JLP’s Blog

During the breakfast I’ve heard the news that there could have been a terrorist attack at the Glasgow airport. Someone crashed into terminals or something like that. As far as I know nobody got hurt and there were only flights canceled for the day.

Today the most interesting talks started with Tudor Groza, who presented concept of semantic desktop and how it is coming into KDE. We found out that the next version of Mandriva Linux should already integrate some parts of it. Later on Olaf and Gunnar Schmidt had a very interesting talk about accessibility, something that is too often overlooked when developing software. Accessibility is also one of the hot topics in governments, so it is very important that KDE provides the best experience for people with disabilities. The next talk on the programme was from Jim Zemlin of Linux Foundation, who told us what the organisation does and into which direction Linux is going. During his talk we got the good news that the internet id finally working. In the following talk Sander Koning provided us with some tips on writing documentation so that it is useful to the users. It’s harder than it looks at first. Towards the end of the day Claire Lotion revealed to us that there is a lot of money available from European Union which can be used for research in informatics and computer related fields. KDE already has some projects which would be good candidates to apply for this money, but currently there is no framework in place at KDE to better utilise the available resources. Claire has started the work to improve the situation.

At the end of the contributors conference there was the 3rd aKademy Award Ceremony. Award for the best application went into the hands of Sebastian Trueg for K3b. Danny Allen received award for his great work on weekly KDE Commit Digest. Congrats to both!

Tags: kde, akademy, akademy 2007, community, conference, meeting, desktop, free software, open source, glasgow, scotland