Neomantra.org

One of my major goals in helping with promo work is to try and build up our KDE community as much as possible here in North America.  Yes…contrary to popular belief we do have something of a community here, which I will prove shortly.  In fact, as I’ve started looking into this more closely I’m realizing we are quite busy on this side of the pond. But before I get to that, how about some useful background information?

Some of you may or may not know that the Promo team, mainly Lydia from what I can tell (because she rocks!), has been maintaining this events page at http://events.kde.org.  This serves as a great place for helping spread the word about what conference, fairs, meetings, etc KDE will be represented at.  However as far as I can tell once an event is over this record sort of disappears from the site so there is no real historical record that allows us to track these events.  I think having such a log would be really useful for reporting back in the e.V. quarterly reports.  Additionally there is no real space to put extra planning information such as who is helping with the event (so we can pester them to do it again next year!), or to list what exactly they’re doing there (like whether it’s giving talks, running a booth space, etc).

Conveniently there already existed a wiki page for tracking events and thus I’ve decided it would be a good idea to get it into shape with updated information so that we can do all these things.  This page lives at http://community.kde.org/Promo/Events and contains all of this extra information I’ve just described.  So if you or anyone you know of is doing something on behalf of KDE at any kind of event please go add it there and/or contact the KDE Promo mailing list to let us know so we can help you advertise!

Now, getting back to activities in North America…in the process of updating this page I’ve realized that there are quite a large number of events coming up in the short term here.  In fact just looking at June through October there are already 8 North American events listed which will have KDE representation in the form of booths or speakers.  Not too shabby if you ask me.  Let’s keep up the momentum!

Well after an extremely long series of planes, trains, and…walking (we didn’t take any automobiles) Celeste and I arrived in Tampere.  We’d already found some fellow KDE folks before we even made it to Finland which was pretty cool.  Nothing like coming out of a passport checkpoint in Amsterdam to be randomly greeted by people you know (especially when you’ve never met before in person).

Anyways we were completely wiped out by the time we got to our room on Friday night so we missed the pre-party that evening though I heard there was some friendly trash talking over the World Cup match along with some cool retro arcade games.

This brings me to day 1 activities.  Unfortunately in the course of trying to keep up with some promo tasks I didn’t get to catch a talk at every time slot but I did see several very good ones.   I made it into the keynote first thing in the morning to learn about how linux is taking over the mobile platform and how Valtteri Halla from Nokia is plotting world domination via MeeGo.  Mobile devices will surely be a key area of expansion for QT and KDE technologies in the near future and I look forward to hearing more interesting talks about that throughout Akademy.

After that I caught most of George Goldberg’s talk on Telepathy.  There are certainly some very cool things on the way from this development framework as well as some exciting opportunities to collaborate with other technical infrastructure such as Akonadi.  As this matures developers will be able  to easily add new features such as single click desktop sharing via instant messaging (possibly as soon as SC 4.6) and many other cool communication related features in later releases.  Check out my interview with George to hear more about what Telepathy does, what it will mean for developers and end users, as well as how you can get involved in making all of this happen more quickly.

While I did not get a chance to see his talk I also had the chance to sit down with Thomas Thym, who reported to the community on the 7 principles of successful open source communities and how they apply to KDE.  He told me his thoughts on how the KDE can best engage developers in finding their “itch for pefection” to help increase our market share and achieve world domination.  Follow this link to learn more about his presentation in this interview.

I also managed to find time to listen to Nils Adermann and Anne Wilson who gave a talk regarding KDE Forums and how we can use them to increase communication in ways that allow users to better help themselves and also to generate better quality of communication between users and developers.  In their talk they discussed how forums can provide a line of defense to weed out nonconstructive feedback to developers thanks to the many great moderators we have in our forums.  Additionally they pointed out that searching for answers to questions that have already been addressed is much easier than most other methods providing an advantage over mailing lists or IRC.  I caught up with Nils later in the day as well, so you can watch this interview to hear more about how popular the KDE forums have become and how the collaboration between phpBB and KDE was born.

In addition to these talks I caught the KDE Women’s panel discussion and Leo’s talk about moving media players out of the digital ice age and into something more intelligent about playing our music.  I will spend some more time talking about these in my next blog entry later tonight as it’s now Sunday morning and I’m about to be late for the first run of talks!  Be sure to keep up with all the latest buzz via the !Akademy Identi.ca group and keep a watch on our KDE Promo YouTube channel for additional interviews and other Akademy related videos all this week.

Help build awareness about KDE by voting for our software at http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/312220/khc07.

I found the survey via PCLinuxOS which notes that “Polls will be open through August 20th. Winners will be prominently featured in an upcoming issue of Linux Journal.”

Spread the word!

Our booth setup at SELF 2010, complete with a 1990's CRT monitor. We kick it old school!

Celeste and I were down in the sunny and HOT state of South Carolina for this year’s SouthEast LinuxFest.  Before I get started I want to send out a big thanks to the Upstate Carolina LUG.  These folks have been awesome!  They picked us up at the airport, took us to the hotel/conference, and were super responsive about helping us when getting the booth setup.  I’d love to see these guys put in a proposal for Camp KDE at some point because they’ve definitely got the ability to organize a conference quite well!

Our KDE gaming compatriot in action

Anyhow, Saturday was a pretty long day but very productive.  We had to wake up at 5:30am to catch our flight…and I am not a morning person.  But after a big cup of coffee I had finally woken up and was ready to rock when we landed in SC.  Lots of people stopped by the booth and all our KDE stickers, “Join the game” fliers, etc were rapidly consumed throughout day.  I had to put some aside to make sure we had some left for Sunday.  I had tons of great conversations with long time KDE users and met a bunch of very interested potential users as well.  If I had to pick one highlight of the day though it was when a few of what I’d call the next generation FOSS community stopped by to check out our stuff.  We’ve definitely got a new Kapman champion in the house!

Celeste also gave a great talk about how KDE is EVERYWHERE!  It focused on enlightening the Linux community about how we’re not only on the desktop, but are also spreading our technologies into mobile, netbook, and  cloud based environments.  She spent some time talking about how KDE is not just software but also a vibrant community including our developers and users.  Finally she also covered some of the latest and greatest features of the 4.4 and 4.5 SC releases and introduced the new “Join the game” campaign.

Celeste's bio page in the SELF program, complete with Ingo's awesome KDE artwork

After the day was over we went to dinner with a rag tag group of Ubuntu/Slackware/Zareason people to get some Japanese hibachi food and talk about the IPv4 Internet apocalypse.  While I’m thinking about it, I should mention that Zareason makes some pretty sweet hardware.  I was really impressed with the models they brought to the conference.  Worth checking out if you’re considering a new computer purchase.

There was a reception back at the hotel later in the evening.  Celeste and I didn’t stay too long but it looked like everyone was having lots of fun.  At one point someone took over the microphone and was actually rapping in geek speak over top of some hip hop music.  Yeah…try picturing that one in your head.  It’s like explaining what it was like to see Knut do his break dancing at GCDS last year.  There’s no way you can do it justice with just words

Sunday was a little bit more quiet but we still had a steady stream of visitors over the course of the day.  It gave me some time to wander around a bit and actually see some of the other booths and even catch part of a talk.  All things told I’d say the weekend was a great success and I look forward to hopefully visiting again for SELF 2011.

Stuart Jarvis wrote a nice article the other day outlining some common reasons why people may be hesitant to make the leap to contributing in KDE.  This gave me an idea just now while thinking about this.  I’m hoping I can get feedback from all of you.

The number one reason I constantly see people give for not becoming a contributor (excluding lack of free time) is that they don’t know where to get started, or have some technical issue with getting setup to start coding, etc.  When asked about this most people quickly provide some story about how they tried to start, got confused about some problem or another, couldn’t find the documentation they needed, and subsequently gave up because they couldn’t find the answer.  I know personally that if I didn’t have encouragement and assistance from others in the community I may have been met with the same frustrations early on and given up as well.  So here’s the idea…

What if we setup something like a KDE mentor program for new contributors?  It could be sort of similar to the Google Summer of Code setup, but running year round.  Experienced members of the community could sign up at some central web portal, list their areas of expertise relating to KDE (maybe Junior Jobs could be linked to or included here as well), and then interested new contributors could sign up and connect with a mentor.  This way they have immediate connection to someone in the community who is doing something similar to what the new contributor is interested in doing.  In addition to the immediate community connection it also gives the new contributor a go-to person for helping them figure out where to get started, find the project or tasks right for them, and for providing help to get them over the initial hurdles that we all encounter when new to KDE.

Some critical questions…

• Do you think a service like this would be productive for our community? (or does anything similar already exist that I might not know about?)
• If such a thing existed, would you sign up to be a mentor?
• For those of you who’ve participated as a mentor through GSoC, are there any critical lessons learned from that process that you’d want to see carried into an initiative like this?

Like many of you I’ve picked up some pretty cool KDE shirts over time thanks to shirts created for big events like developer sprints, Camp KDE, or Akademy (get your talks submitted if you haven’t yet!).  But I always felt like maybe we could do more.  What about all the rest of the community members and fans of KDE that couldn’t be at these events?  Or what about people who wish they could get more than one or two KDE shirts a year?  Don’t they need some place to buy awesome gear as well so they can be the coolest person in their circle of friends?

Well after much begging and groveling I have gotten some fantastic help from lots of people on the promo team and art team and now we have the beginnings of what I hope will turn into a comprehensive KDE store!  A very huge extra special thanks to Eugene Trounev who provided me with the first “ready to submit” SVG designs!  But keep an eye out as we have many more works in progress that I hope will be developed into something final.  And I’ll always be looking for more artwork so please contact me if you want to help make the stores even cooler.

Due to shipping cost issues I am currently maintaining 2 separate sites on SpreadShirt.  One is for the Americas and the other for Europe.  My hope is that this will allow most anyone in the world to be able to order KDE gear at reasonable shipping prices.  The two sites seem to have slightly different rules about design submission so the things available are not exactly the same but I will do my best to offer everything I can in both places. It almost goes without saying but neither site charges any sort of commission price on the part of KDE so the price you pay is only the price that it costs SpreadShirt to make and ship the items to you.  So without further ado, here are the links:

• Americas: http://gearwear.spreadshirt.com/
• Europe: http://kde-gear.spreadshirt.net/

Be sure to check out the front and back views on the shirts as some have designs on both sides.

Last but not least…what if you like the designs but don’t like the way I’ve laid them out a shirt?  No big deal.  I’m also posting the individual designs on the “Spreadshirt Marketplace”.  This means you can go to the Spreadshirt homepage (either spreadshirt.com or .net depending on where you live) and hit “Create your own”.  Then do a Design search on “KDE” and find the individual designs to make your own items out of them if you want.  Because you should “be free” to customize your clothes just like your computer

Just a quick heads up for anyone in the Washington, DC metro area.  I’ll be speaking at this month’s CALUG meeting on Wednesday, March 10.  I’m going to be presenting a similar talk to the one I gave at Camp KDE on how to make the jump from KDE user to contributor (slides/YouTube).  Full details about time and place can be found on the CALUG home page.  Hope to see you there!

No, that’s not a drunken call for more alcohol…it’s just my way of telling you to go check out the beer pages because I’ve added some new stuff once again.  Mainly some tidbits about my first foray into using whole hops vs pellets, my first run at brewing my potential “house brew” recipe, and some post-bottling musings about my dunkelweizen. Last but not least, keep an eye out for my next project…an attempt at cloning Troegs Nugget Nectar.  I bought a 22oz bottle of this stuff last weekend and it was great, but cost me almost 9 dollars!  Sorry but unless I’m at a bar I can’t tolerate 4+ dollars per beer, that’s just insane.  But relax, homebrewing to the rescue!  If I can produce something that tastes pretty close I’ll be saving a little over 3 dollars per bottle compared to retail.  That’s a happy thought.

So as many of you know there is this really cool contest going on right now called the Plasma Javascript Jam Session.   Hopefully lots of you are already putting together some amazing entries.  But maybe some of you haven’t started yet because you don’t know what you want to make?  Well if you’ve got programming skills and are just looking for a good idea maybe this post will help you out a bit.  Recently I pollled the KDE User group on LinkedIn to see if any other non-coding types like myself had any ideas for plasmoids they would love to have.  Below is some of the feedback I got from the group.  Hopefully it inspires some of you out there who are still trying to decide what to do.

• Facebook plasmoid (the commenter mentioned the existing one is buggy and doesn’t work well)
• An eBay watch list plasmoid
• A clock plasmoid that displays multiple time zones (I think the existing one does support multiple time zones but only shows alternate times on mouseover)
• BBC iplayer plasmoid
• A plasmoid that uses iGoogle gadgets/widgets. This will put whatever iGoogle provides is directly on the desktop.
• A subliminal plasmoid: something which briefly displays text on screen and  then disappears (helpful if, for instance, you want to stop smoking)
• A kAddressbook lookup plasmoid:  Something which would allow copying of either a vCard or specific parts, e.g. email address or street address
• A last.fm plasmoid with details from artist for the current played track
• A desktop file search plasmoid

Here’s a few more ideas of my own:

• Social media mashup – it would be neat to have a single plasmoid that tracked all my identi.ca, twitter, facebook, opendesktop, and google buzz feeds from one UI so I don’t need to have Choqok + facebook web page + gmail web page open all the time.  Plus a lot of people (myself included) syndicate posts to multiple services so it’d be even cooler if this thing could detect that and ignore duplicates when you’re following a person on more than one of these services.
• Netflix – queue management, search, etc.
• Beer related – maybe some kind of data entry plasmoid for sites like ratebeer.com that let you review beers…hell anything that has to do with beer would be cool
• Google Calendar – I rely a lot on google calendar to keep my life in order and have several different ones on there.  I’ve never had any luck getting the one that exists currently to work so I’d love to see one that works well and supports multiple calendars, etc.

Oh no!  The out of town visitor beat me to posting the follow up blog entry on our party. Damn you Jonathan! Stop making me look like a slacker!

So unfortunately this past week or two I’ve been rather bogged down with working on my master’s degree and working my day job and brewing beer, etc.    But on the note of beer we had some very good ones at our 4.4 SC party and I think everyone that came had a nice time.

View from our balcony after the storm

We started out at Fuddruckers for some good American style burgers and fries (with drunken locals who swore they knew Scottish people that they’d never seen in their lives) and lots of KDE talk.  I had the opportunity to show off some new features to some of the Kubuntu LoCo folks.  I think we’d have had a better turn out but unfortunately due to SNOWPACALYPSE 2010 in DC we had lots of people whose cars were too buried to make it to the party.  The other bad news was that I forgot all the sweet KDE swag that Claudia sent me.  Though really that was mostly for the CALUG talk I was going to give this month (which was canceled and subsequently moved to next month due to the storms).  Despite the circumstances we still made Jonathan give a really in depth speech about KDE and Kubuntu before we moved on to the bar.  Ask him about it…it was quite grueling and official.

After that we headed off to Victoria Gastropub where many more fancy beers were to be had.  We lost half of our Fuddruckers crew on the way there due to age limits and what not, but fortunately we picked up another 6 people after we arrived so all in all we had a pretty steady group of 10-12 people the entire evening.  2 of those folks were completely new to KDE so I gave them my sales pitch about how absolutely amazing it was.  Here are a couple more photos from the evening:

The last standing at Fuddruckers

Late night at Victoria's