Coming up: excitement and work

First, many of us will be taking off this week for Randa, Switzerland. Many sprints are taking place simultaneously, and the most important to me is that we're writing another book. Book sprints are fun, and lots of work! As well as the team in Randa, a few people will be helping us write and edit from afar, and I'll be posting a link soon so that you can help out as well.

Here is a recent article on Randa and what goes on here: https://dot.kde.org/2014/08/02/randa-meetings-interview-four-myriam-schweingruber. Most of the attendees are traveling on funds contributed by the community. Thanks so much! I hope our work will be worth your generosity.

Today, the Akademy session schedule was announced: https://dot.kde.org/2014/08/04/akademy-2014-program-schedule-fast-fun-inspiring. This will be my third Akademy, and they are always fascinating, friendly, educational, and just plain awesome! At this point, we're still open for more sponsorship of Akademy, and registration seems a bit slow. If you are interested, please register and make your way to Brno for Akademy. If you know a company who is not yet a sponsor and should be, please urge them to register as a sponsor now.

The talks will be great, as will the "hall track." Following the formal meeting, we have a few days of informal talks, mini-sprints, and workshops. This is when Kubuntu will be meeting, which is why Ubuntu sponsored me to attend! \o/ Thanks so much for that, generous Ubuntu users. To sum up, I'll quote Myriam from the above article:

While a lot of the work in Free Software is done over the internet, nothing replaces the real life meetings, as it provides an extra drive in terms of motivation. Modern software development is mostly agile, something even corporate software development is using more and more. Due to the global distribution of our contributors; Free Software development has always been agile to start with, even if we didn't put a label on it in the early days.

And in agile development; sprints are a very important element to push the project forward. While sprints can be done over the web, they are hindered by time-zones, external distractions, availability of contributors, etc. Having real life sprints, even if those are few, are more productive as all the hindrances of the web meetings are eliminated and the productivity is greatly enhanced. [emphasis added]