Drawing in new contributors and growing the community

It's a really exciting time to be active in both KDE and Kubuntu. So many new initiatives, projects, new collaborations. And yet.

Comment often heard over the past couple of years: we've lost $person / we're missing people to maintain/lead/do $project. This is understandable, and to be expected in a large, mature organization such as KDE; a dynamic project loses people as well as gains new contributors.

In contrast, almost daily in #kde and #kde-devel IRC channels we have new people trying to find some way to get involved with KDE. In an effort
to bring the solution and the problem together, at Akademy we
brainstormed and came up with the Mission forum.

What that forum needs is postings! When a developer is thinking
about giving up maintainership, please write a Maintainer Wanted
post. When you are fixing bugs, and see a valuable bit of code which needs
porting, please write that up and put it on the forum.

Naturally we always need ideas for possible Google Summer of Code projects, and the forum is a good place to post and develop those ideas. Eventually they will be moved to our GSoC docs, but they can be discussed and refined on the forum.

New skills needed, documentation, internationalization, translation, artwork, promo, and web work tasks are also suitable. If you have written a "help wanted" blog or mail list email in the past, dig it out and post it on the forum. Be sure to clearly outline for people how to undertake your tasks.



In fact, once Google Code-in is over, how about putting some of those tasks which remain into the forum? Those teams who didn't have time to mentor during the contest can still write up small tasks and put them into the forum as well. Once you get into the habit of creating postings, you'll be prepared and want to participate in GCi next year!

I know developers often don't like forums, but guess who does like them?
Beginners and people who are using search engines. We need these
people to join our community and start helping out. That will happen
when we ask in a public place, which is the forum.

One more time:  https://forum.kde.org/viewforum.php?f=291

Accessible KDE, Kubuntu

KDE is community. We welcome everyone, and make our software work for everyone. So, accessibility is central to all our work, in the community, in testing, coding, documentation. Frederik has been working to make this true in Qt and in KDE for many years, Peter has done valuable work with Simon and Jose is doing testing and some patches to fix stuff.

However, now that KF5 is rolling out, we're finding a few problems with our KDE software such as widgets, KDE configuration modules (kcm) and even websites. However, the a11y team is too small to handle all this! Obviously, we need to grow the team.

So we've decided to make heavier use of the forums, where we might find new testers and folks to fix the problems, and perhaps even people to fix up the https://accessibility.kde.org/ website to be as
awesome as the KDE-Edu site. The Visual Design Group are the leaders here, and they are awesome!

Please drop by #kde-accessibility on Freenode or the Forum https://forum.kde.org/viewforum.php?f=216 to read up on what needs doing, and learn how to test. People stepping up to learn forum
moderation are also welcome. Frederik has recently posted about the BoF: https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=216&t=122808

A11y was a topic in the Kubuntu BoF today, and we're going to make a new push to make sure our accessibility options work well out of the box, i.e. from first boot. This will involve working with the Ubuntu a11y team, yeah!

More information is available at
https://community.kde.org/Accessibility and
https://userbase.kde.org/Applications/Accessibility