Bobulate

For years — perhaps since KDE e.V. was formed — there has been a mailing list kde-ev-vorstand. A perfectly sensible name if you happen to speak German and know something about eingetragene Vereine. For the rest of the world, perhaps not so much. The list has now been renamed to kde-ev-board. Unfortunately, during the changeover, mail sent to one list or the other has gotten lost. So if you tried to communicate with the board of KDE e.V. on the weekend or monday or tuesday morning, september 18-21 2010, your mail may have silently vanished. Please be extra alert for replies and don’t be shy to re-send.

So, what’s KDE e.V. you might ask? It is the non-profit association which was set up to support KDE development. An association is a convenient legal form in Germany (and elsewhere). It has members — the membership of KDE e.V. are those people who want to help the association achieve its goals. It’s a little like a tennis club: the members want to be able to play tennis and so set up a club that ensures that there’s infrastructure so that everyone can play. The association doesn’t play tennis itself, even when the members do; its purpose is there to make things possible. KDE e.V. makes it possible to channel money into developer sprints and helps organize the yearly Akademy conference — this year that will be a Desktop Summit once again in cooperation with the GNOME Foundation. You can find out what the association has been doing in the Quarterly Reports. The latest one is for 2010Q2; Q3 is just about to close so we’ll be looking for volunteers to help write it up and we’ll be soliciting items from the various working groups and teams in the KDE community.

The board list is the right place to ask about travel reimbursements (ask before you book!) or to suggest sprint topics, offer hardware support and instigate new projects which have funding requirements. Just remember that kde-ev-board@ is now the best address to use (although -ev-vorstand continues to function).