LaKademy 2017: expanding horizons

On May 1, another edition of LaKademy, the Latin American KDE Summit, came to an end. This was the 5th edition of the event, which continues to attract new people interested in being part of the community. This time we had 6 beginners, which is a great number, considering that the event itself is small, since it is not an event of talks or courses, but a concentrated one, in the contribution sprint style.

LaKademy 2017 group photo.

During 4 days we dedicate ourselves to work on projects of interest of each one. There were 17 attendees who were divided into promotion, translation, development and design tasks. I, for example, dedicated myself to finishing the LaKademy site, as well as working with community promotion and translation tasks.

The promo work was full time, since during the whole event I dedicated myself to posting on social networks, photographing the event and structuring LaKademy’s main dissemination vehicle, which is its website. As the event has already been happening for 5 years and is already consolidated, we thought it was about time to make a website for it. From the experience I had in building the Timeline KDE 20 years, I thought it would be fun and interesting to venture into building this site as well.

I chose to make a page in static HTML because the site would only function as a repository of information about the event editions. Nothing involving news or insertion of much information and requiring a robust system. When I arrived at the event, a good part of the site was ready, I just needed to make the page responsive to mobile devices and make the localization for Spanish and English.

During the first day I worked on the site responsiveness, I made some changes in the layout so that it fits on mobile devices. In the desktop version, the site has a hover menu that clearly would not work well on touch screen devices. The solution was to configure it to become a clickable hamburger-style menu when the site was opened on phones and tablets. With Francisco Fernandes help, who made this part of the hamburger menu, the site can get a little more responsive.

The problem is that since I had not used Bootstrap (which would have made my life a lot easier if it had been used from the beginning: D), when I added the language menu on the site this messed up the configuration that had been made from the hamburger menu 😦  In the end, the decision I just made was to give up static HTML and move on to something that is easier to organize and more automated. Farid Abdelnour has volunteered to help me do this using WordPress. Soon, therefore, we will have a more beautiful, responsive and more powerful LaKademy website 🙂

On the first day, beyond that work on the site I also had a meeting with the translation team that was present at the event: Fred, Bianca e Camila.  We gather to define the workflow for the restructuring of Vocabulário Padrão (Standard Vocabulary), an old project that existed here in Brazil and that we have been trying to recover since the last LaKademy. The idea was to upload the VP to the KDE infrastructure (which we were able to do during the event) and update its terms as we revise software and documentation translations of community projects.

During the second and third days, I counted on the help of Fred, Bianca and Camila to translate the website pages to English. The idea is have the website available in 3 languages. The English version is already done and the next step is to ask for help from someone from the Spanish translation team to translate into that language.

Still on the third day, the long-awaited promo meeting took place in the morning. Everyone attends to it, regardless of the area. It is the moment of the event in which everyone joins efforts to contribute to the construction of strategies that aim to improve the dissemination and the reach of our community projects. It is also in it that we always discuss the location of the next LaKademy, receive proposals or already leave with the venue decided. This year we had 3 proposals (Curitiba, Belém and Florianópolis), which is very good, because it means that there are many people willing to organize the event 🙂

On the fourth and last day I dedicated myself to reviewing some things of the website code, such as the links integrity and some translation parts. But the main work was done in promo. After the previous day’s meeting, where we discussed the need to restructure some things on the KDE Brazil website and how to improve information about our communication and contact channels, I dedicated myself to writing a text that presented the community the various ways through it could connect to the KDE group here in Brazil.

A nice gif 🙂

In the end, we left the event with lots of cool ideas to put into practice and with the feeling that we are strengthening each LaKademy and bringing new and good people. It was tiring, but at the same time very pleasurable ❤

I would like to thank KDE e.V. for supporting (again) our work. To Fred, who hosted the event this year, as well as all attendees who contributed to the harmony and success of LaKademy 2017. See you in LaKademy 2018!

To see more event images, just visit our page on Flickr.