1. KDE community guide (break into KDE) HOSC Amsterdam 2006
the K Desktop Environment
KDE community guide
(break into KDE)
HOSC Amsterdam 2006
This is the KDE community guide. It explains how the KDE community is organized and who you can talk to about parts of KDE. The subtitle is “break into KDE” to express that – this talk will help you know where you can break in and what to expect. This talk will try to cover both opportunities for businesses as well as for individuals who with to contribute to KDE. /7

2. Adriaan de Groot KDE Quality Team
Who is this guy?
Adriaan de Groot
KDE Quality Team
10 years as an Open Source user and contributor
KDE contributor since 2000
university researcher
This slide should definitely be modified to indicate who the speaker is; the title may be a little too informal for some conferences. /7

3. a Free Software community a Free Software desktop
KDE is ...
a Free Software community
a Free Software desktop
a Free Software applications suite
a Free Software development platform
an Open Standards implementation
KDE is many things; first and foremost an organized community of individuals, organizations and businesses that together create Free software. One of the software products is a Free desktop generally called “KDE.” That's the shiny bits you see when you start your computer. A wide selection of applications – ranging from the personal management suite “Kontact” to the complete and integrated KOffice suite and the award-winning k3b and Amarok -- rounds out the stuff you can use to get work done. For developing applications KDE is a broad development platform (including KDevelop) for many different programming languages. Finally, KDE is committed to Open standards. /7

4. accessibility experts artists and designers free culture evangelists
KDE community is ...
more than geeks
usability experts
accessibility experts
artists and designers
free culture evangelists
an organization, KDE e.V.
local groups like KDE-NL
vendors like SuSE or Canonical
What is in the community in KDE? People – individual contributors mostly. But they are not just geeks, and the community has grown to embrace experts from other “denominations.” There is a lightweight organizational layer, the KDE eingetragener Verein (usually just called “the e.V.”) which handles finances, assets and legal issues. That is the formal face of KDE as a whole. Local groups are the less-formal organizations within a country that provide a local sense of community. KDE.in and KDE-NL are quite different! An integral part of the KDE community are the business partners. OS distributors and vendors bring our code to the public, and we cooperate with them in lots of ways. /7

5. Business deploy it integrate it develop with it sponsor it
Get into KDE ...
Business
deploy it
integrate it
develop with it
sponsor it
So you're a business, and you want to break into KDE. I can think of a few ways to do that – or reasons to want to do that. You want to deploy KDE (roll it out as your desktop of choice, like NiederSaksen). Talk to the OS vendors, or talk to the KDE e.V. to get a pointer to the vendors. You want to integrate it into your own product, using parts of the KDE technology in your own offerings. Mind the license! Talk directly to the community or with the e.V. Develop with it. It's a great development platform. Well documented, agile, leveraging the power and flexibility of Qt and its language bindings. Talk to the developer community for help. You may wish to sponsor KDE; we're open to suggestions; talk to the e.V. or NL. /7

6. Contributor join kde-quality look into junior jobs perform bug triage
Get into KDE ...
Contributor
join kde-quality
look into junior jobs
perform bug triage
add documentation
write new code
scratch your itch!
Individuals who wish to help out can do so in a lot of different ways; in the abstract for this talk I said that it can seem scary, so I'm going to tell you where to get some handholding and what a good way to start is. /7

7. KDE: open community, free software, powerful platform
Wrapping up ...
KDE: open community,
free software,
powerful platform
what have you done?
was it good for you too?
The two questions may be too informal for some conferences; the idea is to ask the audience what kind of interaction they have had with OSS communities and how that turned out.\ /7