My Plans for Akademy / QtCon

My Plans for Akademy / QtCon

It’s finally that time of the year again which many KDE contributors have been looking forward to: The time when we all get together at Akademy, to meet our KDE friends in person, give and listen to talks and make plans for world domination!
This year is special because Akademy will be part of QtCon, a joint conference with Qt, FSFE, VideoLAN and KDAB, which means even greater opportunities to learn something new, reach an audience beyond KDE, and deepen our alliances!
This year, I’ll give three quite different talks:
The first one, on Saturday, is titled “Quo Vadis, KDE? – A FOSS Community’s Journey toward its Vision and Mission“. There I will talk, together with Lydia Pintscher, about how the desire to find a direction for KDE lead to the KDE Evolve initiative, which lead to the KDE Vision and Mission initiatives, and beyond.
The second one, on Sunday, titled “Meet Kirigami UI – How KDE’s new framework can help to create multi-platform mobile and convergent applications” will be a more product-oriented / technical one. Here, Marco Martin and I present our convergent application framework, Kirigami. I will talk about some design background, whereas Marco will go into technical detail and explain how to set up a project that uses Kirigami.
The third talk I’ll be giving (also Sunday), this time together with Jens Reuterberg, is again more on a “meta level”: Under the title “Movements and Products” we will talk about two different mindsets with which contribution to a Free Software community can be approached: A product-focused mindset or a movement-focused mindset. The two are not mutually exclusive, and in fact we’d recommend adopting some of both for a community like KDE to succeed as a movement that creates products.
If you can’t be at QtCon or can’t make it to the talks: I assume the pages linked above will have recordings to download at some point.
Giving talks is not the only thing I do at Akademy / QtCon, of course. There are also all kinds of BoF sessions to attend: On Monday, I’m planning to be at the Plasma BoF (and especially at the Kirigami-focused part in the afternoon, of course), as well as the “Appstream metadata on software releases” BoF (because I was the one who pushed that topic with Aleix). Tuesday morning will be dedicated to Kube, and where I’ll spend the afternoon mainly depends on whether I’ll be elected into the KDE e.V. board at KDE e.V.’s Annual General Meeting this Thursday. Wednesday morning will be all about Discover.
Had I known there were so many important BoFs for me, I’d probably have stayed longer than Wednesday evening, but that wasn’t clear yet at the time I booked my travel, so I’ll have to make as much of the first three BoF days as I can.
Aside from all that, there are of course lots of hallway discussions (Akademy is always great for those!) as well as lots of fun to be had!
It will be great as always, I’m really looking forward to the second half of this week and the first half of the next one.
See you in Berlin!