This year Akademy took place along with QtCon in Berlin, Germany. It is a year of great celebration for some free software communities, so they decided to get together to celebrate in a single event. KDE is celebrating 20 years, while VideoLAN and FSFE are celebrating 15 years. It was a historic moment and I could not miss it, so I went to Berlin for the second time (the first was to attend the Desktop Summit 2011).
As a new member of KDE e.V. I arrived early to attend the AGM, the general assembly of KDE e.V. It is the annual meeting of the members where the board of directors and working groups present their reports, the elections to the board and the KDE Free Qt Foundation happen, as well as other important issues are discussed and voted on. This year a new board member was elected. Thomas Pfeiffer was the most voted to take the place of Albert Astais Cid. By the way, thank Albert for his great work for KDE and welcome Thomas! 🙂
After the AGM we had three days of talks in QtCon, held at BCC. The talks were on the various issues related to the communities participating in the event: Qt and KDE technologies, VLC technical topics, and questions about free software and privacy presentend by FSFE team, among other things.
KDE presented about forty talks. One I most liked was the talk “KDE development, how it was done in the last century”, presented by David Faure. In this 20th anniversary it is very nice to see someone who is in the community from the beginning to talk about its changes over time.
We also had Brazilian representation at the event. Sandro Andrade presented a talk on the Minuet, the music education free software which he is a developer.
After the talks marathon in QtCon, we went to the Akademy at Technische Universität Berlin put the hands on the hacking sessions and BoFs during four days.
During the Akademy we announced two commemorative projects, a book and a timeline. The book has 37 stories of various community contributors presenting their vision of the past, present and future of KDE. You can download it or purchase a printed copy and help the community. 🙂
The timeline was a project developed by me and Camila Ayres. It was one of the coolest contribution I could ever do to this community. It shows some of the most important events of the community’s history. The idea is to add more content as time passes. It will work as a repository of our history. If you have any suggestions or interest in translating it to another language, just send us email or clone the code here. 🙂
Last but not least, we had a day trip around the Pfaueninsel island (“Peacock Island”), a UNESCO cultural heritage which dates back to the seventeenth century.
If you would like to know everything that happened in QtCon/Akademy, the talks were recorded and you can watch them here or see some photos here. For more stories about the meeting, stay tuned to our dot.kde.org or planetkde.org.
Cibermundi 