Blogs

I am back from Akademy and this edition was particularly interesting in my opinion. Somehow it looks like there was a common theme hidden in this conference… let’s go through what I consider the most noticeable events of Akademy 2014.

Even before the official start of the conference, during the KDE e.V. general assembly we had something interesting happening. We had elections for three out of five positions in the board. During the questions to the candidates (thanks all for stepping up!), it was clear that the membership was looking for people aiming at a higher efficiency and then improved KDE e.V. organization. We will see if our new board will live up to those expectations. It sounds like a new cycle of radical improvements will start after a (needed) period of consolidation and stabilization.

Then, the first keynote by Sascha Meinrath was an excellent reminder that we should be more proactive on the political landscape. If we stay in reactive mode just producing software, we won’t be able to prevent centralized infrastructure, opaque Internet of Things and the panoptic surveillance system. Only by aiming at a higher political involvement can we avoid the raise of a digital feudalism age.

After this keynote, during the three days of talks and workshops, a surprising amount of sessions were focused on quality in a form or another. I was obviously guilty there with my craftsmanship cycle but Albert too. Add to those the talks from the VDG, the workshop on profiling by Milian and the one on unit tests by Shantanu to easily figure out that there’s quite a few people wishing to see our contributors aiming at higher quality.

Last but not least, Paul’s talk on community metrics was likely the most important one to attend this year. If you didn’t attend it: go and watch the video now! I’ll wait… This talk is really a wake up call in my opinion. We lost something and we need to get it back. He pointed out a silent crisis going on in the community. We still have time to get back on the right track, but we got to find the root causes and act as soon as possible. What Paul proposes is to aim at a higher cohesion in the community again. That will require a better shared technical vision, a stronger focus on our mission toward our users and a stronger focus on getting better in our contributions.

By now it is clear that the common theme of Akademy 2014 was that we ought to generally aim higher. Overall, we are in a good position today. Unfortunately, that is also a very fragile one as the community metrics and the quality related talks highlighted.

We’re likely at the crossroads now. The decisions we’ll take in the coming weeks and months will lead us either to regress or to strive. In my opinion, we can only strive by improving in the areas mentioned above. In some way, that is very good news! We are mostly in control of those areas to improve. It means that success is reachable if we have enough collective willpower to do what’s required to seize it.