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.

Building innovation nodes through Free Software Communities (III): participants

This is the third post of this serie. Please read the first two (I and II) before reading this one.

A.- Participants

As mentioned in the previous post, the participants in a project like the one we are describing can be organized in three different groups:

1.- Source

There are the organizations which represent the innovation source, that is, Local Free Software Communities (LFSC from now on).

Mature Global Free Software Communities (GFSC) are organizing more and more local groups, specially in non-English speaking countries since people in general like to related to each other in their native language. But in most cases those local groups are not configured as legal entities. When they are, most of the times there is no legal relation with the matrix, at least, so they can operate as legal representatives of the GFSC in its country.

Due to law differences, in each country that relation implies different rights and duties, so there no single and simple way of building that relation. But is an achievable problem in most cases. In KDE we created a precedent with the agreement with KDE Spain (link). we are using this initiative as experiment in order to replicate it with more LFSC.

This project should have, as one of its major goals, to help local groups:

• To become legal entities, so they can grow and mature, by being able to relate to other organizations, not just its matrix.
• To develop activities that allow them to increase the number of local contributors and the software use by local players.

2.- Catalyst

The Catalyst is the organization that will put the initial effort to attract local communities to the project. Ideally, it'll will have the initial resources and the localization needed to launch the project. Its major initial goals will be:

• To coordinate the initial steps and prepare everything for the LFSCs to take command of the project when the Assembly is formed.
• To promote interactions and networking among LFSCs and between those and local agents.
• To do marketing with impact beyond Free Software media.

3.- Local agents

The initially act as receptors of the knowledge transfer generate in Free Software Communities. In a second step, little by little, will generate its own experience and knowledge to LFSC to end up providing them developers, experiences and (hopefully) code. Beside interacting with LFSC, Catalyst will promote interactions among them, so they can learn from each other's experience.

B.- An example: Spain

Local Free Software Communities

Mi idea is giving this project a try in a certain country. Let's say Spain. It would kick off in a certain big city and could be replicated to smaller ones. The initial LFSC candidates are:

• Debian-es
• KDE España
• GNOME Hispano
• OpenStreetMap España
• Joomla Spanish
• Drupal Hispano
• gvSIG

All of them are legal entities in Spain, regularly organize community events and have ten or more members. They are the perfect starters.

Some other local groups must be also involved in the early steps. They are LFSC groups that are not legal yet, but organize events and are active groups. The project should focus on helping them to become members of the project. By the end of the first year, the goal must be to add another 5-6 local groups to the project with the same rights and duties than founders. Distribution LoCo teams (Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Gentoo, Guadalinex, Linex, CentOS, etc.), computer language related groups (Java Hispano, Rails-es, etc.), product oriented communities (Zentyal, LibreOffice-es, Plone-es, LibrePlan, etc.) and other ones like OSGEO-es, FSFe, Mozilla-es, etc. are perfect candidates for these second group.

Catalyst
 

In my mind, the perfect catalyst is a non-profit with many local contacts and visibility or a Public Administration (City Council or Municipality). Last November, I presented this idea to one City Council from a big Spanish City. Other options are being under study.

Local players/agents

The best players to involved at early stages of the project are those that have demonstrated in the past some relation and support to Free Software. The plan is to reduce the culture gap initially. My first candidates would be:

• Regional/national Association/Federation of Free Software SME.
• Local college (through its Free Software Office).
• R&D Institutes with Free Software related experience.

KDE at the Libre Software World Conference 2011

Libre Software World Conference (LSWC'11) is the most important commercial event related with Free Software in Spain. It is organized by ASOLIF, the National Federation of SME's Free Software Associations. As you might remember, I was its Manager Director just a few weeks ago.


Last year it was organized in Málaga, Andalusia, and this year it will take place in Zaragoza. The regional Association from the region, CESLA, along with the Municipality, play a key role in the organization of the event.


This edition includes the Joomla Day and the Python Day, which will help bringing to the LSWC'11 even more people than last year, specially technicians, which I think is really good. The event will take place on November 9th and 10th.The following two days, Zentyal celebrates it first Zentyal Summit in the same place. Zentyal contributors , partners, users and employees from all over the world will meet there to take this Free Software Business Server one step further. A lot of good news will come out of it.

Representing KDE Spain, I will give a conference called KDE as a solution in business environments. It is scheduled on November 10th at 10:30 a.m. Although there are several activities at the same time, I expect a lot of people attending since it take place in the central room. That is pressure :-)

As you can see in the program, more than 70 talks and workshop are scheduled. More than 100 companies will be there and more than 500 atendees will participate those two days.

By the way, Microsoft is sponsoring the event.

Libre Software World Conference instead of Open Source World Conference

Every year it used to take place in Spain a big software libre conference. One year it was celebrated in Extremadura and the other one in Andalucía (Málaga). The Málaga one, called Open Source World Conference had over seven thousand atendees during the three days conference in 2008. This year was announced for October 27th and 28th a few months ago. KDE along with more than a hundred organizations were going to give talks, demos, participate in round tables, etc.

Many companies from ASOLIF, the National Federation of Free Software SME from Spain, the organization I work for, were preparing contents for that conference, and some representatives from our Andalucía Association, Andalibre, and myself has been involved in organicing our presence there since early February. Like it happens in any other big conference, it takes a lot of work to have everything ready in time and there are many things you cannot wait until the last minute to solve.

During the OSWC, ASOLIF was going to celebrate our internal meeting, called IV Encuentro ASOLIF, that take place every six months. 75 of our companies were expected to come to Malaga from all over Spain. During these meetings, we coordinate the actions and projects we are working on and we celebrate meetings with public administration, big companies and other entities interested in collaborating with us.

On October 6th, the Andalucía's Regional Goverment, the OSWC organicer, suddenly announced the cancellation of the event. This meant that all the work we were preparing had no meaning and was going to be lost. Our companies were shocked, just like I was.

Two days later, after a lot of internal disscussion, ASOLIF did agree on leading the organization of a public event during October 27th and the IV Encuentro ASOLIF on October 28th in Málaga. For doing this, we made an open call for help and many other organizations and individuals got involved on it: colleges, LUGs, media, developers, etc. The open collaboration mode worked well. The City Council of Málaga helped us by letting us use the Malaga Congress Palace for the event.

So after 19 days of hard work, we were able to kick off what it was called de Libre Software World Conference (LSWC) in the same place and time the OSWC was supposed to happen. In the four tracks we of the event, more than 60 members of different companies, universities, local and regional goverments, etc. were involved. About three hundred people attended and about 30 ASOLIF companies could show their products in demos. About 50% of the contents involved ASOLIF members and the other 50% were given by other entities. KDE Spain was one of them (Antonio Larrosa did it...yes...he's back :-) ).

The following day, ASOLIF celebrated its IV Encuentro ASOLIF and about 40 companies from all over Spain showed up. So the whole adventure ended up being a great success.

I've been quiet busy the last month trying, along with other people, to organice in a few weeks what it usually takes a few months....but we did it quiet well so all the work was worth it. It is the first time our organization leads the celebration of a partly commercial oriented event. We already have plans to repeat the experience next year. With more time and money we know now we can do a good job.

Bussines around free software is not an exception anymore so we feel there is room for a more commercial oriented event in Spain. We want to bring different profiles to it without losing the hacking way of doing things that works so well for networking purposes in community oriented events.

It was good news that KDE Spain did a KDE 4 demo during the LSWC. Many enterpreneurs attended to it. But it was even better news that most of the speakers used KDE. Some tweets reflected this fact. It was unexpected to most. I knew we had a bigger penetration in commercial enviroments than in public administrations (GNOME rules there) here in Spain, but I was also surprised of our presence being so notorious. As I've said many times before, I think companies should be our major target here in Spain. More and more people agree on it and we are trying to focus some energy in that target.

Call for host for Akademy-es 2010

KDE España opens the Akademy-es Call for Host until January 22nd for 2010 edition. Proposals are welcome. Further information is available through KDE-España website (in spanish).

I'm writing this post from Barcelona, where Maemo Long Weekend is taking place. I'm in an introductory talk about Gtk right now. There is a familiar mixture of Gtk/Qt folks around here :)

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.