Only a few days left before the [Desktop Summit 2011][ds-url], I'm really looking
forward to wander around in Berlin again. I'm excited and almost counting hours
before my flight out on friday morning! Yes, I'll be there:
![I'm going to Desktop Summit 2011][ds-banner]
And I'm not just attending, I'm also giving a talk on monday during the afternoon
(3:20pm to 3:50pm). It's titled ["We're a family"][talk-url] and it's a look
back at the efforts I put into a Community/University collaboration in Toulouse
for the past few years. I had talks around that topic already for an Akademy, but
this one is going to be special for two reasons.
First, it'll be much less about the organizational challenges such a collaboration
carries than the human impacts it can generate. Here it'll really be about showing
the bonds it created among the people participating in this collaboration, and the
opportunities it created for the students in the community projects. It will also
cover the local and global influences those students had on the community.
Second, the course of study where this collaboration was taking place is closing...
Right now it's not yet clear if the students projects we had in the past will
still be possible. So this talk is really a wrap up about what happened in Toulouse
for the past few years, and probably a "goodbye". Even if we manage to create a
new collaboration somehow, this talk marks the end of an era. That's why we tried
and managed to line up several generation of students related to this adventure.
We'll have a lot to share, but maybe not enough time for all the most juicy secrets. ;-)
So, if you're looking for some laugh, tears, and insights on such a Community/University
collaboration, hopefully it'll be the right talk to attend. Don't miss it!
On my side I'm putting the finishing touch to the talk, and of course it'll be ready
on time.
[ds-url]: https://www.desktopsummit.org
[ds-banner]: https://www.desktopsummit.org/sites/www.desktopsummit.org/files/DS2011banner.png "I'm going to Desktop Summit 2011"
[talk-url]: https://www.desktopsummit.org/program/sessions/were-family-how-five-years-university-collaboration-changed-our-town-landscape
If anyone out there wonder why
[Aaron Seigo's blog](http://aseigo.blogspot.com) is down, the
reason is pretty simple... Its author got burnt out because of some
of the poisonous people in our project. The story started several
weeks ago (probably even months ago) with constant bashing of some
of the decisions taken in the Plasma project (which is not a one
person project by the way). It culminated last week with very rude
and useless mail threads on kde-devel, and yesterday on the dot
with personal attacks.
That's why Aaron decided to retire from the public and do what he
truely loves: code. No more blogs, minimal involvement on lists and
IRC to ensure coordination with the other developers. That's what
we obtained after those weeks of angry poisonous mobs. You might
think: "well you can ignore them". Really? Could you? Such people
can bring a lot of stop energy. Really a lot of it, and that
worries me. It seems that the project I love is not a nice place to
live in anymore.
When we are able to turn down one of our public face, someone very
active and energetic, we really crossed a line. Of course, we could
shake head, and think "tsss, those poisonous people, they've no
idea what they're doing". That's even probably what we did during
those weeks of bashing... and still we let it happen. I think
that's the most frightening side of the issue: nobody stepped up,
and no actions are taken to make KDE a better place again. Oh, and
don't worry, I have my share of guilt in this story... I didn't
step up either.
Worse than the stop energy carried by poisonous people, there's the
apathy of your peers. I don't want that anymore! We have to end
it!
Of course, I'd like to propose a way out, but I've not much to
propose. Here are my attempts at bringing some improvements
proposing some actions which could be taken (in no particular
order):
- Recruit more editors for the dot, as far as I know they're
overbooked and can hardly moderate it;
- To help the dot editors, we have to improve it's engine with a
real moderation system (how come most news site I know have one but
not the dot?);
- Write a code of conduct (probably something for the e.V.
membership), and publish it as soon as possible;
- Enforce it, especially on mailing lists and on bugzilla,
mediating as necessary, and banning people in the most extreme
cases.
That's definitely not much, but that's a start... More ideas are
welcome, but most of all: acts are needed. We must stop this kind
of behavior.
PS: I'm not linking any thread, bugreport or mails on purpose. I
don't want to point finger. Aaron's reaction is a symptom of
something broken in our community (in the broad sense, all
contributors and users included) it's just an example (and not the
first case). If you want specifics, do your homework and dig our
archives it's all public anyway.
Once again I didn't blog in a while... In particular I didn't blog
about this year project students even if they got covered once in
the commit digest. Now we're two weeks away from the official end
of those projects, so I thought it might be a good idea to show
some of their accomplishment.
**Kapman**
This year we experimented with a project starting from scratch, and
apparently we had some demand for a copy of an old famous game...
hence why now we have Kapman! It's kicking and alive, it's in a
pretty good shape already so maybe it'll be able to enter kdegames
in 4.1. Of course it's all SVG based so you can freely resize it
(**artists wanted!**).
[](/share/pics/kapman_sshot.png)
**Kscd**
We also poked the good old Kscd... Our team made quite a lot of
improvements in there. In particular it's now fully themable using
SVG (**artists wanted!**), and uses MusicBrainz to identify discs.
Of course it also got the expected KDE4 refactoring: it got ported
to Phonon and Solid.
[](/share/pics/kscd_sshot.png)
**Ksirk**
Ksirk is one of those games we have in playground for quite some
time. One of our team has been working on it to improve its quality
and make it releasable... It's definitely getting there. They
mainly worked on improving its usability and that shows in my
opinion. At least now I feel like I could play with it for hours.
:-)
[](/share/pics/ksirk_sshot.png)
**Kopete**
Last but not least, this year we got a team working on Kopete. They
did an awesome job, it's harder to demo or to make a screenshot for
it, but they mainly focused on integrating support for UPnP and for
the new live messenger protocol. On the UI front it looks less
impressive, but I'm very proud of this team, they definitely had
the hardest project to work on and learned a lot. Since I had no
screenshot to offer, here is a picture of today's "Kopete Gang of
Four" who attended the hacking session:
[](/share/pics/kopete_gof.jpg)
From left to right: Maximilien Verdier, Michel Saliba, Romain
Castan, Kevin Kin-Foo.
**A few words on the hacking sessions...**
Of course, after last year projects we kept the good habit of
having KDE Hacking Sessions in Toulouse, we even have now a few
people who are coming regularly... the community is definitely
growing here. And during the student projects we have an unusual
amount of my students showing up. ;-)
[](/share/pics/hs_march2008.jpg)
From left to right: Sylvere Lestang, Kevin Kin-Foo, Romain Castan,
Michel Saliba, Maximilien Verdier, Stanislas Krzywda, Anne-Marie
Mahfouf.
Missing on the picture: Thibault Normand who arrived later, and
Alexis Menard who is unfortunately sick today.
For the second time in my life have been interviewed... It's part
of the [People Behind KDE](http://people.kde.nl) serie. Thanks a
lot to fab for his patience, since well I'm not that cooperative
with interviews. ;-)
It even made it to [the Dot](http://dot.kde.org), with an
[article](http://dot.kde.org/1124999426/).
So now you can read
[my People Behind KDE interview](http://people.kde.nl/kevin.html)
to know how lovely or mad (it's your choice) I am.
