My Second Akademy
As usual, crossing the Atlantic is tough for me. I'm just too tall, and the seats are, well... just too small. Not to mention the stress of receiving a message on the day of the trip saying that my flight had been moved four hours earlier! I dropped everything I was doing and ran to the airport, only to dicover that it was a mistake in the "system". Add to that the delays and the the risk of missing the connection... Lufthansa did not play well this trip but everything worked out in the end!
My second Akademy was simply amazing. It was also more special beacause it was the KDE 30th anniversary edition. Unfortunately I did not get to try the Konqi cake.
I am very proud to be part of the KDE community - a welcoming, friendly, diverse and free group of people who are making the world a better place. I you ask me what is KDE in one word, I would say hope.
Camille, from the Kdenlive team, asked us to document our trip, so I did a short edit.
Habemus Champions
One of the highlights of my trip was to announce the new KDE Goals. This cycle, the community voted for:
- KDE for Enterprise and Deployments - championed by: David Edmundson, Neal Gompa, and Kai Uwe Broulik
- Better documentation - championed by: Nate Graham, Thiago Masato Costa Sueto, and Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss
- Next Generation Styling for KDE - championed by: Arjen Hiemstra, Akseli Lahtinen, and Andy Betts
We are currently scheduling our kickoff meeting to get things organized. I am sure many of you are eager to contribute, so stay tuned for further news.
We also did a recap of the last cycle and handed the certificates of appreciation to the champions. Congrats to them, they really raised the bar!
My favorite accomplishments, in no particular order:
- Improved graphics tablet support. This made it possible to switch all the computers at our studio to KDE Plasma. We are a 100% KDE studio now. We Care About Your Input goal
- Plasma Keyboard. It was so cool to have seen this being born. We got a lot of community feedback and it will definitely be a cherry on top for Plasma. There are also many improvements and features coming. We Care About Your Input goal
- Ship Kirigami via pip. This is something that is still in a very initial state, but there has been recent progress by a community member. Streamlined Application Development Experience goal
- I love that KDE Mentorship now has a visual identity and it is getting a new website. KDE Needs You goal
- Beacon Program is a new mentorship program that I've been working to setup for ther last months. It is currrently entering a beta phase and will share more info soon. KDE Needs You goal
BOFs
I only got to participate in two BOFs.
The first was the Mentorships one hosted by Paul and Ansh, where I got to give a preview of the Beacon Program, the work that I've been building with universities for the last two semesters.
I also participated in Drunk KDE - Brand personality of KDE hosted by Aniqa and Kieryn. Boy that was a fun one! We got to think about KDE's branding and it contemplated lot's of issues that need to be worked on. Aniqa is compiling all our input and we'll hopefully get things moving afterwards.
Kdenlive at Akademy
The second highlight was getting together with the Kdenlive crew. Although it was a very quick, as most of the team stayed only for the weekend, we managed to get a lot done. We organized future sprints, started planning our upcoming fundraising campaign, discussed some promo tasks, and we even finally managed to merge the features section of the Kdenlive home page.
We also did a lot of testing and UX brainstorming for the upcoming keyframe timeline.
Unfortunately, for most of the trip, Jean-Baptiste was under the weather, so Julius and I had to fill in for his talk.
Graz
I loved Graz, Austria's second largest city. It is so welcoming and chill. I bought a weekly transport pass but ended up using it so little... did a lot of walking.
I was happy that I got to do some last minute sightseeing before catching the plane back home. After all the clock tower and the mountains were the inspiration for this year's edition.
A nice surprise was the Steirisches Backhendl served at TU Graz was just delicious. Styrian fried chicken (in pumpkin seed oil) served with a tangy potato salad and lingonberry jam.
Behind the scenes
This was my second Akademy, not only as a participant but also part of the organizing team.
We've been meeting religiously every Tuesday to organize this edition. Each time with different background lights from Harald's streaming setup.
All the graphics of this edition were made using free software programs like Inkscape for the general graphics creation, Scribus to export the PDF for printing, Blender for the intro graphics animations, and Kdenlive for video editing.
Also a HUGE shoutout to the CCC Video Operation Center (C3VOC) team. I really hope that we have consolidated this partership with them and can continue partnering with them for future Akademies. Speaking of which, the call for hosts is still open.
Lot's of luv to the beautiful, lean, mean Akademy-making team who put together such a fantastic edition. Can't wait for the next one with you all.
Some of the team. <3
