Mario Fux
About Fellow No 1's life
Go pledgie go – Randa Meetings status update
First and foremost I’d like to thank all the people (anonymous and less-anonymous 😉 who already pledged some money for the Randa Meetings 2012 on our Pledgie.com page. It’s great to have gotten so much support from our community and we’re on a good way to reach the goal of 10’000 EUR till the 21st of September 2012.
On this date we are going to start the Randa meetings of this year and therefore I’d like to give you a short overview of the status of the preparations for the meetings and what you can expect from your support and from this year’s meetings.
As it showed it’s not necessarily easy to marry, get your first child and organize a Randa meetings event in the same summer and finally my university decided that I didn’t yet finish my minor in computer sciences as I expected. But these are all the bad news and the good news follow:
Most of the people already ordered their plane or train tickets and with more of your support we can offer to pay the accommodation and the train tickets in Switzerland (from border or airport to Randa and back) for our participants. By the way we searched for quite a while to get the best and cheapest offer for these tickets so we don’t waste your money!
As at every work one needs to eat something to have energy to produce amazing things and thus I can tell you that the kitchen team is already preparing the menu for the meeting at the end of September and they actually already started to shop, prepare and cook the first meals. And I can tell you it looks good, the menu, and the meals will give you a lot of energy to go back to the computer and hack as crazy till late at nights.
The next and probably for this blog the last but most interesting information is about the groups and what they plan to do in Randa (and thus what you get back for your support soon):
- The accessibility (a11y) group plans to work heavily on KDE (and some Gnome) applications to make them even more accessible for differently abled people. We plan to invite some blind computer users to Randa to help us testing our applications. Together with our friends from Gnome we improve the general a11y infrastructure for better inter-application work. And last but not least the GSoC student who worked on lip recognition for Simon (a speech-recognition system based on the KDE platform) will be in Randa too…
- The KDE Education group plans to port as many of their (and where it makes sense) applications to mobile platforms and since some time Android is a new target for KDE software and thus opens a whole new eco system of tablets and mobile computers.
- The multimedia people from Amarok, Phonon and Co plan to work on the next Amarok version, Phonon’s port to Qt5 and QML (QtQuick) and further improvements of KMix and Co.
- And last but not least the Plasma team plans to work on the next version of the Plasma libraries (libplasma2 for and based on KDE Frameworks 5). Another bigger topic is going to be the porting of more parts of Plasma apps to QML. And we expect to see one or the other Plasma Active tablet there and thus some e.g. educational apps or multimedia software on this devices.
Another great feature of the Randa meetings is the possibility to talk with the other teams, discuss and share ideas or just chat about some thoughts during lunch or dinner (breakfast is not for talking ;-).
Some days ago I set up this years wiki page for the Randa meetings where you find up to date information of what’s happening during the meeting, links to old blog posts about the coming meetings and more interesting information.
So please go to our Pledgie page and donate and thus help us to hold yet another amazing and insanely productive series of meetings in Randa.
