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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.