  I had grand plans of fixing this and helping to cleanup unused lists but unfortunately life got crazy and this project sort of fell by the wayside…until now.

After some further discussion with the Promo team and the SysAdmins I’ve decided to do one more final review to see what looks to be currently out of date (mainly because I last checked back in July).  Anyone who is currently a list owner, you may be hearing from me in the coming days if your list appears to be unused.  I’ll simply be looking for confirmation of whether you agree and if it’s OK to remove your list or not.  If you manage any lists that you know aren’t needed anymore and want to notify me up front to remove them that’s even better!

With relative calm finally approaching after spending the chaos filled month of December finishing last minute work deadlines, attending conferences and trying to find free time to buy presents for friends and family in between, I’ve now found some time to do some things I wanted to get done.  Mostly that means I had time to do home brewed beer things, fix up my blog a bit and work on KDE stuff.   I’ll start with the KDE work since there’s likely some of you who may not care about my brewing adventures.  That’ll be at the bottom if anyone is interested though.

The promo team has been quite busy this month.  We’ve been doing a wide variety of things, most of this can be seen via the updates we’ve made on the Promo section on the Community wiki.  One of the things that we’re trying to get off the ground is a section for art work.  The idea is that this could be a common place where anyone could go and easily find cool designs and logos relating to KDE things.  There is a little bit there right now but if you have any other images we could use please do feel free to add them or email them to the promo team.

Along the same lines we are still looking for anyone who can do some design work for potential use on KDE t-shirts/hats/coffee mugs/etc.  This is a great way to earn instant fame and glory among your KDE peers as we will all think of you when we look at your design in the mirror or as we drink our morning coffee every day  If you are interested please let us know!  Ideally I would like to have some cool things available before Camp KDE so we can raise awareness of the store while we’re there (which we can’t really do if nothing is for sale yet).

Also, in case you’re living under a rock and missed the Dot story, the Camp KDE speaker schedule was released last week and I’ve got to say it looks jam packed full of really interesting talks.  Coming from a bioinformatics day job I’m especially interested in Phillip Bourne’s keynote on open access to data.  And somehow I tricked the rest of the organizers into letting me speak there so hopefully that goes well too  I’ll be discussing how people who don’t know anything at all about programming can still get involved and be contributors in the KDE community.  I hope that developers will find this interesting as well because part of this discussion is meant to teach you how to find opportunities for your friends who normally say “yeah I’d help you with KDE things but I don’t know how to write code” to get involved.

One quick thing I’d like to mention is that I put some of the ideas I’ll be discussing in my Camp KDE talk into practice in my own life recently and managed to convince a friend of mine to give KDE a whirl.  Not only did he install openSUSE with the KDE Plasma workspace he also decided to start learning QT (he’s historically been a Windows user/programmer), and has started a blog to document his learning experiences along the way.  It should turn into a great resource for other new KDE/openSUSE users as time goes on.

Last, but certainly not least I just wanted to give a quick update on my beer making activities.  Here is our kitchen, where I spent most of my day yesterday:

My kitchen on a normal brew day

For those wondering what the heck all this stuff is, on the far left there is the malt/hops/etc, aka the “wort”, boiling in the gigantic pot.  Next to that are some more ingredients that I was weighing out to be added later in the boiling process.  Then there is the cooling coil and some other random tools and a thermometer, etc.

Anyways I’ve done some work on the beer brewing section of my blog and it’s much prettier now thanks to a few pictures like this one.  I also added the Belgian White beer I brewed yesterday in the status section and history, and added a more detailed sub page about the Holiday Ale I made in October.  Eventually I’ll get around to doing that for the other beers on the list too.  But for now, it’s time to go bottle my IPA!

Just wanted to provide a few quick notices/updates to the community on some promo activities.  I know everyone is busy with the upcoming holidays and the 4.4 release on the way so let’s cut to the chase:

• KDE apparel design help wanted! – The promo team is in the process of trying to build up some awesome new KDE gear for you all to wear.  We have an online store  that we’re setting up and would like some help from any interested design gurus out there that think they could make a cool looking t-shirt, hat, etc.  Email me (justin at neomantra DOT org) or the KDE-Promo mailing list or leave a comment…find some way to tell me how I can reach you and I’ll get you details on how to get started.
• Camp KDE now has over 65 registered attendees…are you one of them?  Especially if you live in North America this is a great opportunity to come out, meet some of the long time contributors of KDE, meet new contributors, learn about the future direction of our community and software, get training in QT development, hear great presentations, drink beer and socialize with cool people…all in sunny California.  Registration is free, all you have to do is show up.  Come out and join us!
• There are only 5 days left in the Camp KDE “Be Free” contest.  Why pay for your accommodations for Camp KDE when you could win them for free?!  All you need to do is write a short essay which demonstrates how using KDE Software has increased your freedom to get more done with your computers and email it to campkde-organizers@kde.org.  You can’t ask for an easier way to get a free trip to meet all your KDE friends.

Just a quick post to let you know that I’ve setup a page dedicated to tracking the home brewed beer I make.  The link to view it is in the page navigation at the top of my blog.  I plan to add in sub pages for each beer I brew that provides more detailed information including recipes and ingredients, etc as I have time so be sure to check back for updates.