Akademy; at 20, KDE reaches out

Some of the talks, initiatives, conversations, and workshops that inspired me at Akademy. Thanks so much for the e.V. for sponsoring me.

A. Wikidata  - We have some work to do to get our data automatically uploaded into Wikidata. However, doing so will help us keep our Wikipedia pages up-to-date.

B. Looking for Love, Paul Brown's talk and workshop about Increasing your audience's appreciation for your project. Many of the top Google results for our pages don't address what people are looking for:

1. What can your project do for me? 
2. What does your application or library do?

Paul highlighted one good example: https://krita.org/. That crucial information is above the fold, with no scrolling. Attractive, and exactly the approach we should be taking in all our public-facing pages.

My offer to all projects: I will help with the text on any of your pages. This is a serious offer! Just ask in IRC or send an email to valorie at kde dot org for editing.

C. The Enterprise list for people with large KDE deployments, an under-used resource for those supporting our users in huge numbers, in schools, governments and companies. If you know of anyone doing this job who is not on the list, hand along the link to them.

D. Goalposts for KDE - I was not at this "Luminaries" Kabal Proposals BoF, but I read the notes. I'll be happy to see this idea develop on the Community list.

E. UserBase revival -- This effort is timely! and brings the list of things I'm excited about full circle. For many teams, UserBase pages are their website. We need to clean up and polish UserBase! Join us in #kde-wiki in IRC or the Telegram channel and https://userbase.kde.org/Wiki_Team_Page where we'll actually be tracking and doing the work. I'm so thankful that Claus is taking the leadership on this.

If you are a project leader and want help buffing your UserBase pages, we can help!


In addition to all of the above ideas, there is still another idea floating around that needs more development. Each of our application sites, at least, should have a quality metric box, listing things like code testing, translation/internationalization percentage, number of contributors, and maybe more. These should be picked up automatically, not generated by hand. No other major projects seem to have this, so we should lead. When people are looking for what applications they want to run on their computers, they should choose by more than color or other incidentals. We work so much on quality -- we should lead with it. There were many informal discussions about this but no concrete proposals yet.

Amarok Quick Start Guide in Translation

Thanks to the hard work of the wonderful Amarok Promo Team, we now have the beginning of the Amarok Handbook completed, and in the able hands of the KDE Translation team (http://userbase.kde.org/Amarok/QuickStartGuide). It's quite exciting to see the completed pages roll in on #kde-www. Neverdingo has written a wonderful blog post about the procedure: http://neverendingo.blogspot.com/2010/08/amarok-translatons.html. If you love Amarok, and have ever thought about translating, now is the time to step up! This is going from our small team, to the larger team of KDE, and it is thrilling to see.

I guess we did something unusual, beginning our Handbook in the KDE wiki system. I'll have to say that comparing the process to our old way, which was using Google Docs -- it is like night and day. The one advantage of Gdocs is that you can tell who is also editing, and what they are doing, but we got around that, for the most part, by communicating in our IRC channel. There is simply nothing better than seeing your document take place marked up and looking professional! Wiki markup isn't complicated, and the guides (http://userbase.kde.org/EditMarkup and http://userbase.kde.org/Typographical_Guidelines) are easy and helpful to use.

I will never again use Google Docs for more than just text. The wiki rules! Userbase is awesome! Thank you, thank you, KDE.

I understand the next bit of this process is the DocBook markup, which sounds mysterious and scary still, since I don't know much about it. There is a guide to that as well, which I'm sure I'll be consulting often. For now, though, we'll concentrate on finishing the rest of the Handbook, for those who need more detail about the finer points of using the best music program of all time, AMAROK!

Thank you Mamarok, and Willem, Nightrose and Pete, Abhi and Adrián, Emilio and Dima for all your work. You've been GREAT.