ervin : change

KDE Manifesto: On The Doorstep

2013-05-10T12:00:00+02:00

This post is part of a series about the KDE Manifesto

As mentionned in my previous post, I have been on a very needed hiatus from public communication. It also means that I delayed indefinitely my series about the KDE Manifesto. If you don't remember the first part, I advise you to read it again first. Now... Let's resume the story telling.

We've previously seen why we needed a tool to answer this question of "What is a KDE project?", in this part we'll see how we tackled the task which led to the KDE Manifesto.

Because of all the events and the questions without answers related in the previous part, some people finally noticed some actions were needed and that we couldn't ignore the symptoms any longer. At one point the discussion started in the KDE e.V. about trying to provide a definition of what is a "KDE project". Then in the KDE e.V. was created a small team which had the mandate to create that definition. I had the honor to be part of that team, and the other members were Cornelius Schumacher, Eike Hein, Ivan Čukić, and Sebastian Sauer. We should really be grateful to the work they put in that task (I know I am).

We started with the right first step in my opinion: collecting feedback from the community and from different projects to see how they perceive themselves and the community. But doing it this way had a downside, we ended up with way too much data, and got completely overwhelmed. That was clearly not easy, and everyone being busy as usual at some point the data got ignored, collecting dust in a dark corner of our hard drives. The team became completely dormant and no communication was going on anymore.

Until... one night... I don't really know why, I picked up everything and tried to map it on paper. I extracted criterias and definitions out of the pieces of text we received. After all, I used to do Knowledge Engineering, that couldn't be an impossible task! That's when I noticed why we felt overwhelmed and silently gave up on the task at hand. If you took all the criterias and considered them equals (which was our mindset all along), you could end up only with a tautological situation: "A KDE project is a project considering itself part of KDE or started by a known KDE contributor". Not a terribly useful outcome, but at least I then knew how to move forward.

I asked the membership of the KDE e.V. to change our mandate in order to move away from trying to define what a KDE Project is and instead determine which characteristics we want KDE Projects to share. It sounds similar but makes a huge difference, you're not working on a closed check list anymore. It made for a much more open space, and not all feedback could be treated equal anymore, there definitely was noise in there.

Once that change of scope got accepted, I summoned the original team again to set up a meeting at Akademy 2012 to work together on the data again. With the given mandate, it was likely not possible to nail it down in finite time remotely. Since not everyone could make it to Akademy, we had to reshuffle the team a bit to make the meeting happen.

And so the meeting finally happened at Akademy, after the KDE e.V. general assembly in presence of Alex Fiestas, Albert Astals Cid, Carl Symons, Cornelius Schumacher, Mirko Boehm, Pradeepto Bhattacharya and myself. We were looking at a very long and intense brainstorming session to go through all the notes which were collected the past months and try to make sense out of them... We all know how this kind of brainstorming sessions can quickly go out of control and be in the end fruitless. That's why I came with an experiment to propose.

Instead of debating the outcome, I proposed a very light process, in the form of a tuned "Prune the Product Tree" game. This game is part of a set named "Innovation Games" which are good for market studies, or emergence of answers to very broad questions like the one we were tackling.

The basic idea is that we went through all the feedback we got, and for each piece of information found, we tried to determine where on the tree it would fit:

On the floor if that was irrelevant, or mentionned as something we should avoid as a criterion in the future;
On the roots if that was something supporting the community, something the community couldn't function without;
On the trunk if that was something central to the community definition;
On the canope for anything less central, and derived from the rest, further away from the trunk as it was more refined by-product, in other words consequences from what was on the roots and the trunk.

And so, while playing that game (it's a serious game, but a game nonetheless so it has to be played!) we obtained the following tree:

That's when it struck me... We're not really creating a definition, we're creating a manifesto. On the roots and the trunk it was clearly on the values level, while on the canope you could see practical consequences of those values. I suggested the rest of the team to work on a document which would follow this form: the real manifesto talking only about the high level values, and then extra parts for the practical consequences of those values. This proposition was accepted by the whole team.

Before parting, we also decided to sanity check our result and get an idea of its impact on existing projects. We took a few sample projects and examined them through the tree we produced. Obviously sample projects which were already KDE projects would have to fit, and for sample projects which were not KDE projects we would need to easily identify the blockers for them to join. Reassured by this last check, we parted ways and the editing work started.

I ended up carrying that editing work. I took inspiration in the Agile Manifesto and the Software Craftsmanship Manifesto which went through this kind of exercise before us ("stand on the shoulders of giants" they say). While creating the different drafts, I proposed them to more and more different people, collecting feedback and amending as I go. That led us to the release of the KDE Manifesto in its current form. It is definitely not a document set in stone, I keep collecting feedback and I plan to push updates to the manifesto in the future. I expect the main page to be rather stable, but we'll probably see the rest of it change with time. It seems I turned into the de facto curator for the KDE Manifesto, it's something I try to approach humbly as to not betray the spirit of KDE.

And that concludes this genesis of the KDE Manifesto... it is definitely not the end of the process I mentionned in my previous post. We're really on the doorstep, this document is more or less our late constitution, it's up to the community to choose the path from here. I'm pretty sure it will be full of adventures for the years to come... That's why, even though I generally avoid to do that, in the last part I will try a small exercise in forecasting and see which changes it might bring to the community.

Frameworks Finding Their Voice

2013-05-07T19:30:00+02:00

I didn't make noise about KDE Frameworks for a while now, and to the outside it could look like it wasn't making progress. Let me assure you: this is not the truth. Admittedly, I decided to take a risk a few months ago... I stopped communicating or reaching toward people to get more contributors.

Why would I take such a risk? Well, we hit a major road block in the form of KDEUI. The complexity was so high there, that as soon as someone was trying to split something out they were daunted by the task. That's why I stopped trying to bring more people in... what's the use if they then walk away in disgust? I'd rather have them do stuff they take pride in.

And so I took the risk, went into a sort of retreat to focus all my energy on trying to find a way to slay the beast. I can tell you it has been months of work to remove the difficult parts of KDEUI in order to make it more inviting to people. It's not all solved of course, but we're at a point where the beast is about to die... we have to collectively strike it once more to put it to rest before moving to other fun areas.

That's why, today, I am glad to announce that the battle plan to split KDEUI is finally published. I am able to concentrate on other people again, and so expect more communication and help from me (it even picked up a bit already).

All people wanting to push KDE Frameworks forward are invited to pick tasks either to split KDEUI or push our contributions to Qt forward. Both are surely needed and most of the tasks there should have a similar size.

If you are interested, please contact us by email on kde-frameworks-devel, or on IRC at #kde-devel. If you are not sure what to pick we can help you get started and select something matching your skills. If you have issues with your task and are unsure what to do we can help you.

We also plan to hold regular meetings to share efforts and progress. They will happen on #kde-devel every Tuesday at 4pm (UTC+2).

Hoping to see you there! Let's bring KDEUI down.

KDE Manifesto: An Unexpected Party

2012-10-12T14:00:00+02:00

This post is part of a series about the KDE Manifesto

So the cat is finally out of the bag... The KDE Manifesto has been officially announced. It probably came as a surprise to some of you, and since I got a unique perspective in its birth I thought it'd would be a good idea to blog about it to give some background information.

So why this unexpected party and the sudden release of this document? Well, like most unexpected events, it is the realization of an unnoticed process set in motion a long while ago. I think I would have a hard time to pin point exactly when the need to have such a document appeared in the subconscious of the community... My opinion is that it should probably have been done a few of years ago. I'm sure of one thing though, it became necessary because our community evolved in a way that its creators didn't expect.

Now, let's jump back to October 14th 1996, a student named Matthias Ettrich sent an email announcing a new project. If we examine this announcement today, what is immediately obvious? Let's see... It was an energic call to arms. It was very developer centric. It laid down some of the main technical choices. It was limited in scope by providing a list of the components a desktop needs. Also, at the same time it pointed out that more than what was listed might be needed, claiming it's a very open project.

After this announcement, people started to join and to happily work on KDE. They clearly delivered, release after release, KDE was getting bigger and better. Nobody really thought about the community which formed, it was all about the technical artifacts (which is totally fine, I'm not judging). This trend continued for years, pushing KDE (the desktop) toward its popular success, while the community making KDE was growing.

It's time to fast track to the year 2006! The community behind KDE is busier than ever (the first KDE 4.0 alpha will be released the following year), and all this activity shows how big and complex this community became. Teams formed, not every team progressed at the same speed or had the exact same vision of the whole. Clearly something happened in our community which changed it.

That same year we had Akademy in Dublin, probably one of my favorite Akademies. And remembering that particular edition two things struck me:

The first one is Aaron Seigo's keynote which was subtitled "The Quest for Project Identity and Definition"... Interesting, in retrospect, isn't it? But lots of people probably attended it, I won't spend more time on it, you probably got the idea from the title.
The second one got probably unnoticed to most. It is one of those tiny details which are really precious because the event passes quickly... and somehow I remember it vividly, it touched something in me and stayed in my memory. During that Akademy, Matthias Welwarsky was chairing the community track of the conference. During one of the introductions, and probably in reaction of the keynote mentionned above, he said that to him "KDE is not a project anymore, because a project has an end, it has become an on-going process".

And here it is... I think that in one sentence, Matthias Welwarsky has put the biggest change which happened to KDE in plain sight. The event which was unforseen by the creators of our community, at some point between 1996 and 2006, KDE became an "on-going process". And that's right, if you look at the original announcement of KDE, all of the goals set there were reached in 2006...

KDE was still operating, but in the unknown, what is this "on-going process" trying to solve? Nobody could provide an answer to that question anymore. Somehow we created something self-sustaining which was delivering more and more software.

It took a few more years before someone really tried to visit what was going on and to characterize what KDE meant... At that point it was clear it wasn't simply about KDE the desktop anymore, the community was doing much more than that. That's why in 2009, our marketing team took the lead and announced the repositioning of the KDE brand. KDE wasn't a product brand anymore, so not a single KDE the desktop anymore, but it was a vendor brand. It meant that from now on KDE the community was producing (among other things) a desktop. The new word on the street was "KDE released KDE Platform 4.5", "KDE released Kontact 4.7" and so on... Quite a change of perspective!

I know some people didn't really like the marketing team taking the lead on that... I don't have a strong opinion about the exact content of the repositioning, but it clearly was the tip of the iceberg of the mutation of KDE. It had the merit of making it explicit at last!

At the same time, despite such a brand repositioning being welcome, it was not enough to address the changes in our community. It emerged because we kept going after reaching the goals set in 1996. It emerged because we were creating more and more diverse products: development platforms, workspaces, desktop applications, mobile applications, even server applications (Kolab was born in our ranks, ownCloud would appear in 2010). But, it didn't allow to answer "what is a KDE project?".

And that's pretty much the situation we were at in early 2012. "KDE" is the name of the community, and this community makes products. So we're in a situation where "a project is a KDE project because it has been created by people in the KDE community". It's not exactly satisfying though... What if someone from the community creates a database system? is it a KDE project? (hint: the answer depends on who you ask) What if someone outside the community creates a mobile application? can it join the KDE community? under which conditions?

I'm not making this up. Those are real questions which arose over the years... and we never had a tool to help us devise a proper answer. We dealt with that in an ad hoc manner, and it was a growing pain. I'll go as far as saying it had potential to hurt the cohesion of the community.

That's what we're trying to fix, and we'll see how in the next post of this series. :-)

KDE Workspace Sprint Wrap-up

2012-06-16T00:52:24+02:00

Interesting week, I think that's the first time I attend a sprint where I don't write a single line of code. Wait! What? Me? Not writing code!? Yes... I guess it was doomed to happen since I've been doing more and more sprint organization lately.

This one was a bit special though, I'm not really a very active contributor of our workspaces. I care about them of course, but I just provide a patch here and there from time to time. Lately, there's been new blood getting involved in the workspaces, which is great of course, but that's also challenging. When you get such a community growth, it is often difficult to keep everyone on the same page.

I've been doing organization work, I care about our workspaces, and I'm a rather neutral/free agent in that area so I decided to attend. Indeed, it seemed that I had a proper profile to facilitate the meeting, and help integrate people, so I tackled that task. It was probably risky in retrospect, but no one got hurt, that's a good sign. ;-)

Of course, since I'm working on KDE Frameworks as well, I could from time to time bring the "people from the basement" perspective. :-)

So, what did we achieve during that week? Maybe not a lot code wise (yet), but definitely a lot on the bonding and community front. That's fine as it was the main goal!

I planned several sessions throughout the week to prepare the proper mindset. Of course it all started with hugs and massages (I've been told it relieves tensions, so it was a proper first step I think). Then we had a first meeting where Marco and Sebas presented the terminology and the concepts used around Plasma. It of course raised some controversy, but we quickly moved on for the time being as it was more about sharing the current state of affair, not more.

We then took on a long tour of group activities.

First Björn helped the people to build a set of personas to help thinking with the user point of view when dealing with our software. We came up with Carla and Raj who helped quite a bit during the sprint. Hopefully, they'll help us more generally when designing to keep a user centric approach.

Then we had two innovation games named Speed Boat and Prune the Product Tree. They were respectively meant to figure out the pain points around the workspaces, and to find out the product core features and its dynamics. We did a terrific job on those games along the course of two days... They were exhausting for me though! Keeping your attention focused to facilitate the process, get the people to share, make sure everyone can talk, etc. Pfew! That wasn't even the end of it all... I still had to process all the generated data!

Luckily, those games completely met my expectations so it was worth the effort. They indeed confirmed some of the assumptions we had about our products, but they also helped to discover some unsuspected dynamics. Of course I pushed all the data and results on our wiki.

We concluded this process with two meetings. The first one to revisit the terms and concepts extracted on the first day. Those terms and concepts got adjusted a bit, which is a very good thing, allowing everyone to appropriate them. The second one was more technical, and the people extracted together tasks to move the products forward. It helped fill up a Kanban that they're supposed to use over the week-end now (I can only assume, I unfortunately won't be there to live the experience, I had to get back home).

Of course, throughout the sprint, there was quite some slack in the schedule for the mandatory cooking activities (led by our own personal Dario The Cook), table tennis games, naps and messing around with the swimming pool. That helped keep a playful atmosphere which was definitely welcome.

Anyway, during this week it was fascinating to see less and less controversies appearing during discussions. They got replaced by more and more group thinking, consensus creation, etc. Definitely more pleasant for everyone. I dare believe the activities we proposed through the week helped pave the way of this shift of mindset.

As you can see on that group photo, very nice atmosphere in the group this morning! I hope it'll stick... only time will tell.

PS: For more pictures with sexy hackers or the usual sticky notes, I already uploaded them in the Sprint gallery

KDE Frameworks 5 volunteer day 2

2012-03-22T00:20:24+01:00

You want to help us make progresses on KDE Frameworks 5... But you missed the volunteer day? No problem! It wasn't a one time event, and we're having the second edition this week-end!

We're of course a bit sorry for the late notice, we'll try to announce the next one more in advance.

Come and join us! Saturday March 24 on Freenode #kde-devel channel!

This day will be mentored by Sune Vuorela (svuorela), Dario Freddi (drf) and David Faure (dfaure) from 10am to 6pm CET. Feel free to ping them on the channel.

They will be around to guide you and answer all the questions you could have on KDE Frameworks 5.

Pre-requisites: Qt 4.8, a build of kdelibs frameworks branch (note the you will need cmake 2.8.7 for it or the cmake git version and a clone of extra-cmake-modules). You can also read the Frameworks Community wiki pages in order to learn more about Frameworks internals.

Remember Saturday, 10am to 6pm CET, #kde-devel on Freenode, be there, help our community!

First KDE Frameworks 5 volunteer day

2012-02-13T00:02:24+01:00

You want to help us make progresses on KDE Frameworks 5... But you're not sure you're up to the job? You don't know what to look at or where to start? You're not sure what it takes to be a KDE Framework maintainer?

Fear not! We're thinking about you, and we will have the first KDE Frameworks 5 volunteer day next saturday.

Come and join us! Saturday February 18 on Freenode #kde-devel channel!

This day will be driven by Aaron Seigo (aseigo) and myself (ervin) from 10am to 6pm CET. Feel free to ping us on the channel.

We will be around to guide you answer all the questions you didn't dare asking to get yourself started on helping us with KDE Frameworks 5.

We're preparing tasks to allocate to volunteers, and they will range from the small self-contained code adjustment, to splitting your own KDE Framework out of kdelibs and becoming its maintainer. Eternal glory will be provided with any task package you pick, so don't hesitate anymore, it's your chance right now!

Remember Saturday, 10am to 6pm CET, #kde-devel on Freenode, be there, help our community!

Osnabrück KDE PIM Sprint 2012

2012-02-12T23:48:24+01:00

Just a quicky on "what I did this week-end".

And yet another week-end which went away like a blast... of course it was again the fault of KDE! I went all the way to Osnabrück to attend the traditional KDE PIM sprint. This one was a first for me despite the fact that it was its tenth edition.

My plan before flying in was simple and easy to remember: "Sit with David Faure and fix all his IMAP bugs". It turned out not that easy to apply in practice. Of course, there's always something unexpected... sometimes pleasant, sometimes not.

For the unpleasant part, we had a tough luck on Friday: David's travel wasn't smooth at all so he arrived only during the night, while I had a terrible headache during the afternoon and the evening which made me only able to triage bugs (and at a very slow pace even...).

The pleasantly unexpected event which turned me away from my initial simple plan was the presence of Christian Mollekopf and Björn Balazs. I work with Christian on Zanshin, and I already interacted with Björn quite a bit during the Forge 2011 for usability work... one plus one being equal to lots, we ended up having meetings to discuss the interaction schemes for Zanshin 0.3. I have to say I'm pleased with the results so far. There's still a few gray areas but I think we'll decide on those when we turn the ideas into code.

And for the IMAP support? Well let's say that despite the disturbances which turned me away from my plan, the bug count went drastically down. On arrival, there was a bit more than forty bug reports against the IMAP resource, and between the triaging and the bugfixes we worked on with David I'm now leaving the sprint with only twenty known bugs (also a couple will likely get closed shortly since patches are in the work).

And again, a fairly nice and productive sprint, courtesy of KDE. I looove this community!

Bye Bye 2011

2012-01-08T21:35:18+01:00

Didn't blog in a while... Indeed the end of 2011 was hectic lots happening (both at work and in the community) so almost no time to write about it. Despite Christmas and the New Year I didn't take vacations in December, I admit I'm now a bit tired.

Anyway, the last few months were awesome, as I said: lots happening. So let's take a look in this post at the latest endeavours I participated in be it technical or community work.

Akademy-fr / Capitole du Libre

The path leading to end of November has seen Benjamin Port putting quite some work in the organization of the very first Akademy-fr. It's been a very important event for the french KDE community.

This event was grouped inside the Capitole du Libre with an Ubuntu Party, a DrupalCamp and two tracks of conferences on Free Culture. As usual, the whole Toulibre LUG was a great support to organize such activities.

The first day, we managed to fit two tracks of talks in Akademy-fr itself, one oriented toward contributors, the other meant for users. It was a nice success overall even though we maybe suffered a bit from the user track of the Capitole du Libre for our own track. That's understandable and something to fix for later. We also had a booth where we demoed the different productions of KDE. Using one of the Exo-PC with Plasma Active on it was just great to attract people, it is also great to show such a device next to a Plasma Desktop powered computer as it helps illustrating how coherent thoses workspaces are together (activites being pervasive concepts, same widgets to operate the devices, etc.).

The second (and last) day of Akademy-fr and Capitole du Libre was dedicated to workshops and labs. I think it was a really nice idea and we should keep it for the next edition. There was a bit less attendance, such workshops are more involving and requires to engage more with the community so it's understandable they can be a bit more frightening. Still, it was just great to get people trained on how to make a proper bug report, how to make their own Calligra plugins and such.

Of course, the real plus of this event is that most of the french KDE contributors showed up, we also got "pure-Qt" french contributors around. Funnily, all of KDAB France showed up in the end. Anyway, it was really nice to gang with already known faces again, but also to finally meet some people we only heard of so far.

Thanks to the sponsors who made this event possible. Also, thanks to everyone who helped, held a talk, or simply attended: you made the event a success! Finally, I'd like to give a special thanks to Aleix Pol who traveled from Spain to talk about Akademy-es and KDE España (which are both nice inspiration for us).

PS: I finally uploaded the handful of pictures I took during Akademy-fr 2011

Zanshin 0.2.0

Lot's happened around Zanshin which led to its first proper release. Most notably it got its own website now, and we fixed bugs like crazies leading to the release of 0.2.0 the day before Akademy-fr (although the public announcement was done only the week after).

It's also interesting to see it picked up by packagers, and now it is available on most of the major Linux distributions and on Windows. Hopefully it will sooner or later reach Mac OS as well, it has been reported to build and run by a couple of users but there's no official packaging for it yet.

The community around Zanshin also grew a bit, with a couple of contributors gettings in. I'm looking forward to see their influence inside the project. Nice ideas floating around at the moment. We'll have to implement those ideas incrementally of course otherwise the next release will be one of those long cycles again but I'd love to see shorter cycles for Zanshin now.

KDE Frameworks

After a period of some slow down, the KDE Frameworks is picking up again. I volunteered to help with the stewardship of that effort which led to some discussions and the creation of a wiki to track KDE Frameworks state.

It's obviously still on-going so the wiki needs to be improved, but it helped quite a bit already in decision making and figuring out where we are headed and where we want to be.

On the people side, we're getting contributions in but more importantly as we make kdelibs more modular we're finding volunteers to maintain the newly created library. It think that beyond the technical side of KDE Frameworks this trend is a very important one to nurture.

Indeed, the number of maintainers in kdelibs has been only a few for a very long time, and even though we have people interested in it they don't necessarily commit to be maintainers. With the modularization it is apparently less scary to step up to take care of one of the modules created, they're well identified, have a given scope and so on. Less unknowns then leads to less fear.

I find interesting how the motivation for KDE Frameworks was mainly technical, but is apparently changing the structure of the community. My take is that it will lead to a somewhat similar organization to the Qt Project. Only time will tell anyway, but it's fascinating to be a direct witness of the on-going evolution.

KDE Toulouse & Monthly Hacking Sessions

The KDE Monthly Hacking Sessions are just running as usual, we keep having this monthly get together on saturdays people carrying on their work, but also having a talk or a workshop in the morning. Thanks to Benjamin Port and Jean-Nicolas Artaud strong involvement, this activity is more secure than ever not being completely dependent on me being available and relaxing constraints on my own schedule. Thanks for that guys! It helps the whole group having enough energy to undertake other activities (like the Akademy-fr above). Say no to burn-out, distribute work! :-)

We had less people attending the sessions at the end of 2011, probably in part because of Akademy-fr being around the corner by then. There was also some other factors but we have plan to fix that. January's session, held yesterday was the proof of the continuing interest in those monthly events, we had another of those high attendance rate of the good old days. It was even further improved thanks to Akademy-fr. Indeed, we met Romain Perier who attended the conference in November and we were delighted to have him motivated enough to volunteer for holding the workshop part yesterday, travelling just for the day to do it! Thanks a lot Romain! It was really nice to have you around, hope to see you soon again.

Toulouse University Involvement

Bad news there... this activity came to a halt. We saw it coming for a while, but last year was the last time our projects and teaching to run with the IUP ISI (the course of study whose director, Henri Massié, trusted us to do a good job there). Indeed, after a few years of political games (mostly driven from the ministry as far as I can tell), all the "IUP" type of courses of studies disappeared. The IUP ISI was one of the last to carry the torch...

I thought I'd just carry on with another course of study this year. But I have to admit this abrupt ending and the way it happened (nasty details I'll spare you) just hit my motivation more than I expected. So somehow I still have to recover from it, but I have some leads and potential contacts to maybe setup something again for 2012-2013. Let's see if I manage to revive that activity. Apparently, after seven years of efforts to nurture that collaboration, I'm back to square one. Challenge accepted!

On the brighter side though, I got invited to a whole day seminar in Paris early February to discuss and share with people on the topic of University/Free Software Communities collaboration for student projects and teaching. Nice opportunity to meet with people having similar aims and share on alternative setups to the one we had in Toulouse. Really looking forward to this event.

What's coming next?

Well, I don't plan much ahead and I'm not the type of guy taking "good resolutions" in january every year (I just try to improve as I go). Still... from the waves around me, my own motivation at the moment and some other factors I think I can forecast a bit of what's coming.

Obviously I expect new Zanshin releases, at least two. Zanshin 0.2.1 should appear soonish as mentionned earlier. And then we'll roll toward Zanshin 0.3 which will be the release where Zanshin gets more of the missing basic features making it really useful.

I also expect the first KDE Frameworks release. Quite some work needed still, but I have a target date in mind that I think we can reach... No, I won't share it yet. :-)

Maybe I'll also get through the necessary mourning and administrative steps to setup a new University/KDE collaboration in Toulouse.

And last but not least I expect our monthly sessions to go on as usual. It's just great to have a small team of people helping with the local promotion, I'd like to see it grow more to spread even more love. Despite the current team size it's very likely we'll pull another Akademy-fr, but this time truely focused on the contributors needs, while the end-user aspects would be completely provided by talks and workshops of the upcoming Capitole du Libre 2012.

And so that concludes my last look back at 2011. Time to look forward again, lots to tackle still. :-)

Forge 2011: Metalworkers Videos

2011-10-11T18:16:17+02:00

From September 29th to October 2nd, we had the yearly developer gathering of the Solid team in Madrid named Forge 2011. It's the perfect opportunity for metalworkers to meet and make plans for the year to come.

This year was especially interesting because we had an usability expert on board which is a good thing for us metalworkers. We spend most of the time stuck in the middleware, but we also end up integration and presenting our work in the workspace where it should be easy and pleasant to use. I'll cover that aspect in more details in a another post.

We also took some time to record a few videos, mainly a demo of a new feature and a couple of interviews with key people. Took me some time to put everything together, but it's now in a state where I can share them!

Dario on Power Management and Multi-Screen

In this video Dario shows a nice new feature implemented thanks to the collaboration between power management and the multi-screen support. This way we can put in place refined policies on when to suspend or not.

(if you cannot see the embed, direct link to video for you)

Björn about Usability

In this video, Björn Balazs our resident usability person for the sprint talks about his job and what he worked on during the sprint.

(if you cannot see the embed, direct link to video for you)

Lamarque about Network Management

In this video, Lamarque Souza covers the work started during the sprint to revamp the network management support in the workspace. We also learn a bit more from his early KDE involvement.

(if you cannot see the embed, direct link to video for you)

Dario on Power Management

In this video, Dario explains the history of power management support in our workspaces. He covers quickly the past and gives us more clues about what is about to land in the next release. He also talks about his take on the interesting innovations in the community.

PS: And yes, Dario is very tired in this video. We had to charge the battery of the camera, it went empty during the first take. So yeah, he actually meant "4.10" there's no plan for a "5.0" workspace yet. ;-)

(if you cannot see the embed, direct link to video for you)

Alex on being the New Solid Maintainer

In this last interview, featuring Alex host of the sprint and new Solid maintainer, I had to step up and be in front of the camera to conduct the interview... It was the last one, probably around 3 or 4 in the morning...

(if you cannot see the embed, direct link to video for you)

B-Side! What Happened Behind the Scene...

And last but not least, I kept quite a lot of the rushes and failed attempts. So I also put together a "B-Side" for the videos so that you can also witness the nice atmosphere we had during the sprint!

(if you cannot see the embed, direct link to video for you)

PS: I think there's a bit of the video which might not be clear, so I'll give a few words of explanation. When the red circle and arrow appear, look very closely in the circle. I'm actually crawling behind the couch to retrieve the remote control of the TV... I'm totally in stealth mode! Except that you can briefly see my hand which totally killed Alex's concentration. Apparently it looked like the Thing in the Addams Family. If you couldn't see it watch again, veeery closely, it's furtive! :-)

Zanshin 0.2 RC1

2011-10-10T22:35:23+02:00

A few weeks ago we released Zanshin 0.2 beta2, and I'm glad to announce the immediate availability of Zanshin 0.2 RC1. Except if any showstopper bug is reported, it will be the last stop before 0.2 final.

I'd also like to use the opportunity to report a few changes regarding contributions and adoption. We've seen tremendous activity on the packaging front since the previous release:

It is available for openSUSE and Gentoo as previously announced;
It is now available for Fedora thanks to Christoph Wickert of Kolab Systems, you can grab it from Christoph's repository and it'll hopefully get into Fedora itself soon;
I got pointed out that it was already available in Arch User Repository;
Kartik Mistry volunteered to package it for Debian, so we'll have some good news there soon hopefully;
Patrick Spendrin confirmed to me that it got added to the KDE-Windows port, and so it was officially released with the KDE-Windows 4.7.0 release;
On Mac? I got users building it for themselves reporting it to work, but no official packaging yet.

I'm glad to see so many people stepping up like that, bringing some GTD goodness wrapped in Free Software to more and more potential users.

And since some people pointed it out on my previous post, yes we need a website, screenshots and so on. We've been aware of it for a while, but we've been too busy working on the software itself. The feedback on Zanshin 0.2 beta2 didn't bring many issues, so we used the extra time to work on a website. It's not ready for prime time yet, but we hope to go live with 0.2 final.

If you want to get Zanshin from sources, the tarballs are available, at the same place than usual on files.kde.org.

And of course, you can still git clone kde:zanshin if you want the bleeding edge or if you wish to contribute to the code.

Now we're waiting a bit for your feedback. We have exactly one minor bug left in our list and the future website need some extra polish. Hopefully at this pace we won't need a 0.2 RC2.