My personal Desktop Summit 2011

I'm back in Malaga and it is time to summarize my Desktop Summit.

First of all I would like to thank every single one of the local organizers and volunteers for the effort they've done the past days/weeks/months. It has been a great conference.

I've attended to many conferences. I've read a lot comments about many of them so I'm not going through them.

Mediation Training Session

Thanks to KDE e.V., I was able to attend to the Mediation Training session on Thursday. It was designed to improve the skills of the KDE Community Working Group. It worked really well. What I did learn there will be very helpful. I'm sure it will help the CGW, so every single KDE member will benefit from it.

By the way, you guys are doing an awesome job.

GUADEC 2012 in La Coruña

On Monday July 8th, I attended, as a member of the La Coruña candidacy for hosting GUADEC 2012, to the project presentation to the GNOME Board. ASOLIF supported GPUL (and other companies and organizations) in its effort to bring this event, for the forth time, to Spain. We succeded and the announcement came a day later.

José Millán, from GPUL and KDE Spain, and I were part of the team that did the presentation. This gives a clear idea of the good relations GNOME and KDE have in Spain, that made possible bringing the Desktop Summit to Gran Canaria back in 2009 or celebrating the GUADEMY, for example.

Hosting GUADEC 2012 in Spain became a personal goal too. I am really happy about the result. The members of the candidacy did a great job. They deserve this opportunity GNOME is giving them.

Kiosk BoF

Kiosk is one the most important features KDE offers for big deployments in restricted enviroments. On Thursday 11th, some KDE developers and people related with deployments talked about the state of kiosk, new improvements and requested fixes. We came out with several tasks to do during the following weeks.

My new tasks in KDE

Little by little, I'm getting more involved in KDE, after not doing much during the second half of 2009 and almost all 2010. The weeks before the DS, I did some research about corporate networks around free software projects, specially those supported by non-profit entities.

Back in 2003, I actively participated in the birth of ESLiC, the Association of Free Software Companies from the Canary Islands. This project was followed by the foundation of ASOLIF, on which I was also involved. A couple of years later, back in 2009, I became its Manager Director (life sometimes takes funny turns). So I have been involved lately in building network of companies and relations with other type of organizations.

On Thursday, during the KDE Promo Team BoF, I presented a new approach for building relations between KDE and other organizations (companies, other non-profits, education institutions, etc.). Some team members agreed on helping me to finish the strategy plan and defining an Action Plan so it can be runnig before the end of 2011.

Since this is just a plan, I won't go into details until it is finished. I'll just say that I'm excited about it.

In parallel, I will put some effort this year in helping KDE e.V. in comercial activities. I always tried to do in KDE different activities than in my regular job. It looks like this is going to change in 2011, which I'm not sure yet if it is good or bad news...for KDE :-)

Karaoke

It looks like it will be impossible to take away a karaoke session in future Desktop Summits. The Spaniards did particulary good singing a Spanish classic song from Camilo Sesto. We demostrated we can beat really bad any Free Software group from Japan or Korea. There is no doubt about it.

Conclusions

It has been a very productive Desktop Summit for me. I always enjoy meeting the KDE crew, and people from GNOME as well. I'm looking forward to work on the new ideas we've been going through this DS, to help the eV and to see improvements in Kiosk, among many other innovations we are working on.

GNOMErs..see you in La Coruña in GUADEC 2012.

KDErs...keep rocking. 

My job at ASOLIF

As you might know, I work at ASOLIF, the Spanish National Federation of Libre Software SMEs, formed by 9 regional associations that group about 200 IT companies.

You can find a description about who we are and what we do in our website and an updated presentation below:

ASOLIF - Spanish National Federation of Libre Software SMEs

View more presentations from ASOLIF.

So basically my time is divided into:

• Projects (design, execution, monitorization, cost control, etc. ) that involve our associations and/or our companies.
• Commercial activities.
• Communication activities.
• Lobby :-)
• Administrative and other internal activities.

So I'm in the Libre Software bussiness but in a non common organization. I hope this clarifies what I do. Many people ask me and it is not so easy to explain.

Season of KDE: we need you, KDE contributor, to get involved

KDE provides a great oportunity for students interested in computer science, designers, translators, etc., to improved their skills in a worldwide, structured and organized libre software community project. The result of their work could be used by millions of users.

Season of KDE is the program our community has built to give new contrinutors the chance to get involved in KDE in a smooth way, supported by experienced contributors. Coordinated by Lydia Pintscher, we are being really successful in getting potential contributors to join the program. After all the effort done in the past, and the great opportunity we have in front of us to increase our community, it is KDE's time to give all these young students the opportunity to become part of our journey.

We need you to join the program by mentoring these new contributors.

Why should you become a Season of KDE mentor?

1. It is the best way to support the great job some KDE members are doing for bringing new developers into our community.
2. Season of KDE is a great opportunity for you to attract some new contributors to your project.
3. Do you remember your first few weeks as a KDE developer? Make it easier for new contributors to join our community.
4. It is a great starting point for you if you want to become a GsoC mentor in the near future.

To join Season of KDE as a mentor, please contact Lydia Pintscher.

Join the Game.....c'mon

There are many ways for supporting KDE. Of course writing code for our project is the most popular but there are many other ways for contributing to KDE. For those who do not have time to invest collaborating with us, or simply wants to add an extra effort to support us, KDE published the Join the Game campaign last year.

Join the Game is the supporting KDE program we have built for helping to ensure our future. KDE wants to keep increasing or at least maintaining the actual number of activities we do all over the world to support our contributors, make KDE a better software and spread free software principles and benefits.

We, KDE, have a lot of fun doing what we do specially because it benefits a lot of people all around the world. So join us by joining our game. Join the Game

Killer feature for big Education deployments: kiosk returns

Most of the people I've met that participate in taking the decisions in IT related to Education in public administrations related are not technicians. Many people around libre software tend to think that the decision to go for Windows or Linux based desktops (GNOME  or KDE) has a lot to do with technical, usability or the look & feel features. Throughout the years, we have concentrate a lot is these aspects hoping that winning the any of those wars, we would suceed in being chosen as the default desktop in education.

During the decision process made by those people, when considering KDE and GNOME as default desktop compared to Windows, three considerations play on our side:

• TCO cost
• Availability of many useful applications within a classroom.
• Computer's lifecycle increase.

Thanks to our effort, most of the good applications we have in Linux plattforms, are already availiable for Windows. KDE has done a huge and succesful effort in this area (KDE for Windows project).

The TCO cost is a relevant one, but it is not the most important one. The experience tell us that it is the mainteinance and support the biggest piece of the cake in the medium term.

That cost has basically 3 sources:

1. Communication (connectivity)
2. Hardware
3. Software

If we ask any user support department from a IT Education oriented organization, they will tell you that most of the software support queries comes from:

1. Users that do not know how to use the software
2. Teachers that report that the software do not work properly because an unexpected action from a student. 

The second queries are fatal ones since they are more difficult and more expensive, to solve.

When talkign about migrating schools from Windows to Linux based desktops, one of the major features KDE had to offer in the past was our ability to port in a more scalable and cheaper way many of the features implementd in schools related to user profiles and desktop lockdown offered with Windows desktop + Active Directory. We could do that because of Kiosk.

During the KDE Edu Sprint public event that is took place yesterday in Bilbao, two people from two different Edu projects, one from Portugal and another one from Spain, pointed out the strong effort that is taking to them porting what they usually did in KDE3 with Kiosk to KDE4. In fact, they both agreed that support queries will increase due to unexpected actions done by students with the new software (KDE4).

It is easy to think that for big deployments, not having fully implemented kiosk is a major obstacle for switching from KDE3 to KDE4. Without kiosk mode working properly, we cannot compete with the Adctive Directory + Windows desktop in most of the features related with user profiles and lockdown of unusable features either.

From my point of view, related to Education, our priority should be to have a  fully inplementation of kiosk mode for KDE4. If we want to beat Windows in Education, we have to think about the maintenance cost of having a huge number of desktops to take care of. Kiosk is in these situations is the best feature we can offer.

We have talked about this during the KDE Edu Sprint. Alex Fiestas  is already doing some previous work in order to know what is missing and what is the effort needed to bring kiosk mode back in KDE 4.

I cannot think on a better way of having in the near future more new deployments in schools based on KDE 4, and the ones we already have switching smoothly to KDE 4, than giving them a killer feature that has a direct impact in medium term costs. Kiosk was our strongest feature in this area. It is worth it to have it back, even better if we can.

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.

¿Why will I celebrate the Software Freedom Day?

Tomorrow we celebrate the Software Freedom Day. The hispanos translate it into Día del Software Libre. I'm going to celebrate it because of the following reasons:

1.- I think it is a good tribute to those that, before me, fought hard to make Software Libre and the movement around it posible.

2.- This day should serve as an inspiration to those who keep putting effort and illussion to promote freedom through Software Libre, to those who want to bring justice to Software market and to those who, like myself, still feel motivated by innovation around ingeenering in general, and software in particular. During the everyday battle we loose part of ourselves and ocassionally we need some extra energy.

3.- All our effort is useless if our work is not known and understood by others, no matter if they agree or not with our statements. Only if they know what we do and why we do it, they will be able to understand us, which is the only way to respect us the same way we respect them.

Beacuse at the very end, this day is about celebrating that we now can choose. That is freedom. Happy Software Freedom Day. Celebrate your freedom.

II Desktop Summit: take control of your own future!

...and the winner is...Berlin. It will be the "star of our system" for a week during the summer of 2011.

The II Desktop Summit has location, a good one. I'm excited about this event for several reasons. The first one is because, somehow, it gives credit to all the hard work done to celebrate the I Desktop Summit (Gran Canaria Desktop Summit). But above that, I'm excited because, after breaking the ice during that first approach, this event can be a huge oportunity to takes steps forward in joining efforts between GNOME and KDE to develop better technologies, better solutions for more devices and more exciting applications.

Beside pure technical issues, there is a lot of work we can do together in areas like marketing/promotion, usability, internationalization, education, etc. This is a great chance to begin.

So, do you want to know why Software Libre makes a difference? Come and live it by getting involved in decisions that matter.

II Desktop Summmit: take control of your own future!

Akademy is over for me

I'm writing this while heading to the airport to go back home. It's been an interesting Akademy, well organiced and with a lot of good topics to disscuss. Last night we ended up in a karaoke...something unexpected but really fun. Listening people from Netherlands, India, México, Brazil and Spain singing together is not common, right?

This Akademy has also been a little different because of the World Cup. Obviously for all the spaniards that came to Tampere we have enjoyed it a lot. Let's see what happens this sunday against Netherlands. If we win.....Spain will be a huge party.

I've attended to several BoFs related with many different topics. I've also updated my laptop, tryed some new KDE features, talk about several little improvements and coordinated different actions I'll be helping on. Akademy is fun, but definetly means a lot of work of all of us.

As expected, my clothe doesn't fit into my bag. Buying clothe in the summer sales may cost me a lot....thanks God Antonio Larrosa is flying to Málaga in the same plane that I am and he has a little room in his baggage for some of my new clothe.

So, with a lot of hours of sleeping to take, a couple of extra kilos, a two weeks beard and tons of new experiences lived ....my vacations in Finland comes to an end. Thanks to all the KDE people and to the local team for organicing everything. See you all next year in the II Desktop Summit.

Let's do it

Sometime we concentrate on little things that matter a lot to us but has no impact on what we are doing. I frecuently come to disscussions in my everyday live in which I put a lot of my energy but, overall are not worth it. Sometimes I have people around me telling me that there's no point on "trying to win" those arguing but moving forward and pushing hard to accomplish the real goal. But sometimes I don't have them.

This Akademy is being great so far, but as always happens when innovating, I've seen a lot of tough disscussions. Some of them matters, and some don't. Or at least to the project as a whole or not to acomplish the global goal, which is to have a great product made by a healthy community and having a lot of people using it.

This article [1] [2] just got into my e-mail client and I want it to share it with you. Even if it's not totally true, it reflects how much work is ahead of us.

So let's concentrate more in what matters and a little less in other things. It is not that we are doing bad....I just want to share this feeling that we can do even better. There are tons of opportunities out there, and now we have a great product and the best community we've ever have.

Let's do it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_market_share
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Operating_system_usage_share.svg