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.

Problem redimensionated into challenge, thence into success

Problem: our Dish DVR died. And it died before I backed up the content, and that content was hundreds of old Doctor Who episodes I was collecting until I could watch in some kind of decent order.

Since it would briefly come back to life if allowed to rest for awhile unplugged, I bought a backup hard drive of the proper sort (with its own power supply), and plugged it in. However, the DVR died before backing up commenced.

This DVR is leased, so Dish sent along a new one, asking that I return the broken one within 10 days. Yesterday a technician showed up to be sure that everything was working, since the new machine had taken quite long to get a watchable image. I asked him if it was possible to move the old hard drive into the new machine and do the backup, before sending the old machine back? He said yes, although he couldn't do it for us.

So, new challenge: remove the old hard drive from the old DVR. I found a wikibook about the DVR here: en.wikibooks.org/wiki/VIP_922/Dish_Network. There the author says,

With no A/C power connected - from the old 922, pull the internal hard drive and set it aside. To do this remove 4, back cover screws (black,) then slide the cover back about 1/2 inch and tilt upwards to remove.

Well now, here was my first problem. Screws, no biggie. But "slide the cover back"? It simply would not move for me. However, teamwork to the rescue. My husband Bob used the straight-slot screwdriver and pried with a bit more power than I would have used, and slide, it did. From there on out, the problem was redimensionated (thank you genii for that beautiful term!) and it was only a matter of more screws, unhooking the power and motherboard connection, and sliding out.

After using my husband again to help me slide out the TV cabinet and photograph and then remove the DVR hookups, I used the same procedure again. Remove the cover, then the HD, and then switched the old HD into its place. I left off the cover, and then Bob hooked up the new machine again, and we turned it on to wait. After the backup hard drive was plugged in, this slow beast restarted again, but we had a new option: backup. Just to be safe, we selected only the Doctor Who eps. If there is room once that's done, I'll select the rest of what I want. The backup is now proceeding, and the readout reports that it will take another 10 hours. OMG, usb is slow!

So, redimensionating is cool. I'm going to try to remember to do it more often. Also, many thanks to the dish tech and wikibook author who both shared their information freely, and my husband who supplied support, muscle, and didn't give up!

Today's catch-up meeting with the Ubuntu Community Council

The Kubuntu team has been thinking about what to bring up to the CC for a few weeks, and at our Mumble meeting, discussed it there as well. Rohan Garg, Scott Kitterman, and Philip Muscovac (Shadeslayer, ScottK, and Yofel) attended with me (thank goodness!).

We put all our discussion items on a wiki page: https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/CCmeeting. Since the moin moin wiki is unreliable, here is our list:

Summing up -- PAST

Since last year, the threats of legal action against Mint and other derivative distributions have upset our community. We were disappointed in the reaction of the CC -- it seemed to us that the CC was just doing as Canonical directed, rather than work with Mint to bring them into the community.

We continue to feel apprehension over Wayland/Mir situation, which has brought the Ubuntu brand into controversy, and has caused a lot of bad feelings from our upstream. We hope for peace and technical excellence.

We are missing our face-to-face UDS meetings with the rest of the Ubuntu community. Last year and again this year we've arranged a Kubuntu meeting at the KDE yearly meeting, Akademy. Last year we met in Bilbao, this year it will be held in Brno, in the Czech Republic. However, we really miss being able to touch base with the rest of the Ubuntu community.

PRESENT
We have our own webserver now, at Kubuntu.co.uk. Kubuntu.org will be moved there soon.

We're now using the KDE wikis to develop our user docs, and some community wiki pages. Moin moin is just not reliable. We've gained some more translations this way for the documentation. We ran out of people who were experts in Docbook, which is why we started using the MM wiki.  http://userbase.kde.org/Kubuntu is for writing; when docs are done they are moved to the website.

We are wondering about the state of donations. On the donations page, a report is promised, but we've not seen one, and none are linked to. http://community.ubuntu.com/help-information/funding/

FUTURE

Discussing how to handle KDE's new Frameworks, Plasma Next, and new Qt. In 14.10 we'll be rather conservative, and offer the newest stuff being released this summer in a PPA. We may be able to spin an ISO of this software; we are still pondering our best path forward.


It was encouraging to hear from Mark Shuttleworth during the meeting, as well as Jono on the funding report. I'm not sure any issues were resolved, but it did feel like the air was cleared.

Full text of the meeting is here: http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2014/05/15/%23ubuntu-meeting.html#t17:39. Thanks to tsimpson for the link. :-)