Akademy-es 2012, the annual Spanish KDE event, will take place next weekend

KDE Spain, in collaboration with Saragossa City Council, The Saragossa Knowledge Foundation and the Aragon regional FLOSS SME cluster (CESLA) organizes Akademy-es 2012, the V edition of the yearly meeting where KDE community from Spain meets. It will take place next weekend, from Friday 18th to Sunday 20th in Saragossa.

This year we pay special attention, beside pure KDE contents, to Qt and companies, with several talks related to them. KDE Spain (a legal entity), as usual,  also celebrates its annual assembly on Saturday, May 19th, as part of the event.

We have several sponsors. One of them, Wadobo, is owned by Eduardo Robles Elvira (aka edulix). This is nothing but a confirmation of how Free Software communities, even local ones, work as business incubators, feeding the project back. This is definitely, something to promote even more in KDE.

On Friday 18th I'm giving a talk specially oriented to companies. I will try to explain them the advantages of getting involved in a community driven Free Software project like KDE. On Saturday 19th I will talk about KDE Connect.

I'm glad to see that this year we will also have several talks from representatives of non KDE initiatives that helps us in different ways, like Jesus, G. Barahona, from Libresoft (we collaborate in FP7 project ALERT) or Paul Brown, from Linux Magazine (Spanish version director). We will also have OpenSUSE related contents. I hope next year some other distros propose talks for Akademy-es.

KDE Connect progress

The last few weeks KDE Connect Team has been working on different areas. To know a little more about KDE Connect please check the end of this post.

Tools

Thanks to our awesome sysadmin team, we have a management tool to help us coordinating every effort we do. KDE Connect in not an isolated project. We already have or will have relation with many other KDE projects so we want to make sure we are prepared for growing without heavily increasing the administrative and coordination efforts needed to offer a high quality service.

KDE Connect will have mailing lists, IRC channels, forums...everything you expect from a community project. We will be open them up by demand, little by little. So don't expect them as soon as the project is launched.

Artwork and marketing

Asun Sánchez is designing our logo and we are preparing a brochure for organizations that might want to join us. It will include a basic description of the Program and the basic terms and conditions.

KDE Connect will be presented during Akademy-es that will take place in Saragossa from May 18th to 20th.

Akademy 2012 Program Committee has just communicate me that the KDE Connect talk has been accepted so we will have a presentation this summer at Tallin, Estonia.

Procedures and activities

We are also defining the basic procedures that will be followed by KDE Connect team and organizations involved. The networking activities are also being described so KDE Connect Team members can have clear guidelines.

Roadmap

The roadmap is also under development. The initial plan is to launch KDE Connect in May. We will organize several activities during Akademy, so we need to do some previous work with organizations that will attend to our central event.

If everything goes as expected, I will be attending to LinuxTag 2012 helping in KDE booth and doing some KDE eV Board work .

Join KDE Connect Team

I would like to thank all the people that is helping me in this idea. If you are a KDE members and want to get involved, get in touch with me.

KDE Connect previous references

• Please check the previous post about KDE Connect
• Other references:
• KDE Connect early definition
• Some thoughts about dealing with private information in KDE Connect
• KDE Connect structure (check my blog for previous articles since Nov. 2011.

What I've been doing lately and my near future plans

Lets begin like many people did before ....

It's been a long time since my last post.

Now... I won't bother you with excuses.

I'm helping (as part of ASOLIF) in the organization of the GNOME Marketing Hackfest, along with the regional association of free software companies from Aragon (CESLA), the Aragon Technological Centre (ITA), Zaragoza Municipality and the Regional Gov. Some well known GNOME community members like Vincent Untz, Stormy Peters or Paul Cutler, among others, are attending. I'll be in Zaragoza from next Tuesday until Friday afternoon, just in time to go to Bilbao for Akademy-es.

On thursday May 6th, apart from the GNOME event, I'll give a workshop (in spanish) about free software bussines models within ASOLIF. In this Federation many companies make money in different ways related with free software. I'll try to summarize the most relevant ones giving some keys about how to improve those models. 30 people are already registered which is an unexpected number for me. It's been a long time (about 5 years) since my last teaching session so I'm quiet excited about it.

The organization of the local KDE conference in Bilbao is going fine and a few days ago we had almost 70 people registered, wich is a good number. Some ASOLIF companies and the Regional association from Vasque Region (ESLE) are sponsoring (not much, but hopefully this is the first of many) Akademy-es. Check other sponsors through the website

Last week I was involved in the organization of III Encuentro ASOLIF, the Federation internal event, which take place each six months. It wasn't as crowded as expected (just around 50 companies during the two days, we expected around 75) but very interesting anyway. We will repeat it in October (it takes place every 6 months).

The week before that, on April Friday 16th, I went to the ODF Plugfest in Granada. The event was organized by another ASOLIF company, Opentia, along with other organizations. It was cool to see how the ODF standard is done and how is implemented in different applications, KOffice among them. Jos Van den Oeven was there and, on saturday, I went back to Granada from Málaga this time with my friend Antonio Larrosa. The whole ODF Plufest crew visited la Alhambra with an archeologist that worked there a few years. We got there at 16 hours and we left at 23. We all agree that it was a long but still awesome tour.

After Akademy-es, it looks like I won't have another event until LinuxTag, which is good 'cause I need a rest. But let's not say it loud, just in case...

I'm still thinking about staying at Berlin after LinuxTag until flying to Akademy 2010, at Tampere, Finland. Maybe I can work a few days in Berlin and then take some days off.

Akademy-es a great success

Akademy-es is in its final day. It's been a great success so far. 65 peolpe have registered and, since it took place in La Coruña's college (Computer Science building), even more people attended to some talks.

This year has made a big different from the organization point of view. The organizers have previos experience, so everything was well prepared. We lacked more developers truly involved in KDE but is just a matter of time. Spanish community is still getting together. After that we will be able to grow fast. Definetly, the new formed KDE-España will help a lot. Right now there are many people that uses KDE in Spain and many young developers are beggining to program with Qt-KDE tools, so it is just a matter of time that more spanish developers participate actively in core-KDE projects.

Electing for the KDE-España board most of the spanish people that actively contributes to KDE have been a great decision. Other young guys identify the association with a strong KDE feeling. People with other profile or not actively contributing decided to stay back and we made a hit. Now it is time for getting developers involved, so its time for young KDE people like Albert (aacid), Rafael (ereslibre), Eduardo (edulix), Alex (apol), etc. They are the present of KDE in Spain and its future. By promoting and supporting them, KDE will be able to have in this country a strong community sice they have the energy needed. Spain is investing tons of money in free software and we cannot be on the bench.

From my point of view, this Akademy-es will definitly make a difference. Well organized and with KDE-España born, we have a great momentum that we all shoul feed. GCDS'09 will come probably too early for demostrating anything, but at least KDE-España will be ready to take full advantage of the event as association. I feel the KDE-España board is aware of that. They are prepared to organize some activities for getting some canarians young developers involved and to get credit for their job. That will be a great goal.

Now everybody can say there is a truly spanish KDE community. It will be obvious in just a couple of years.

Thanks to GPUL and the rest of local organizers. It has been a great job.