KDE e.V. COMMUNITY REPORT

Over nineteen years producing high quality free software, spreading open culture, and creating a thriving community, KDE has become a huge umbrella organization supporting all sorts of FOSS-related projects. As a consequence, an even more inclusive, diverse, and open community has grown, with opportunities we couldn't have envisioned some years ago.

In this edition's feature article, we present four stories of KDE incubated projects: WikiToLearn, GCompris, KXStitch, and Kdenlive. Some of these projects have already been developed for many years and, by being incubated in KDE, they found a proper way to ensure continuity and relieve original contributors from some administrative tasks already provided by KDE, like translation and release/distribution.

The report continues with a summary of KDE e.V. supported activities, in terms of developer sprints, trade shows and community events where KDE representatives have been attending, presenting talks, or organizing. The report finishes welcoming twelve new KDE e.V. members and providing a brief summary of the sysadmin activities undertaken in this period.

An important step of such a movement towards an umbrella organization is the KDE Incubator program ‒ presented in this edition's feature article. The KDE Incubator has been responsible for providing all required guidance to already existing FOSS projects in their way to join KDE community, benefit from our social and technical infrastructure, and helping us to create a better world with the power of open knowledge.

For other more youthful projects, KDE has been the place were they found the motivation, energy, and support to overcome the initial (often hard) barriers we face until the project is able to stand on its own feet and starts to exhibit its own contribution dynamics. We hope this feature article may serve as inspiration for many other incubated projects to come and also provide a glimpse into how open and receptive KDE is.

Enjoy the reading!

Sandro Andrade
for the KDE e.V. Board of Directors

The WikiToLearn (W2L) community gathered for its first sprint in the beautiful setting of Bormio, in the middle of the Alps. The main goal of the meeting was to prepare the WikiToLearn website for the new year. Courses are starting for many students so we want to provide an open structure for people who would like to share and spread the knowledge. The sprint took place from Saturday 28 Sept to Monday 30 Sept. It was only three days, but productivity was set on high so we were able to complete all our self-assigned tasks.

Some sprinters worked on software development, some with infrastructure, others with content. Some people were brand new to the project, bringing nothing but their interest, commitment and willpower. On the first day we started with brain-storming and planning the work with a strange new method proposed by Riccardo. As usual for him, in the beginning the method seemed messy but turned out to be successful.

We developed some stories with the form "as a <user>, I want to <goal>, to <reason>". We then split up into small groups and transformed the stories into real tasks that went into a big "to-do" column. One by one, we moved them to "in progress" and finally to the "done" column. Our objective was get every task of every story into the last column by the end of the sprint. Working, working and working, the days passed by, while a silent enemy was slithering in the house and making the work harder: the Cough. In the beginning there was just one infector and everyone else survived, protected with strong immune defenses. One night we realized that our project was being blessed with a sign from the gods — the Red Supermoon. We went out between 2 and 6 AM to see the lunar eclipse (and to do more brainstorming), floating in some natural pools with thermal water. It was a wonderful experience, but the day after everyone was ill.

Our setting was a private home that was like a castle: a shower with color therapy, mattresses for everyone and wonderful views of Bormio’s mountains. We brought food so we didn’t have to go out and stop working. Machines that turned pizza into code. Serious workers. The group was diverse, and except for Riccardo, who has been working on the project from the beginning, we have only been working on the project just since April.

Under the moon, we got a magical transfusion, expanding our will, our force, our wisdom. The next day we realized that most of the stories were in the “done” column. Had it been us? Or some supernatural power? They were completed tasks; nothing else matters.

As usual we had quite a collection of meetings in one big house, which is why the event is called Randa Meetings, in plural. We might have already explained that last year, but it seems to be something that doesn't stick yet! The meetings altogether were a big success, thus we would like to thank all the supporters, sponsors and other people and groups who made the event possible.

On Thursday two special events took place. In the afternoon a trip to Zermatt, a rather famous Swiss mountain town only a couple of kilometers from Randa, was organized. A couple of local taxi buses drove people up to Zermatt, where Mario showed them around and people were able to buy various souvenirs and Swiss chocolate. Afterwards, a hike back to Randa was planned, roughly 10 kilometers down through forests and over meadows, following the river Vispa back to the house.

As we pointed out during the fundraiser: It's because of these people, hopefully including you, that people from all across the globe were able to get a lot of work done and make the software you love even better. The participants did not only fly to Switzerland from all across the globe, they also were quite a mixed bunch regarding age, background and projects they are working on. So if you like the work we are doing and describe below don't hesitate to support us and donate. Every meeting tends to start with the arrival of the participants, as did the Randa Meetings. Most people arrived by airplane, so either at the Geneva or Zurich airport, both of which are basically at the other ends of Switzerland. On the second day most of the participants has arrived and had enough sleep so they were ready for some work. However, most of the second day was spent on getting to know each other, talking with and getting to know the various different groups: digiKam - professional photo management; KDE Connect - Connect with your Android devices; Multimedia - including Amarok and Kdenlive; PIM - The Kontact Suite; QMLweb - QML in the web browser; and the biggest group: Touch&Mobile - to bring touch to KDE.

All the above mentioned groups worked on different ideas and projects but in the end the big topic and motto of 2015 was "Bring Touch to KDE". And although most of the participants of the Randa Meetings started their work even before the meetings, thought about the topics during their journeys and started with their work as soon as they met the first other participants on their paths to Randa, the main working time of the KDE Tech Summit was the time from Tuesday to Friday.

In the evening the second event took place: the traditional Raclette dinner with our sponsors. Raclette, a traditional Swiss meal made out of molten cheese, served with potatoes, gherkins and usually wine, was rather well received by both the participants and also our sponsors. As last year, people, groups and companies that helped with monetary or hardware donations received an invitation to spend an evening with us, eating said Raclette, having good local wine and getting to know the event they made possible. It was a lovely ending to a great and rather eventful day. Please refer to the full Randa Meetings 2015 report or Randa Meetings website for further information.

From 7th to 11th October, Kate and KDevelop contributors met in Berlin to work on both Kate and KDevelop. The work in Kate was mostly spent on fixing bugs, more than 300 bugs and wish reports were closed. Granted, many of the reports were just old and given our limited manpower we were closing many wishes since it is unlikely that old wishes get implemented. Then again, we also fixed a lot of bugs that required code changes, and also fine tuning of KTextEditor and Kate.

At the moment that is not really feasible, as things like ui files are not found, xml syntax files are not found and so on. Christoph started to solve those issues and at least KTextEditor framework itself should now be more or less Windows- (and therefore Mac-) compatible. However, the other frameworks will still need love, like KXmlGui not being able to locate its own ui_standards.rc. Kate is now compilable without any strange patches, too, on Windows.

54 bugs have been fixed (yes, the auto-brackets option is back!), besides there are also a lot of changes that were not listed in bug reports. We hope the changes are useful to you, so be sure to get the KDE Frameworks version 5.16 as soon as it’s released. Christoph Cullmann fixed many small bugs and reintroduced the automatic brackets completion removed by accident in the transition from KDE 4.x to KF5.

Dominik Haumann did help in the bug fixing effort, too. At the end of the sprint he started the painful work to review and fix the use of hard-coded colors in our highlighting files, work nobody really wants to do. Sven Brauch helped to improve the reintroduced bracket completion to be not completely dumb.

Regarding bugs, the new policy for Kate will be: wishes that not got any attention since 2 years will be closed, it makes no sense to keep them around forever and it will only make overview about what is really wanted impossible. In addition, we tried to get Kate running on Windows. We want to have a way to build Kate with an unpatched Qt.

As for KDevelop, the focus was on making it ready for its 5.0 release, as well as implementing features such as the new concentration mode. It allows for the user to work withoutall the clutter, stripped of most of the visual stress, so usually we're left with the good old katepart editor, with all of KDevelop's features.