Mario Fux

The Randa Meetings 2014 fundraiser is quite successful and I want to thank everybody who already donated or supported us. But there is still some time till the 9th of July and thus we have still some time to convince more people for this good cause.

So please, remove the dust from your blog or social media account and spread the word and convince your friends and environment to give something. Just ask them politely and the worst you get is a “no”.

You can tell everybody that they will get even better KDE software, software that runs on almost all platforms and in the future on even more and software that everybody can use and share. Concretely this means that at the end of September 2014 you will get an updated KDE Book that helps you to work with KDE Frameworks 5, a more stable Kdenlive, a first port of KMyMoney to KF5, a glimpse at Amarok 3, another beta of GCompris based on Qt, a reinvigorated Gluon Games Framework, at least a first idea of the KDE SDK and much more. Isn’t that worth it?

And we will try something new this year at Randa to keep you, dear supporter, better informed about what happens at the meetings. Everyday you can check this work page and see in a short and concise form what everybody has done and achieved.

So thanks for donating, spreading the word and supporting us!

As I probably already mentioned somewhere there is currently quite some energy going into the work of bringing more and better KDE applications to the Mac platform.

• See e.g. the recent raise of emails on the kde-mac mailing list.
• Then there is the work of Harald Fernengel and Co on KDE Frameworks 5.
• Or the collection of problems with KDE software on Mac.

So it’s a perfect time to get involved, help to solve the problems or test our software on another platform and thus make another step in {our,a} plan to konquer the world. And don’t hesitate to do this for other platforms as well and/or come to Randa to help with this.

PS: There is still the little poll open about KDE, families and Randa. Please participate and share your anonymous opinion. Currently seven people filled it in.

First and foremost I’d like to thank the KDE e.V. that they invited me to extended board meeting in Berlin two weeks ago. I got some more insights in the board’s work and could participate in the fundraising workshop on Saturday. So what did we learn?

“Ask, ask again and ask for more” and “KISS – Keep it simple and smart”. I hope to be able to apply this and the other things we learned to the fundraising campaign for the Randa Meetings 2014 which we’re going to launch in the next weeks.

Another thing where I was quite active in the last weeks is the “recruitment” for people that should come to Randa this summer. As you of course already know, two of the topics this year are the KDE SDK and the porting of apps to KF5 and other platforms. Thus I tried to get in contact with KDE-Mac people and then also got in contact with people from Macports. I’m currently working on bringing the technical parts of the discussion back to KDE-Mac mailing list.

And I’m working further to bring Windows, Android and the aforementioned Mac people to Randa. So if you’re interested and I did not yet get in contact with you (under which rock were you hiding?;-) get in contact, please. One of my personal goals is it by the way to get some “foreign” machines to our CI park, namely Windows, Mac, Android and Co ;-). There e.g. the Macports.org CI people could be of valueable help.

On another topic or actually the middle one in the title above: I’m happy to tell you that this year we’ve already three or four participants registered for the Randa Meetings whom will bring their families with them to Randa. Don’t fear, none of the money of the KDE e.V. will be used to pay their accommodation or travel and food costs. They will pay for their families’ stay. But why do I think that this is so nice?

Because I think this is an important step and the right direction. A huge problem of many free software communities is the fact, that contributors leave after they get graduated or get families. So it’s (IMNSHO) only in the best interest of KDE if there are possibilities for KDE contributors to bring their families to KDE meetings. It is nice if you can hack on KDE software during the day and eat lunch and dinner with your family and spend the evening with them. And who knows probably we need to organize a day nursery in the coming years.

But what about the coming years and my family? First and foremost I’d like to write here a huge and humongous thank you to my family, the small and the big one and even some farther relatives. Without them I couldn’t organize these meetings in Randa. So as you may have already read some time back I decided to found an association for the Randa Meetings and each year since the founding I was searching for some local sponsors for some expense allowance for me and some other helpers. Do you have any idea what amount of work it is to cook for this crowd for a whole week. You won’t believe how much KDE and free software people eat ;-).

And to be honest for the coming years I plan to stabilize this expense allowance or even small wage even more. But don’t fear (again ;-). None of the money of the KDE e.V. or the planned fundraising campaign will land in my wallet! I just want to be able to keep the Randa Meetings alive for the next years (I roughly estimate to work one to one and a half month on the organization of a single edition of the Randa Meetings) and thus look for new opportunities. So if you have some ideas tell me or at least participate in this is short and tiny (takes around a minute to fill in) survey or poll about this topic. Would be nice to have it widespread…

But what’s next for the Randa Meetings beneath the fundraising campaign? In the coming days I plan to poke and email the people and groups that are already registered for the sprints in Randa that they should check their data, check their groups and see who is missing and who needs to be poked. We need to fix a more or less final budget till the end of April.

So stay tuned when we launch the fundraising campaign for the Randa Meetings and help us to spread the word. Thanks for reading and don’t forget to flattr me below ;-).

PS: This blog post already got a bit larger than planned but here is another PS ;-):
PPS: In the coming days I plan as well to check the wiki pages for the Randa Meetings and add some information about the some hardware present at this year’s meetings (e.g. touch screen, WeTabs, etc.) which you can use and I will add some additional information for families.

As my questionnaire is now open for two weeks I plan to give it another 24 hours and then close it. So you’ve still time till tomorrow, Wednesday, February 19, 23.59 UTC to fill in the survey and participate in the draw.

If you should need more time or planned to fill in the questionnaire after tomorrow night please ping me (unormal) on freenode.net or write me an email (fuxkdeorg). And thank a lot to all the people who already filled it in: thank you!

And now a promise: this is the last time I write here to ask you to fill in this questionnaire. Next time I write about this topic I’ll write about results. Although my diploma thesis will be in German I’ll write some summaries or blog posts about the results in English and probably will do even a presentation or two about it.

And here yet another teaser: tomorrow I’ll blog on planet kde about the dates and topics of the Randa Meetings in August 2014 😉

First and foremost I’d like to thank all the people who already took some time and participated in the questionnaire for my diploma thesis and KDE.

But it’s not over yet (last chance is on 25th of February) and we still need more data and as a member of KDE I know we can do more and better. I got some feedback about the length of the questionnaire and that some questions (mostly the once at the beginning of the questionnaire about the 12 different tasks) are quite abstract and difficult. But please try it, try your best and take the time and brain power. The remaining part of the questionnaire (after these two pages with the tasks questions) is quite easy and quickly done.

So if you already started the questionnaire and gave up then or needed to run for something else: no problem, you can reopen the questionnaire and continue where you left. And don’t forget the chance to win something nice  – but just if you complete and submit the questionnaire.

And if there are any questions, feedback or you need help don’t hesitate a moment to write me an email or ping me on IRC (freenode.net) as unormal.

Thanks a lot for your help and tell your fellow KDE mates about this questionnaire
Mario Fux

At the end of last year we started the organizational process for a new version of the Randa Meetings. After a year without them we’d like to invite some KDE (and other) people to Randa in the summer of 2014. One of the first things that need to be set is the date for the meetings and thus at the beginning of this year we started to ask some people in the KDE community (and the chef 😉 and started a Doodle.

Projects ideas we had and have for the Randa Meetings 2014 are:

• Creating one or two new KDE books (possible topics: application development with KDE Frameworks 5 or Plasma Workspaces 2). The books should be done in the same manner as the well known KDE Guide.
• KDE Edu group
• KDE Multimedia, Phonon and Amarok
• Kate and/or KDevelop
• KDE Accessibility, Simon Speech Recognition and the new Open Speech Initiative
• OpenStreetMap (Switzerland)
• OpenUsability

Some other ideas are meetings of the KDE Workspaces, Nepomuk/Baloo or inviting an artist or two (hey Krita guys 😉 to Randa to be creative there.

The slogan for the Randa Meetings 2014 could be something like Porting KDE and Qt applications to KDE Frameworks 5. With a possible first stable KF5 release in June this could be quite a good time to push forward in this direction. About this topic see some recent blog posts on the KDE planet.

But now back to the actual topic of this blog post: the date selection for the next Randa Meetings. If you or your group is interested you (single person) may add yourself to the Doodle or come to #randa on freenode.net and talk about your ideas. We plan to finish the Doodle thing at the end of next week and then reserve the house.

Or you’d just like to help. We plan some crowd funding actions and other stuff where we could and would need your help.

This is just a short blog post about a thought I had in mind right now. It’s really great to be a part of KDE. All the stuff that’s going on atm in such a great atmosphere:

• Extra mile bugs getting fixed and worked on…
• All the work that’s going on in Plasma land…
• Fresh air in the kde edu department (here just tow examples: ktouch and marble)…
• And the great enthusiasm behind asking for funding for the Randa meetings 2012…

And that’s just the stories I’m aware off at this small moment in life. Great to share some of my life with you KDE people and users… Thanks and cu in Randa…

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.

This will be just a short blog post but at least it will be one ;-). This week first discussions will start about the creation of foundation (legal entity) for the Randa meetings. The following things are quite important for me on this:

• To keep it alive for the next years.
• Broaden the scope of free software communitites which can use this place.
• Make it independent of my person (and thus make it able to to give to people working on this big organizational task at least some expense allowance (and for me to pay the diapers which I need to buy soon ;-))
• Find more sponsors to save free software organisations (like the KDE e.V.) from costs.e
• Involve more and more locale people, schools and industry.
• Bring even more KDE people to Randa in the next years.

And for this I created a new internal mailing list (German only, sorry). So if you’re interested send me an email (my lastname at kde dot org) and we’ll add you to the list.

Another nice thing that happened in the last weeks was the arrival of my new N9 I got from KDE. It actually was a nice coincidence that the device arrived at the same day I officially finished my WiktionaryParser university project which I’d like to port to the N9.

As I won’t find the time in the next days to port this software and work a bit on QML frontend at least I installed all available KDE software for this nice mobile. Thus I’ll be able to demonstrate KDE software on yet another device (and to e.g. show it to potential new sponsors for the Randa meetings.

And the last thing in the post. I’ve of course already some plans for this year’s Randa meetings: My favorite focus this year would be Accessibility (a11y). I’m already in contact with a11y developers and blind users. And this year September would be the date of choise… And don’t forget to flattr me if your like what I do :-).