Robert Lefkowitz's Keynote

Today the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit has started, bringing KDE and Gnome developers together in the biggest conference of its type. It is situated on the beautiful Atlantic island of Gran Canaria and housed in the spectacular Alfredo Kraus Auditorium which dominates the skyline of Las Palmas, capital of Gran Canaria. The conference was opened by a series of talks from various people in the Canaries local government and the organisation. After that the keynotes started with star speakers and impressive announcements including an Open PC developed by the community and Maemo switching to Qt. Read on for an impression of the GCDS!

Free t-shirts were popular

Tonight the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit was opened with a party sponsored by Kubuntu's very own Canonical. Stickers, t-shirts and beer were all given out to contributors and users of KDE, Gnome and any other free software environment. Some converts were made from the local Canary island population who were enthused by the spirit of freedom.

Heavy metal and free software do mix

Conversation ranged from the essential cross desktop collaboration issues to the question of whether it ever rains in Las Palmas.

More photos on Flickr.

It is that time of the year again. Akademy 2009 is about to begin in only a few days. Held in the Alfredo Kraus Auditorium close to the beautiful beaches of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, this event is shaping up to be a special conference.

The first ODF Plugfest was held on the 15th and 16th of June 2009 in the Royal Library in the Netherlands. The meeting was initiated by the Dutch government and the OpenDoc Society. Jos van den Oever, brand new employee of KO GmbH and Sven Langkamp, proud developer, went on behalf of the KOffice team. With over forty organisations and a total of sixty representatives from businesses, public sector organizations, open source projects and research institutions, the meeting was an incredible success.

Read on for an impression of the event.

As we get ready for the 4.3 release, it's time to have another BugDay! We are going back to basics this time, and doing Konqueror.

All you need to join is yourself and a recent copy of KDE (trunk is best, but you can also use a Neon nightly or a snapshot from a distribution). You do not need to know how to program! We will teach you all you need to know. This is a fun and easy way to get involved with the KDE community! Working with BugSquad is a great way to discover KDE, especially if you would like to help contribute, but aren't sure where to begin.

We'll be doing various things:

Today we are launching the Social Desktop Contest. As you know the idea of the Social Desktop is to connect online webservices with desktop applications. We give away great prices to developers who help making this vision reality.

The Open Collaboration Services API has gotten many new features in the past few months and is now stable. The first features will ship with KDE 4.3, but this is only the beginning. Now that the infrastructure is in place we think that it is a good time to open up the development to more developers.

The GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. are excited to announce the keynotes for the first ever co-located Akademy and GUADEC, over 100 talks as well as BOFs, keynote sessions, lightning talks and many opportunities to meet other developers and begin collaborating between projects.
Current confirmed keynotes are:

• Richard Stallman, Free Software Foundation
• Walter Bender, Executive Director, Sugar Labs
• Robert Lefkowitz, Distinguished Engineer of the ACM
• Jakub Pavelek, Nokia

The first openSUSE Community Week took place on the 11-17 May 2009 and as an important part of the distribution, the geeko-loving KDE community were actively involved.

Throughout the week we were busy packaging, triaging bugs and introducing new community members to these skills. The releases of KDE 4.3 Beta 1 and Amarok 2.1 Beta 2 kept the team busy fixing last minute compilation errors and replacing 4.2.3 in the KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop repository with 4.3 Beta 1 as we move towards openSUSE 11.2. KDE 4.2 continues to be available in the KDE:42 repository so if you haven't switched yet, we expect you want to help make 4.3 excellent!

This year the annual KDE community summit, Akademy, is being held in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Spain, from 3rd to 11th of July. It will be part of a larger event, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit co-located with the GNOME community's annual summit, GUADEC.

Registration for the event is now open. Attendees can register for the event at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit website.

Early registration is advised as this year's event is expected to be even more popular than usual.

In addition to launching registration, the Akademy Call for Participation is now available. The timescale for submissions is short this year, so potential speakers should follow the submission instructions precisely to speed up the review and increase their chance of success.

The first Nigerian conference on Free and Open Source Software was held this week in Kano, Nigeria. The conference featured local speakers, consultants, network engineers, system administrators and academics, and international guests from KDE for three days at Bayero University of Kano. Over 500 students and professionals attended, filling the hall to capacity.