Neomantra.org

Well hello there KDE community, my name is Justin Kirby and thanks to Lydia I’ve managed to get my blog added to Planet KDE.  I suppose I should spend a minute telling you who I am and what I’m doing. In the day time I work for a contractor that provides bioinformatics support to the Cancer Imaging Program which is a part of the United States Government’s Health and Human Services division.  Mostly I help them with utilizing some open source tools developed by the Center for Bioinformatics and Information Technology  (CBIIT) to collect interesting sets of medical images to help researchers find better ways to find and cure cancer.   Very interesting stuff and quite rewarding to know that the work we do eventually helps improve the lives of so many people.

Switching topics, I’ve been using KDE for a while and as some folks already know I am married to one of the e.V. board members so KDE is often the subject of conversation around our house.  I’ve been to a few face to face meetings (KDE 4.0 release event and GCDS) as an end user but a few months ago I finally decided I needed to find a way to contribute.  I had considered doing this many times in the past but my lack of programming knowledge always deterred me.  As it turns out, I’ve since found that you don’t have to know a thing about writing software to be a KDE contributor.

I fired off an email to the KDE Promo team on their mailing list asking how I could get involved there, hoping that since I didn’t know how to code maybe I could help promote the great work the developers are doing.  The team responded and put me to work right away.  Jos gave me some ideas for Dot articles and before I knew it I had published something.  I also started working on cleaning up the number of unused listservs floating around the mailman site but that’s not quite done yet.  Hopefully I’ll be bugging the moderators of the lists that seem to be dead sometime soon to see if they agree that their list is no longer needed.

Now I find myself in Stuttgart, Germany at the Promo Sprint.  It’s been great fun and we’ve kept insanely busy since arrival.  Troy and Stu covered most of the activities in blog posts for the first two days, but today we spent a great deal of time debating the rebranding topic and are very close to having formal documents ready now outlining these new guidelines and brand mappings.  We also started building some mockups of the KDE web site redesign and continued working on our informational conference handout materials.  Last but not least we had a very interesting discussion about finding ways to bring in even more new contributors to the KDE community.  One of the items that came out of that was an idea to send regular updates about “junior jobs” opportunities on the Dot.   If anyone out there has any tasks they’d like help with that might be well suited to a potential new contributor  please let me know and we’ll help you spread the word!