Take it away I would like to immediately hand off our president Aleix is it working?
Yes, it looks green so yeah, thanks everyone for joining us today we will be
talking about what we've been up to,
we being the KTV board I hope everybody knows what the KTV is if you don't,
I think we're going to have a Q&A session later,
Or will we have a buff over during the week?
We will also have a buff. We will also have a buff. We're going to be amazing.
For starters, let's introduce ourselves. I'm going to start because I have the microphone.
My name is Aleix. I'm from Barcelona, living in Berlin. And I've been on the
KDP board for maybe eight years now.
And I'm the president right now.
Hello, I'm Lydia. I'm the vice president, live in Berlin, on the board for 10 or something years.
Hello, I'm Eike. I'm the treasurer on the board. I have been for the past seven
years, so I make sure we don't go broke, which we haven't yet, which is great.
I'm apparently Dr. Adrien de Groot. And I've been on the board also for six
years now and six years before then.
I'm Nick Graham. I boast none of those credentials. So I make up for it with
pluckiness and enthusiasm in my two years on the board.
So, well, just to mention, we have three-year mandates. dates and it happens
that this year there's no ending so it seems like there's not gonna be an election this AGM.
The AGM this year we're gonna have it detached from Academy like unlike we normally do.
This is a first time thing but not really first time because last year happened what happened.
But be mindful it's gonna be in a few weeks online.
First of all our new members we had seven new members much like,
last year and two years ago thank you very much for joining us Bart,
James, Emir Joshua, Julius Andre and Kisaragi and two pending two pending.
Adding to that, Academy tends to be the day when a lot of people join the KDEV
or maybe are suggested to become members. So use that opportunity if you can.
We don't just have members in KDEV. We also have supporting members,
people who support us financially.
We have a very sharp increase in supporting members in the last year.
You can see that going from 53 paying members to 719 is a big jump.
We refreshed our donation infrastructure. We have new ways to donate that have
gotten great feedback and I think are easier to use.
And we've also advertised them a lot to great effect. So that's fantastic.
The same is true for many other ways to donate to KDE via GitHub and via other forums.
We see an uptick there as well. So we are very happy with that.
Oh, still me. We are very happy that all our fantastic patrons are still with us.
These are our corporate supporting members, so organizations rather than individuals.
These are all a fantastic, loyal bunch.
Many of them have been with us for many years. Many of them also sponsor Academy.
We don't have any new ones to report this year. So if you are in touch with
any company that benefits from KDE or sees a value in what we do,
maybe talk to them about it.
And talking is what we do with the KDE EV advisory board. This includes our corporate sponsors.
It also includes friends and affiliated organizations, Blue Systems,
Canonical, City of Munich, well known for their Linux shenanigans.
The Debian Project, The Document Foundation, FOSS Nigeria, friends from way
back, the FSF and the FSFE, G10 Code, one of our sponsors.
Resource uh kubuntu focus we're always happy to see kde oriented hardware in
the room ambition open uk i can't say anything nice about ambition sorry um
open uk and the osi the cute group our,
grand parents i guess uh slimbook suza and tuxedo computers this forms our advisory
board we have regular quarterly calls with them to talk about what's on their
mind and what's on in our plans.
Other partners and affiliations that we have as KDEV, community partners, Lix, the Qt project.
So that's the open source angle there.
Verein Randa meetings, everyone remembers the Randa get togethers fondly.
And we hope to get them up and going again sometime in the future.
Sure. KDE Spain organizes, among other things, Academy España.
We're friends with GNOME over the Linux Application Summit, the Chaos Working Group.
And on the right-hand column, you can see the rest of our friends,
including the Document Foundation, Oasis, OAN, and the Open Source Initiative.
Moving on to our staff and contractors, people that work for us.
Aside from the community, there's the people that we employ to get things done.
First and foremost, Petra Gillert, who has been with us for a long time.
In the KDE ECO space, we have Joseph and fairly new Nicole, who's over there. Hi.
Yeah, we'll go through you in more detail. Anika and Paul, our goals have just been renewed.
We also have renewed our goals project coordinator, Farid Abdel-Nour,
will be taking over that role.
We have events via Dina.
We've also completed some projects. Ingo has completed the App Store support engineer role.
I should go back and mention Tiago as our documentation writer.
He's been mentioned in some of the talks this morning as well.
Natalie just gave a great hardware integration talk.
Jacob will be joining her in the hardware integration space.
Nicholas does stuff. And we had a brief stint with Kuntal Bar adding to the lab prod.
But for more details about all of these people.
All right, let's start with Petra. Petra is amazing and makes sure that we get
our stuff done by helping us maintain the office, taking care of accounting and paperwork.
That would drive us crazy. She's also making sure that you all get paid if you
want reimbursements and stuff.
Helping organize meetings and, yeah, generally helping us stay on top of things.
And then we have Dina, who is helping us put up events with all the amazing
volunteer organizers, both for Academy and the Linux App Summit.
And now Farid joined us.
Just as we are starting a new round of goals, Farid will be taking on the support
of all the gold champions and making sure that we talk about the goals and that
the gold champions have everything they need and that the goals are moving forward.
And he will also be looking into grants to support the goals more,
and then we have nicole and joseph who are here and they're doing amazing kde eco stuff,
joseph has put a ton of work into getting us a new grant so that we can now
have him and nicole work on the new project nachhaltige software für nachhaltige
hardware sustainable software for sustainable hardware.
And yeah, generally helping us rally people around hardware sustainability,
software sustainability, and how we can support all that.
And that is on to marketing. Yeah, on the subject of marketing,
we have Anika and Paul who are in the audience here.
They are fantastic marketing contractors who help us with promotion and organization
of promotional activities in a million and one ways.
They have been organizing lots of participation in events this year,
have personally attended and helped community members attend a whole bunch of events.
They also help to write the release announcements for Plasma and Gear,
and overall make sure that KDE is well represented in the minds of people in our community's orbit.
Bit and next moving on we've
got uh natalie for our hardware integrator and
soon to be jacob natalie has been with us for about a year and a half and she's
been doing great work on power management which is always very relevant to the
hardware integration story especially as so much of our software is distributed
on mobile devices these days um sold by some of our partner
vendors and Jacob is going to be joining her very soon with a,
um, a project with the framework laptop people.
Then, uh, Ingo was working with us up until, uh, February.
So starting this year, we'd been working together, uh, for a couple of years.
Um, maybe more, uh, we did a lot of work on making sure that applications can
get delivered on especially Android and Windows,
but also we did some work on other platforms like in Linux,
it was a lot of work in our GitLab infrastructure and making sure that,
well, craft things also work, which is the tool we use for implementing things on these platforms.
Then Nicolas has been, oh, hi.
We don't have a picture here, but the real thing is over there.
Uh, he's been helping us, um, lead on the Qt 6 port when we started, which was, um,
sometime last year without, okay, let's make sure that the sixness of things
happens in the best of, uh, conditions, and then we'll start looking into other, um, ventures.
Uh, we did some of QML tooling as well as, uh,
now he's starting to work on documentation which is i think going to be a super
project and i hope that you will all support him into making sure that it happens
because it's going to be needed it's going to be a big project but also it's
going to be having a huge impact.
On the documentation front, we've got Tiago Masato-Sueto. He's been with us
now for a little over two years.
He continues to write documentation and will be, of course, participating with
Nicholas in the documentation changeover.
Tiago writes all kinds of bits and pieces. He's improved the developer onboarding
documentation a great deal.
And he switches focus every couple of months. You can find him in the KDE development
channels and just poke him there if you need something documentation specific.
That wraps up our overview of contractors. So let's move on to talking about Academy itself.
It's great to see all of you here. It's great.
Well, we would have wanted everyone from the other room here as well,
but, you know, take what you can get.
It's great to have everyone here. A big thank you, especially to the Academy
team, to Promo, to the organizers for getting the word out and making sure that
people have a good time here.
If you're in the audience, you will also be thinking about next year,
and we'll soon be looking for a location for next year's Academy.
I'm going to talk a bit about non-academy things, the sprints.
We had a promo sprint in the fall of 2023 in Berlin.
There was a goals mega sprint to talk about the wrapping up of the KDE goals that was in summer.
And there's a reliable source of sprint information in the PIM team,
which gets together in Toulouse every year.
Nominally there's a list of uh of sprints that goes on on the community wiki um.
It uh could use some more entries so please think about what you would like
to sprint on next any group uh in kde can get together and uh sprint together
let's talk about trade shows Yeah.
So in past years, you've heard us talk very often about a return to travel.
I think the past year is the first one where we can now say we can retire the term post pandemic.
Many well-known events that KDE has for a long time attended are now back in
physical form, some in their second year.
And we've attended quite a lot of them thanks to many of our contributors who
had the interest to Manabu's,
thanks, of course, also to our promo contractors, and in particular the KD Network
effort that is also supported by them.
It's a good mix, both of well-known events and new things that we haven't been
to many times or even attended for the first time.
A particular highlight here perhaps is, and I think it's actually mentioned
on the next slide as well, I think it's worth even mentioning twice,
is that our India satellite event, conf.kde.in, is back for the first time in many years.
We're very happy that this happened again.
Right, so again, super happy about conf.kde.in, but of course also that we're
back here at Academy, as Ade also said, and also that Academy Spain happened as well.
Linux App Summit is still coming
up this year. That is going to be another highlight in the calendar.
And of course, this was also the year where we released Plasma 6 and we had
many release parties all over the globe, including a very lovely one in Berlin
that I attended along with Lydia and others.
And we had a good time there and met many users. And that was, I think, very welcome.
Usually we go to developer events. It's very nice to also meet some users who
just enjoy using your software. So that was really great.
Fundraising. So I mentioned we had a significant uptick across many of our donation channels.
This is.
Partially, especially as it concerns the supporting membership,
because we finally retired CiviCRM.
This is a software platform that we tried to use for many years.
Somebody could write a book about it. We've burned every contractor that exists in that market.
It never quite worked. We switched to DonorBox.
This is certainly not free software, but it does work very well.
UX turns out to make a difference.
Reception by donors has been fantastic. So the great thing is that we did this
in time for the Plasma 6 release,
which of course was a big attention grabber and a good reason to run also fundraising campaigns.
But it looks like the resulting supporting memberships are quite sticky.
People are keeping their recurring plan going and they They keep donating, which is great.
Patrons, again, no changes.
Another income source that we have is grants, something that we've mentioned
we want to do more of in the past.
This year, we're very happy that Joseph and Nicole have been successful in getting
a follow-up grant to our Blower Angle project.
The new one is called Sustainable Software for Sustainable Hardware.
And Billy continues on where the previous one left off.
So it's fantastic that we have continuity there and we're very happy with that.
We also supported through a contractor in Guglielm that project of getting more
KDE applications into proprietary app stores as another income source.
This project has been completed successfully. The first applications are now available.
And it is now really up to our KDE application developers to start making more
use of this infrastructure and start engaging with that audience.
And then this in the future was also then a funding source that we expect to grow.
And if you want to read an amazing report that our promo team has put together
about all the activities of the ev then you can find that on the ev website,
very well very worth reading,
all right that brings us to individual projects funding as some of you might remember we've been
putting uh quite some effort
into figuring out okay how can we help individual projects more
um in funding for
specific uh initiatives for example around their projects
um and where we are with this right now is
that kid in life is the only uh project
still that is a part of this um and we have uh gotten quite some money for this
but we are still figuring out how to now actually spent that money together
with KDE Live because that's what this money was fundraised for, right?
And in general, if other projects are interested in exploring this more,
we're open to adding more programs to this.
Come talk to us and we can see if that's a fit at this point.
Another major KDE topic is always the KDE goals.
We just concluded a round of goals and voted on another one.
Some of you may have been in the session just before lunch.
A couple of us who were goals champions talked about our goals,
wrapping everything up, and mentioned some of the things that were challenging for us.
Some things worked a little bit better than others. And so that feedback has
been taken into account for the latest round of goals.
And as such, we're making a couple of changes to try to adapt to those pieces of feedback.
We're going to try for each goal to be run by a team instead of individual champions.
Hopefully this will reduce the amount of work on any one individual person and
make it possible for people to have breaks and avoid burnout.
We're going to be doing more aggressive outreach for the community,
helping to get the word out for these goals, and we're also going to be,
through our new goals coordinator,
seeking external sources of funding in the form of relevant grants for the goals
in the hope that these new monies will be able to be put towards actual work
and development relevant to the goals.
Uh, the goals were just one of the really cool things that happened. There were many others.
Uh, some of us have put our highlights on this page here. Some of the things
we're particularly proud of.
Uh, one of the ones that personally I'm the most happy about is one of the things
that I could just mention, which is we did an incredible fundraiser that was
super duper crazy successful.
We went from, I believe, 51 supporting members to like 750.
It's a factor of like 13 is huge, huge, huge improvement.
So it shows that there's a lot of low-hanging fruit there in terms of fundraising,
and people are very willing to give to our organization.
A lot of that came from Plasma 6, which there was a lot of release activity around.
We released Plasma 6. It was a very successful major release.
After nearly 10 years of Plasma 5, we moved to 6 in a largely drama-free way.
We're about to be releasing Plasma 6.2 in a little over a month.
And so far, the reaction to this has has been super duper positive.
As I discussed when you voted on the new goals, three have been chosen.
They're really great. I'm very happy about those new goals. I hope all of you
are excited about them as well, because we're going to be hearing a lot about them.
And finally, another highlight is that we got another KDE Eco Grant.
This now marks the second one we've got, which shows that our organization is
really building trust in that space.
And as Cornelius mentioned in the previous session, we're now becoming known
as an organization that's active and trustworthy in the eco and sustainability spaces.
Moving on, here are some of the things that we talked about last year that we
said that we were going to do.
We want to do better support the KDE Goals program.
As I mentioned just a moment ago, we have revamped the program.
We've decided to change around a few things, hopefully to offer more support to Goals champions.
We have contracted with Fareed to take over the organization of the process,
and he's doing great work to help support the new champions.
So we have very high hopes for the Katie Eagles process moving forward.
Then after that, we've got our new financial situation, which is something that
was a little bit aspirational last year.
We were hoping that DonorBox and this fundraising campaign would bear fruit,
and it certainly has borne fruit.
Our supporting member donations have
increased from 2022 to 2023 in total
by over 60,000 euros this is fantastic we're going
to be putting this to good use to do more activities that are highly relevant
to the community and finally as I could just mention we're in firmly post-pandemic
territory we wanted to organize more events we are here for academy of course
LAS is next month and I hope to see some of you there.
I'm actually going to attend this year.
Hiding from that one. So I want to see a bunch more of you as well.
And then there are all of those other events that we mentioned,
conferences and trade shows. So KDE is really showing up in a lot of places.
Finally, over here, we have the Make a Living program, which is where we put
all of this fundraised money to good use by employing people,
largely existing members of the KDE community, but some outsiders who are brought
in and then made insiders.
And we definitely wanted to put
that money towards that use so that we're reinvesting in our community.
And then finally, the fifth thing was that we wanted to get our products closer
to users. This is a work in progress.
We discussed already making it more possible to acquire our apps in various
app stores, which is where people tend to want to find them these days.
There are also partnerships with hardware vendors and distro partnerships.
And in general, We've been thinking a lot about the topic of how to make it
more possible for KDE to have direct relationships with our users.
It's been a very big topic in the recent past, and we expect that to be true going forward as well.
Now for the next year, I wouldn't expect something like super deviating from what we did this year.
But obviously it's an iteration, like we still need to support our new goals.
They were announced today. They're amazing, but we need to work together,
which means we need to work together as a community member, but also as an EV.
Actually, something that was a reason for the goals to be, to exist in the first
place was like, how does the EV and the EV board specifically,
like know how to like spend money within the community and the goals is a clear way.
Like we have a mandate there that it's something that we care from as a community
and it should be actionable.
The financial situation remains a topic.
You will have seen that on the yearly report, we had some fancy red numbers.
On the other hand, we have the increase in donations.
This is something that we need to understand and navigate.
We will go a little bit about that later today. And then also coming together, it remains important.
Academy LAS should also happen next year.
By the way, like we said, If you want to organize Academy or LIS,
say so, and we'll help you.
Also, Sprint, they have diminished considerably since pandemic correlation or
causation. It has been clearly a thing.
Some people who are newer in the community were telling me yesterday,
we don't really understand why they're not happening. And I would have liked to go more of that.
So if you think that this is a problem you've identified, reach out to us.
Like we do have funds and actually if we think that you care we will also like push it more right.
Um on make a living it continues to be a thing but uh making make a living thing
also was considered like um,
also a test and a start to like
hire people to work on on the product and
on on the community which is something that we hadn't done before and
at the moment we're at the point that like this initial push for it uh is somewhat
over we should start thinking we think which things work which things didn't
and actually how do we establish that right like uh when how do we decide that
to take on a new project, how do we decide to stop a project?
These are things that need to be established so that also you can say,
I would like to work on this or I would like to see this worked on.
How do we do that properly?
And on the same lines as Nate was discussing earlier, we brought down that getting
closer to our users into these two big topics on the when it comes to hardware.
I think that we need to like have this direct communication with the community
to see how that story needs to look like at the moment as KDV and KDV board.
I mean, we're obviously like very related to the community and we know the answers,
right? But I think that we need to polish a lot more.
How do we, KD, want to be present in this kind of deployment?
And probably right now is a very good moment to have this kind of consideration,
both because, like, well, our ecosystem at the technical level is at a moving moment.
And but also because, like, at the moment, we have all of the contacts and we
need to make sure that we are also delivering to them something that we're proud of.
And when it comes to the app stores, we have the one on Windows and Android.
I think that we should do more. We should see that everything is in place to make it happen.
But we do think that it would be interesting if this could become one of the
sources of income and of engagement of people from outside of our direct community.
Like we're very close to the Linux community itself.
There's a lot more world than that. And I think that, or we think that if we
can be part of it, it would be very interesting.
And furthermore, when it comes to Linux itself, we have been working with Flathub
to see if payments can be a thing there and also be part of this story.
It hasn't happened yet, but we're hoping that it will be a thing soon.
So these are the key topics that we are suggesting for next year.
We'll do our best to make sure that they happen. happen, reach out to us about
any topics that you might want to talk to us about.
We're all very nice people, or at least most of us, and find us on the hallways, on the chat rooms.
We will have a buff, like we said earlier on Tuesday.
So come over and we talk about any EV stuff.
And maybe now we have some time for questions. I don't know. Do we have time?
10 minutes.
Yeah let's do questions does anyone want to say something.
Please raise your question in the form of a question,
don't tell me what to do so no like we had now some successful grant processes
and I recall that in years past it wasn't the case.
Did we collect learnings from that for the future?
I think that the main learning I've had from the grant processes that grants themselves
are a lot of work and we need
to be very convinced for them to pay off uh but
they do and when we are convinced and
when it works uh like we're happy but
when we also try to do them how fast then everybody
gets frustrated and it's a waste of time so like
saying as blanket we should be doing
more grants is something that we should be aware very off
but it's obviously a good opportunity for for ktv
and for katie for evs in general i imagine to
to do these kind of things because that can be a good way to fund what needs
to happen and i think um one lesson that i learned about the grants process
which in hindsight is maybe obvious is that um.
Grants are not a way to earn money that you put into your coffers, right?
Ideally, they break even. You get money for a certain purpose and you follow
through on that purpose.
That means that for a grant pitch to be successful and for the project to run
successfully, as a community, we need to be really convinced we want to do that.
The support has to be there.
The people executing on the work, they have to be there. or we have to be able to contract them.
So KDE Eco, I think, is a fantastic success story that's really a feather in
our crown, right? It's something that otherwise we wouldn't have done.
But it's also something that we've invested into. So if you just look at the
financial numbers, we've put in a little bit more money than we've gotten out,
especially because we had the gap between the two grants, right?
And as long as we're totally convinced that it's worth doing and fits to our
mission, then that makes perfect sense.
So I think the grant proposals, they fail when we strain to apply for a grant,
but there's no true community activity or interest sort of backing that, then it's bound to fail.
But if there is enthusiasm and opportunity and they come together plus enough
time, then it can work out really well.
Yeah. And I would add to it, honestly, it's not just enthusiasm, right?
For the first grant, Cornelius put in a ton of time. For the second grant,
Joseph did the same thing.
Like without their work, we would not have these grants because it requires
so much time and effort that the board cannot do this.
And um in the in
both of these grants um we also specifically added um personnel resources to
handle the administrative part of that uh still some of it ends up on pinterest
desks and so on so that is a lot of work and enthusiasm isn't enough to make that,
magically happen right like it takes like work and i'm very grateful to both
corneas and and Joseph, that they have put in that network.
More questions.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You mentioned there's one app on the App Store that is paid,
that is available for payment,
which one it is, and could we make more available? Do you have any candidates?
So I recently asked Lej the very same question, and now I can relate his answer.
So I understand, right, the pilot app on the store that you can pay for is NeoChat.
Yeah. The rest of it, you're much more qualified to answer than I am.
So I think the second part was how do we get more apps on there as an app developer?
So we've been having the conversation about which are the others.
And obviously, one of our problems is that we're all using Linux,
like the population of Windows users in our community is fairly scarce.
And even like Like when people use Linux at work and stuff, when they do kiddie
things, they want to do Linux things.
But we do have some applications with good adoption. Ocular comes to mind.
Like it has several thousand users.
Like we can have this discussion about like, do we put it, do we put it now?
Do we want to like do any extra assessment of whether it's a good idea?
Like some of the people of the community has also mentioned,
like, why don't you just put them all at, like, five euros and see what happens?
Something we could do. Like, in practice, I think that if KDE,
as a free software organization, puts effort on Windows, needs to be paid for in the end.
And also, like, if you use Windows and really don't want to pay an EV for the
software you're getting, you can always get installables elsewhere.
But it's still a good idea that we do the effort.
But I would really prefer if it's the developers, the maintainers of each project
that says, I'm going to take on this platform and make sure that it's working reasonably well.
Because it's not really in our realm of expertise or even the kind of things
we can do to figure out what happens in color paint on Android, right?
Like, sure. So we cannot go all blanket on every platform.
We could consider sponsoring more work, much like Ingo did, if this was something that is necessary.
But this is something that we need to discuss and sit down and figure out properly how to do.
If someone wants their app to be on the Windows Store, what do they do?
Well they they they can reach out to
us they can reach out to uh the different people
who are maintaining the different platforms like for
example on android android is another one that we could explore more that way
like you don't even need to ask me right uh but reach out to me and we will
figure it out or whatever else that's gonna be fine yeah two minutes you have one last
question or two very quick ones.
And you mentioned the new supporting members, which is fantastic that there are so many now.
My question is, the supporting members are actually members of KDEV.
We don't want to treat them as a recurring source of money, but actually as part of the community.
Have you thought about how to engage them?
I mean, we probably would have room for 700 people here, but it would have been
nice to have at least some of them more here.
Yeah, so they get quarterly newsletters, thanks to Annika preparing them,
with news about what's happening around KDE.
By the way, we need some help with that. If people are good with newsletter
setups, please come talk to me.
And they are invited to the AGM if people have more ideas how we can engage them even more please,
talk to me and we can figure it out,
and there was another question nine,
here Here.
If there's not enough time for an answer, that's a pity.
But you mentioned several projects that were funded where the KDE EV was active.
But as I will show in the talk tomorrow, there are also several projects that
were funded on KDE, which were developers themselves asking for funding.
And I think that's something.
So I think maybe the EV could also encourage people to, you know,
just you can also apply yourself.
And then the EV doesn't have the burden of employing people.
Depends on the project, of course. What's the best choice? We totally recommend
everybody to go talk to yours and do their KD project with them.
It's going to be amazing.
Obviously, we cannot report on things that hasn't been done by the KDP because
this is the KDP board report.
Thanks, everyone, for joining. Yeah, thanks for coming, guys.
So coming up next in this room in about five minutes is a report of the working groups. I'm going to...