Send your talks for Akademy NOW!

Akademy 2026 (the annual world summit for KDE) is happening in Graz. Austria, Saturday 19th – Thursday 24th September. 

First of all, if you're reading this and thinking, "Should i go to Akademy?" 


The answer is [most probably] YES! Akademy has something for everyone, be it coders, translators, promoters, designers, enthusiasts, etc.


Now, with this out of the way, go and register at https://akademy.kde.org/2026/register/

 

After you have registered, you think which interesting talks will we have on the weekend?

 

And you know who has something to say? *YOU*


Yes, *YOU*. I'm sure you've been working on something interesting, or have a great idea to share.


*YOU* may think that your idea is not that great or the things you work on are not interesting, but that's seldomly the case when someone explains me their "boring" thing they've been working on, i always think "Wow that's great".


Ok, so now that I've convinced you to send a talk proposal, when better than *TODAY* to send it?


Yes I know the Call for Participation is open until the 17 of May, but by sending it today you make sure you don't forget sending it later and also [more important for me] you help those of us in the Program Committee not to worry when the final date starts approaching and we don't have lots of talks yet because you all prefer sending talks on the very last minute.


So stop reading and send your talk today ;-) 

Send your talks for Akademy NOW!

Akademy 2024 (the annual world summit for KDE) is happening in Würzburg, Saturday 7th – Thursday 12th September. (I hope you knew that)

First of all, if you're reading this and thinking, "Should i go to Akademy?" 

The answer is [most probably] YES! Akademy has something for everyone, be it coders, translators, promoters, designers, enthusiasts, etc.

Now, with this out of the way, one of the many things that makes Akademy is the talks on the weekend, and you know who has something to say? *YOU*

Yes, *YOU*. I'm sure you've been working on something interesting, or have a great idea to share.

*YOU* may think that your idea is not that great or the things you work on are not interesting, but that's seldomly the case when someone explains me their "boring" thing they've been working on, i always think "Wow that's great".

Ok, so now that I've convinced you to send a talk proposal, when better than *TODAY* to send it?

Yes I know the Call for Participation is open until the 24 of May, but by sending it today you make sure you don't forget sending it later and also [more important for me] you help those of us in the Program Committee not to worry when the final date starts approaching and we don't have lots of talks yet because you all prefer sending talks on the very last minute.

So stop reading and send your talk today ;-)

Akademy 2022 Call for Participation is open

The Call for Participation for Akademy is officially opened!

...and closes relatively shortly! Sunday the 12th of June 2022

You can find more information and summit your talk abstract here: https://akademy.kde.org/2022/cfp

If you have any questions or would like to speak to the organizers, please contact akademy-team@kde.org

Submit your talks now for Akademy 2021!

As you can see in https://akademy.kde.org/2021/cfp the Call for Participation for Akademy 2021 (that will take place online from Friday the 18th to Friday the 25th of June) is already open.

 

You have until Sunday the 2nd of May 2021 23:59 UTC to submit your proposals but you will make our (talks committee) live much easier if you start sending the proposals *now* and not send them all last minute in 2 weeks ;)

I promise i'll buy you a $preferred_beverage$ for next years Akademy (which we're hoping will happen live) if you send a talk before end of this week (and you send me a mail about it)

Book your BoF for Akademy 2020 now!

BoF sessions are an integral part of Akademy, it's the "let's discuss and plan how to make things happen" oriented part after the more "this is what we've done" oriented part of the talks.

So go to https://community.kde.org/Akademy/2020/AllBoF and book a session to discuss with the rest of the community about something you're passionate! :)

Send your talks for Akademy 2020 *now*

The Call for Participation is still open for two weeks more, but please make us a favour and send yours *now*.

This way we don't have to panic thinking if we are going to need to go chasing people or not, or if we're going to have too few or too many proposals.

Also if you ask the talks committee for review, we can review your talk early, give you feedback and improve it, so it's a win-win.

So head over to https://akademy.kde.org/2020/cfp, find the submit link in the middle of that wall of text and click it ;)

Akademy Guest Post: Some thoughts regarding discussion culture

First of all I want to say thanks for hosting me on your blog and letting me write this guest post!

I am Florian Müller from Germany, working as a Sysadmin at a small tech collective. I have been a KDE user for years, but I am quite new to the KDE community. This years Akademy was my first and I am looking forward to dive in deeper and contribute more to KDE.

I had a really good time at Akademy in Milano, got to know so many cool people and learned a lot about the KDE community and KDE in general. Thanks a lot to everyone organizing this unique event! I am sure it won't be the last time I'll attend Akademy.

I want to share some things I noticed about discussion culture, please feel free to criticize/discuss/comment, so maybe we can work out some guidelines for that in the future.
First of all some words about discussion culture in general. Because all people are different, we need technics to allow everyone to participate in group discussions. When people are not that confident in general, they tend to not raise their voices in bigger groups, also if they have opponent opinions to the main stream. So in order to have a greater culmination of creativity and ideas, we need to create an atmosphere to make it easier for everyone to participate.

One thing would be the setup of the room the discussion will be held in. Do you want to have a central speaker in the front leading the discussion or do you want to setup the chairs and tables in a circle so everyone is on the same level. Sometimes there are mostly lecture halls available, so time to plan in advance and ask for a different room has to be taken in accountance. The advantage of a circle is that everybody is able to see everyone else. We can also think about forming smaller discussion groups when possible and a topic can be split up into smaller parts.

Another point you can think about is how you organize the turn keeping. One could appoint a person who only deals with turn keeping. We could alternate the job of turn keeping from one discussion to the next. At the beginning of the discussion we should make it transparent on how turn keeping will work. For example we could have a rule that people who want to say something the first time, move to the top of the speakers list to make sure that rare voices will be heard. We could also have a speakers list alternated by gender. There could be a maximum time for speakers so that single people don’t dominate the whole discussion by simply talking others out.

There are many other aspect we can think about when we want to make group discussions more inclusive. With this post, I just wanted to get the discussion started, so we can improve on that in the future.

Here are some links to continue reading:

https://www.workingdigital.de/en/blog/post/respectful-culture-of-discussion
https://www.wikihow.com/Be-Good-at-Group-Discussion

You can reach me directly at mail@flo-mue.de.

Akademy 2019

It's 10 days already since Akademy 2019 finished and I'm already missing it :/

Akademy is a week-long action-packed conference, talks, BoFs, daytrip, dinner with old and new friends, it's all a great combination and shows how amazing KDE (yes, the community, that's our name) is.

On the talks side i missed some that i wanted to attend because i had to extend my time at the registration booth helping fellow KDE people that had forgotten to register (yes, our setup could be a bit easier, doesn't help that you have to register for talks, for travel support and for the actual conference in three different places), but I am not complaining, you get to interact with lots of people in the registration desk, it's a good way to meet people you may not have met otherwise, so please make sure you volunteer next year ;)

One of the talks i want to highlight is Dan Vrátil's talk about C++, I agree with him that we could do much better in making our APIs more expressive using the power of "modern" C++ (when do we stop it calling modern?). It's a pity that the slides are not up so you'll have to live with Kévin Ottens sketch of it for now.



My talk was sadly not very well attended since i was sharing time with the more interesting talk by Marco and Bhushan about Plasma in embedded devices (i would have gone there if it wasn't because i had a talk) so if you're interested in fuzzing please read my slides and give me a shout if you want to volunteer to help us fuzz all the things!

On the BoFs side one of the hardest but most interesting we had was the one about KDE Applications (the N things we release monthly in one go) vs KDE applications (all applications made by us), and i think we may be on the right track there, there's a plan, needs finishing out, but I'm confident it may actually work :)

One of the things that shows how amazing this conference is and how many interesting things are happening is the fact that i made a small list of bugs i wanted to work on if i ever got bored of the talks or the BoFs, i don't think i even started on any of them ^_^

Akademy 2020

Akademy is a core event for KDE and we need to find people to help us organising it every year. If you think you can help, please have a look at the call for hosts document.

Thanks

I would like to thank the UnixMiB friends for hosting us, i know it's lots of work and i hope you know we all very much appreciate the effort you put in.

I would like to thank the Akademy-team on KDE's side too, you are amazing and pull out great work year after year, keep it up!

I would like to thank the KDE e.V. for partially sponsoring my attendance to Akademy, please donate to KDE if you think the work done at Akademy is important.

Order your Akademy t-shirt *NOW*

If you want an Akademy 2019 t-shirt you have until Monday 12th Aug at 1100CEST (i.e. in 2 days and a bit) to order it.

Head over to https://akademy.kde.org/2019/akademy-2019-t-shirt and get yourself one of the exclusive t-shirts with Jen's awesome design :)

I'm going to Akademy!

And you should too!

Akademy is free to attend however you need to register to reserve your space, so head to https://akademy.kde.org/2019/register and press the buttons.

Akademy is very important to meet people, discuss future plans, learn about new stuff and make friends for life!

Note this year the recommended accomodations are a bit on the expensive side, so you may want to hurry and apply for Travel support. The last round is open until July 1st.

Akademy 2018 hotel and flight booked!

I just booked my flights and hotel for Akademy 2018.

If you're planning to come you should too! [1]

You can find information about the recommended accommodation here.

See you in Viena!

[1] unless you're applying for sponsored travel+accommodation

Akademy 2018 site visit

Last week I was part of the expedition by KDE (together with Kenny and Petra) to visit the local team that is helping us organize Akademy 2018 in Vienna.

I can say that I'm very happy :)

The accommodation that we're probably going to recommend is 15 minutes away by train from the airport, 20 minutes on foot from the Venue (10 on metro) so kind of convenient.

The Venue is modern and centrally located in Vienna (no more "if you miss the bus you're stranded")

Vienna itself seems to be also a nice city for late evening sight-seeing (or beers :D)

Hopefully "soon" we will have confirmation of the dates and we'll be able to publish them :)

Akademy 2017 Call for Papers deadline is in a week!

The Akademy 2017 Call for Papers ends April 10th at 23:59:59 CEST.

Surely you have interesting stuff to share with the community, so go to https://akademy.kde.org/2017/cfp and submit a proposal!

Akademy 2016 travel support

If you want to attend Akademy 2016 but are a bit short on money, that is no excuse :)

Read https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2016q2/002758.html for more info on how the KDE e.V. can help you!

Akademy 2015 and Akademy-es 2015 recap

I'm back home after more than a week of talks and hacking in the beautiful city of A Coruña.

There I attended Akademy, the international conference of the KDE Community, and Akademy-es, it's Spanish counterpart.

First off I'd like to thank the local organization, GPUL, that as always has done an amazing job in hosting us, repeating the success of Guademy, Akademy-es 2008, KDE-EDu sprint, etc.

Also kudos to the Scottish-Kenny duo, top notch organizing work as always.

Finally thanks to the both Akademy and Akademy-es sponsors. Specially Qindel, that sponsored us for the first time, hope we can continue the relationship in the future.

The talks this year were specially interesting, I attended some good BoFs on releasing and translation infrastructure, hopefully some improvements coming your way soon :)

Of course not everything is perfect and my biggest pain point this year was that we did not have as much people in Akademy-es as we expected. Akademy-es happened the 2 days before Akademy and this meant that lots of local people from the organization team were helping set up the place instead of attending the talks; also on Friday some of us (I count at least 8) were attending the KDE e.V. General Assembly so couldn't attend Akademy-es either. Definitely something to think about and improve next time Akademy and Akademy-es happen at the same place.

But all in all pretty positive experience as always, nice to meet so many KDE people :)

Submit your talk to Akademy 2015!

The Call for Papers deadline for Akademy 2015 is just 10 days away. So you should submit a talk now, you know you have cool stuff to share, so do a small write up and tell the world that awesome new stuff you're working on.

And of course don't forget to register as always it's free but let's us know how many of you nice people are going to come over ;)

Ah and we also have the badges available, thanks to Alba Carro for the nice pictures :)

Akademy 2014 needs *you*

Akademy 2014 is just 3 weeks away.

If you haven't registered, you should register now, but since probably you are registered already, the next step is thinking if you want to be a volunteer.

Every big event needs volunteers: infodesk people, session chairs, video operators, etc.

If you want to make Akademy 2014 a success please go over to https://community.kde.org/Akademy/2014/Volunteers and sign yourself up!

I'm going to Bilbao!

I will be in Bilbao from July 11th to 19th. I am going to be attending lots of different events


The first of the events is the Akademy-es, Akademy little sister that we've been celebrating since 2006, this year we have modified of usual schedule of making it happen in a weekend to accommodate for Akademy schedule, so it will run from Thursday to Friday. In Akademy-es I'll be talking of how Qt5 and KDE projects fit together and also about QML, QtQuick and the other declarative-y things you can find in Qt world.


Obviously I'll also be at Akademy, I've been attending each year since 2005 so I couldn't miss it :-) I'm looking forward to lots of the talks there, but specially the keynote by Kevin Ottens :-) I will be running for a position in the KDE e.V. board as announced in the kde-community mailing list a few weeks ago, wish me luck!

Qt Contributor Summit
On Monday and Tuesday we will have the Qt Contributor Summit running in parallel with Akademy. I will be there with my Canonical-hat making sure everything QML-y we need for the Ubuntu software we are writing in Qt is fine and dandy :-)


And incidentally from Thursday to Saturday there's Green Day, Depenche Mode, Kings of Leon, Biffy Clyro and a lot more of bands playing in Bilbao, so I could not miss them!

Rock on Bilbao!

Berlin

I'm also doing a Lightning Talk about Poppler :-)

I like shiny images too

Though unfortunately not all week :-/