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.

Morning. Right now I’m in my bed after a busy day and crossing half of Switzerland. I’m in the south in the middle of the Alpes (with almost no snow down here in the valley) as I need to do some civil defence service tomorrow (some kind of substitute for the mandatory military service we (men) need to do in Switzerland). Anyway, that’s not really interesting (I hope the rest of the blog is more interesting for some of you ;-).

This morning at the university me and my collegue did a presentation about our project about a morphological API for KDE. The presentation went ok but I’m not really satisfied. And there is some code which I hope to publish in the next weeks and months. Not really sophisticated stuff but probably some nice ideas for inspiration. Finally it should become part of the Sonnet framework of KDE (there is some quite interesting stuff in playground as well).

Another KDE and university project of me ended yesterday when I handed in my paper about the KDE semantic clipboard and some proposals for solutions (I don’t want to publish it here right now but if you’re interested I can send it to you privately. Just send me an email to fux at the KDE server dot the shortcut of organisation). The project did not really end with this paper but with an oral test on the 16th of December. But that should work quite well. The project included no programming but I still hope to do some development on this thing in the new year.

And another thing of the next year is yet another meeting or sprint in Randa. After Tokamak 3 and the KDE multimedia meeting 2010 this will be the third spreenting (;-) I organize in Randa. The main topic or group which is going to work there at the beginning of June 2011 consists of KDE-Nepomuk people. I’m in contact with Sebastian Trueg and some other people and we hope to make KDE SC 4.8 the semantic desktop/Nepomuk release! Another group which could have a sprint there is the KDevelop/Kate team (you didn’t know, right?;-). And then there is another team or group. Mark Kretschmann of Amarok asked me to help organizing another multimedia meeting in Randa and as I don’t want to organize two of them in one year … There is enough space and we don’t yet fill the house ;-).

Lastly Aaron Seigo blogged about a KDE sprint manager. If you’re one of this guys or gals working on this thing, please include some name tag printer, financial integration (with e.g. Kraft or KMyMoney), reinbursement form support, accommodation night support and so on ;-).

Oh and right after my last blog (no connection) entry Vishesh Handa wrote about a nepomuk backup and syncing solution. BTW: Vishesh: Hope you’ll be in Randa next year!

Before I finish with an outlook to next week’s blog I’ve some ethical or moral problem for you to solve: as I estimate to invest one month of work time to organize this meeting I thought this year to put some allowance expense for me in the budget for the sprint (and some amount for the cook and helper!). If and when I find enough sponsors. Is this ok?

Next week I’ll write probably some more about the morphological API, about the progress of the sprint organization (this year I want to have a more formal registration system as it’s easier to organize with facts than with uncertainties and it was a wish in this year’s sprint evaluation) and what else next week? You’ll see. Good night, dear reader!