New KDE book, Beginning KDE Development!

This week has been amazing! I'm not sure what I expected when I applied for the GSoC Doc Sprint, or when I became part of Karan's team, whichproposed creating a guide for new KDE developers. I know I did NOT expect to have a book in print within the week! However, our wonderful hosts and guides from Google, FlossManuals, and Aspiration http://www.aspirationtech.org/ guided all of us so well, that WE DID IT! Not only the KDE team, but also the people from OpenMRS, OpenStreetMap and Sahana also created and published books! Four books in one week, from 29 people. I still can't believe it. Rohan, Supreet, and Karan (Rohan Garg, Supreet Pal Singh, Karan Pratap Singh) - you are the best!

Publication isn't the end of the process though. In fact, the opposite. Because of the way FlossManuals is set up, the books are in a "rolling release" unless they are deliberately frozen. So interested folks can edit and add over time, or even clone books or chapters to "fork", if needed.

Also, one of the teams was describing how they created a book before, with a co-located coding and documentation sprint. Doesn't that sound like a great idea, KDE teams? As they told it, as the doc team struggled with difficulties, and consulted with the coding team, often the code was made better, cleaner, simpler -- which make the documentation more straightforward as well. It sounds like a great idea; to make the new documentation match exactly the new code, released together at the same time. Sounds like a best practice to me! We did something like this at the Amarok sprint at Randa last summer, and it worked out very well. Since we had Myriam there hunting down bugs too, which was triply effective.

Not every team will want a book, of course. Books aren't always a practical documentation form-factor, although FlossManuals points the way to the future, I think. The books don't have to be printed, but can also be made available as HTML, PDF, or ePub files. Also, the files can be given away or sold, as the project chooses, and the projects set the price on the printed books as well. Since we have make the e.V. the owner of the book, they could even decide to set a higher price for awhile, as a fundraiser, or buy them cheaply in bulk to send to the GSoC students, or make available at KDE booths at FOSS events.

Our book, Beginning KDE Development, was created with the GSoC students in mind, to help them get up and running KDE trunk, if necessary, as quickly as possible. Along with the technical helps, we've also discussed the KDE community, where to get help, and how to communicate -- all in one short book. I hope you will visit http://booki.flossmanuals.net/kde-guide/, create an account, and help us make it better! We have to have it in excellent shape in time for the next group of GSoC students 2012.

Adam Oram has written an interesting series of blog posts about the event, with some pictures. Check out the series here: https://bitly.com/bundles/praxagora/4. Thank you O'Reilly for sending Adam to help us, and chronicle the event! And most important, thank you Google for selecting our team for sponsorship. You've done KDE a great service.

Google Summer of Code, and Season of KDE: Past the mid-point

We have now passed the mid-term evaluations for both GSoC, and SoK. Our students are doing a wonderful job in GSoC -- all 51 students passed! We've had a couple of disappointing reports from SoK, which I would like to follow up on. Please, students and mentors, if you are having difficulties with research, coding, or support, contact us administrators. Lydia isn't alone; we are all here to help you.

This past week I was at the Community Leadership Summit and OSCON. A meeting of GSoC mentors and admins during lunch one day was fun, and I'm looking forward to the Mentor Summit in October. I'm so pleased with the creative support that Google is providing to KDE and the rest of the FOSS projects. This last year, they added the spectacular Google Code-In, and it seems likely they will offer that contest again this fall. New in 2011 is the Documentation Sprint, which I've applied to attend. If accepted, I'll be in Mountainview for a week, for the Sprint then the Mentor Summit.

Thank you Google, thank you KDE mentors, thank you wonderful students, and thank you to Lydia, Jeff and Ingo, my fellow administrators. This has been a great ride.

PS:

GSoC and Season of KDE - Let's GO!

Our students have received their acceptance letters, and this year are being assembled into small teams. So the students will not only have access to their project community and mentor(s), and us admins, but also each other. We hope that this will make it more likely that students will not only contribute code to KDE, but their continuing participation.

We had many strong proposals this year, but unfortunately were only able to accept 51 out of the 169 proposals for GSoC. However, now Season of KDE has been announced! See Nightrose's blog for all the details: http://blog.lydiapintscher.de/2011/04/25/announcing-season-of-kde-2011/. If you are one of the hundred or so students who were not selected for GSoC, please consider applying for SoK. The T-shirt is always *awesome*, and you'll also get swag and a certificate attesting to your contribution.

While we created this for the folks who could not do GSoC, it is open to all, and need not be code. Please discuss your plans with the community where you would like to work, because a mentor is required for participation. If you cannot find a mentor yourself, please apply anyway and ask us to help find you one. All this new code is great! But what is really important, is that we are growing the KDE community. Put on your thinking cap, and apply!