Which is the report from the working groups, of which there are several in multitude. So, Aleix.
Yep.
So kind of by omission, I ended up doing this slide deck talking about the advisory board.
We called it a working group because it fit nicely on our organization,
but it's not like, yeah, there's a whole group working on it.
It's been mostly Anika. So if Anika is here, Thank you very much for helping us there.
So let's see what we've been doing. So the advisory board, what we do is we
have a number of organizations that are part of it. Some of them are patrons.
It's one of the perks you get as a patron to be part of this advisory board.
And we have some other sister organizations.
We went through them before. And the idea is to keep them up to date with the
different things that we can do.
With the idea of, let's see if we can collaborate at any level.
So we've been having meetings every four to six months.
We had one in October, for example. We were talking about the events,
the things that were happening in KDE.
Another one in April. April was after the sixth release, right?
So we were talking about how it all happened.
Some of the people on the advisory board are from the distro,
So they were talking about how they were adopting it and so on and so forth, et cetera.
We also had updates from Kiriaco. Something we do, for example,
is when there's something interesting happening in our project,
then we'll invite somebody.
We had Joseph this year. We had Kai at some point also and talked about what they were working on.
So the different partners are also aware of these things happening.
Like, this is very important, right, because otherwise, like,
it's very hard for all of these organizations to follow what we do,
but it's a good way to, like, put that forward, and if they have something to latch on, then we can do.
We had another one in July, we talked about Krita, we talked about the different conferences.
Kai Uwe, for example, he joined and talked about the amazing things we were
doing in Plasma 6. At this point, it was already all released and ready, right?
And we're going to have another one in a few weeks.
And yeah, thank you very much, Anika, for putting that together.
How can you help? One thing that we do as advisory board besides these meetings
is we assign each of these partners
with a person from the KDE who is knowledgeable about everything we do.
The idea is that these organizations don't need to reach out to the board or
something like that whenever they have some kind of question or doubt or idea.
So if you are their partner, you can say, have regular conversations with them
if you're familiar with what they do, et cetera.
And if you know an organization that should be part of the board,
then convince them, tell us, and we can see to it.
For next year, the idea is to continue doing more or less the same things,
to continue meeting, make sure that things that we discuss matter to them.
Like it's especially interesting and important in this
kind of meetings to make sure that they care about what we're talking
about so that they like
keep continuing during the meetings because obviously it's a
good opportunity for all of us so yeah and yeah
you can reach out to us you can reach out to the board about different
topics the advisory board contacts KD.org mailing
list this one is for the KD side of things so if
you have an idea and you want to discuss it with the advisory board but obviously
only our people you can do it over there um do so don't hesitate now the community
working group who is going to do that presentation are you from the community working group.
Yes, like I say, I'm the community working group today anyway.
So the community working group takes care of KDE's community members,
enables the KDE community to work effectively and efficiently by helping community
members maintain healthy interactions and resolving conflicts.
We have two new active members this year.
Kai Potter, who is from Australia. He's not here probably because he's very far away. Me.
We have two existing members, Andy Betts. I haven't seen him here yet,
but I think he's going to be here.
And Neofitos. He's right there.
David Edmondson stepped down. He was here last year.
Year. Some of our work in the past year was we created internal guidelines for
reaching out to people on Matrix.
We received a total of 41 requests since AGM 2023, which is 10 times more than the previous year.
37 of those were complaints. Five community members had had more than one complaint.
One was a bogus complaint from someone outside of our community against a community
member, and we unbanned one community member.
We are one person shy of a full community working group.
Having another member would enable us to respond and work on our goals more quickly.
It's the kind of work that a lot of of people don't really want
to do but kind of needs to get done um some
of our goals and plans for the coming year are to standardize the onboarding
process for new cwg members it was a bit chaotic being having like two new members
with like not a lot of you know senior people,
um define requirements for uh joining the cwg mainly just like you know make
sure you don't have someone insane on the board or something or on the on the working group,
uh define guidelines for moving community members if they do something like really bad or something.
Define a policy for giving updates for requests, so when people send a request
we have to say oh, this is the situation.
Promote the CWG within KDE so people know about it.
Chain the mailing list to avoid confusion with community at KDE.org.
We had someone make that mistake and make a public complaint.
All right.
And if you want to talk to us, you
can send us an email address at that suspiciously similar email address.
Or talk to us during Academy.
And that's not my report there.
All right, let's see. Okay, the financial working group.
So the financial working group exists to assist KDEV in its financial matters.
It acts as a sounding board for the board and the treasurer in particular.
We review important documents. Sometimes we write them, including this report
or, for example, the financial information that is published in KDEV's annual report.
We also do some software development. We develop the web-based dashboard application
that KDEV uses to track its finances.
The current members of the Financial Working Group are myself as the treasurer
of KDEV, who is always included in the Financial Working Group,
as well as Marta, who was the previous treasurer of KDEV.
And it's really great that she's still around and we have a lot of continuity
when it comes to the financial side of the organization, as well as Till,
who, of course, has also been involved with KDEV for many decades.
And is very experienced in business and financial matters.
Looking back at the past year, and you fortunately hear me say this often or
others who speak to you in this occasion, it's been a stable year with no major negative surprises.
Sometimes we also say uneventful. And what we mean with that is that nothing
happened that we were not able to predict, at least nothing that put any undue
strain on the organization.
This is very important given our current financial operational strategy,
which is that we intentionally operate at a deficit.
We outspend our income because we have very high financial reserves from past
donations that under non-profit law we are not allowed to keep.
So that means that we are intentionally outspending and we want to of course
track this very, very well so that we don't accidentally end up with a burn
rate that becomes unsustainable.
So it is great to hear maybe that our income in the past year was just within
500 euro of our projection.
For the second year in a row, it was very close to the prediction.
That means that we have a really good handle.
On that side of our finances, we know what will happen.
Our expenses tend to be below what we actually put into our budget plan because
we budget plan with sort of a high watermark approach.
We assume that allocated money will be spent completely, even though particular
projects might not actually manage to do this. So we prepare for the worst.
And then we have sort of a min and a max there.
And again, our expenses were entirely within the range of our expectations.
Even though they did not actually hit that high watermark.
We mentioned already in the board report that fundraising has been going great,
particularly our supporting membership program.
Our income increased significantly due to that.
So did our expenses. Again, as planned, they are mainly personnel expenses where
we have many tuning screws due to the way that we contract.
If things should one day not work out, we can scale there fairly easily.
Easily, of course, we don't want to do that, but we can.
The reason this keeps climbing is that we are traveling again,
but also many positions that we've created in past years have now for the first
time been filled for an entire year.
So, of course, those expenses accumulate.
Academy 2023 set a new sponsorship record by some margin. It was really great.
Thanks so much to the sponsors of last year's conference.
That said, organizing it was also very expensive.
So it was largely offset.
This is a big change from Academy in the past when we used to use Academy as
a source of income. We used to make quite a bit of money with the conference.
Now our goal is mostly to break even.
You could say open source or free software, we are now so established that nobody
gives us stuff for free anymore, which used to be more the case with Academy.
But these days, for example, venue costs are much higher.
As you can see, broadly speaking, our income is growing year by year.
This reflects the overall growth of the organization and also its sort of activity profile.
As you know, we have many contractors now that we didn't have in the past.
They have more things to fund and fortunately our income trajectory is generally going well.
The same on the expenses side, obviously with more activities,
things are expensive, contractors are expensive.
So that is also going up.
You can see here the ratio between income and expenses.
You can see here the strategy that I talked about that intentionally in the
past two years we have outspent our income to deaccumulate our financial reserve. serve.
Our goal now for the running year is to make that gap smaller.
We are now taking the first steps to limit our expense growth and to lower our
burn rate so that hopefully by 2026-27 with an increase in fundraising,
we end up breaking even again and then we can take aim at further growth of the organization.
In pie chart form, you see things are not that complicated, really Really,
most of our expenses are personnel.
The income pie chart is the one that has more significantly changed.
If you look in years past, there used to be an almost even 50-50 split between
donations from organizations such as our corporate patrons and individuals.
And now the patronage side is dwarfed by the individual donations because the
supporting membership program has been going so well.
But you've also heard that the board plans to change the way that our patron program works a bit.
So maybe there will be some more changes to this pie chart going forward.
The budget plan has been done by the treasurer and the financial working group.
And we expect to grow our income significantly with the fundraising.
We now have new tools. Our dashboard can project the income channels that we
have on the donation side. and also there we have sort of a min-max and even
with conservative projections we should be growing our income quite a bit.
This again allows us to lower our burn rate in addition with some steps to limit
our expense growth and the ultimate goal is that in the 26-27 time frame we're even again.
Things are on track with regard to that. So far the year is looking great.
Sponsorship continues well, um, academy sponsorship is not as high as last year,
but we expected this, it's a tough year for conferences and we've heard the
same from other conference teams, almost done. Um.
It's kind of dying, you know, I try to, but it's been lowering in volume over
time. So at some point I gave up.
You've heard for many years that we would like to dissolve our US-based KDE
satellite organization, the KDE League, and that we expect also its remaining
money then to be disseminated to us. The dissolution has finally passed.
We don't have the money yet, but we expect it sort of any minute now.
We're in the pace that it's going at, it will probably be next year,
but it's It's good news all the same.
All right. Tools, I already talked about it. Our dashboard is doing great and
it's now doing better things with donations that allows us to forecast things
and keep an even closer eye on how our income is developing.
So thanks for the people who work on that tool. All right. And then handing
off to the fundraising working group.
Maybe it works better for you.
Yeah. Yeah, so fundraising working group. Yeah, so where we are and what we
do, like you can say, currently alone.
We had a few members leaving the working group this year.
So I'm now looking for new volunteers to join the working group and help fundraising.
What we do is coordinate the execution of the fundraising campaigns.
We had a lot of help from the promo team, Paul and Annika.
Yeah, and we maintain and improve the technical infrastructure,
which was CVCM, past years, not anymore. Yeah.
So now there's a bit less work on the technical infrastructure and just editing the websites.
But nothing much more.
Last year, we had the Plasma 6 fundraising campaign, which was a success,
as you can see by the financial report.
We also shut down CVCRM, which was a bit of a pain, and it's good that we are done with that.
Yeah, I mean, I think Ben is quite happy about that.
Yeah, and yeah, success stories, like we increased the number of frequent donations,
other one-time donations, thanks to DonorBox.
I mean, the Plasma 6 campaign was like a really We had a plan at the beginning
to have like 500 or 250 new members and we managed to go a lot higher.
Yeah. And that's what we learned is that posting often about the fundraising
and campaigns and asking people often to do donations actually work.
Like if you ask people to donate, many of them will do that. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, like I said, join the working group, we need help.
And yeah, and if you do blog posts, don't forget to mention what we are.
You can do the donation to KDE for, yeah, I think that's it.
Yeah. And at least my plan would be like to do a fundraising campaign again in December.
We already had like with Plasma, there's a notification which will appear in December.
We should recommend you to do a donation and let's try to do that in social
media and other places to see.
Yeah. If you want to talk to us, you can either talk to me, or there's a matrix
room, which is public, and an email address for many of us. Yeah, that's it.
Hello. Yeah. OK, so yeah.
I'm Albert, and I'm here to report on the Katie Free Qt Foundation Working Group
and on the Freddie Qt Foundation.
Two things very similar, not the same.
So what do we do?
It's a working group with a lot of people.
So there's me and Olaf, which are the actual people, which which are part of
the FreeQt KD Foundation, together with other two folks from the Qt group.
And then there is Chris, David, AK, Frederick, Martin, and Victoria, which help us,
Shape our communications with with the foundation right it's like we are good
friends with the cute group But it's always when you're doing things at a more
official level It's always a
good thing to have your message not be hey dude. How are you doing right?
It's it's better if you come across a bit more professional.
So what did we do last year? We have a work a group in in matrix,
and we had a few discussions there Nothing super important.
We have a few live calls on meetkd.org.
I think we didn't have many this year. That's a good thing. Not many things
happened. So we didn't have to do many calls.
We have not met yet formally with the foundation. So with the Qt group people,
the four of us haven't met yet at the time of writing and not at the time of today either.
So this is something we're going to do this year at some point.
We have to meet and approve the taxes and all those boring things that foundations do.
We had an informal talk on the Qt Code Editor Summit last year and also this year.
But this was like two days ago, so it didn't make it.
Into the slides.
Lessons learned. So yeah, we're in good relations with them.
No news is good news, right? So the foundation, like the Free KDE Qt foundation
is a foundation that exists for when bad shit happens.
So no bad shit has been happening, so that's good.
The working group continues to be a great help for both me and Olaf,
which are the official people on the foundation.
So yeah, it's great that we have this working group.
We have increased collaboration at the technical level between KDE and Qt group.
So not something we do at all, but there's more people from KDE contributing,
to Qt, which is a good thing, because the more communication, the less bad blood.
So no, they did that. No, yeah. OK. Done. If you talk to people,
you realize we're all friends. So yeah, that's good.
Obstacles during the year. We had a very big obstacle, which is we lost access to our bank account.
The foundation has a bank account. It got blocked because of reasons.
If you want to pay me a beer, I will explain you what happened.
But it's like, well, there was churn in the foundation. There was churn in the bank.
There was churn in the company people. and some of the messages that the bank
sent, we didn't see them, and blah, blah, blah.
So yeah, we're working on getting access back. That was what we wrote in July.
An update is that the bank account is not blocked anymore, which is a good thing.
We don't have access to it yet, which is not a great thing. But we're halfway
in the middle of resolving the thing.
I mean, the main problem is the foundation is set up in Norway,
but none of the people from the foundation live in Norway nowadays.
I'm in Barcelona, the cute people are in Finland, and Olaf is somewhere in Germany, I think.
So when you have to go physically somewhere and it's far away,
not so easy. But we'll get it fixed.
Where we need help. I mean, if you could live in Norway, that would be amazing.
But you're not going to change your place of living just to help us.
So yeah, we didn't add that to the slides.
But yeah, just continue being what you're doing, right?
Continue building good relationships with, yeah, it's not the kid company anymore. It's the kid group.
But yeah, talk to them. You don't have to even pretend you're part of the working group or not.
Just be nice people and say, hey, I'm ComKD, and I want to help.
Do that. You're doing it. It's great. So yeah, keep doing that.
And I think that was my, no, there's more slides. Right, OK.
Key goals for the next year, yeah, just basically what I said, right?
Keep doing what you're doing and fixing the bank account. This is really important.
I'm the chairman of the foundation. I don't want to go to jail just because
we didn't present the taxes on time. So eventually, this needs to be fixed.
And yeah, talk to us. What do we do? So if you're interested in Qt licensing, talk to us.
If you're basically anything related to Qt, right? So talk to us.
Who's here. It's basically only me and David Redondo, I think.
But otherwise, we have a mailing list and there's a matrix IRC.
Just, yeah, you find the name of the people here and talk to us,
right? Oh, Victoria's here. Sorry, forgot about you.
So, yeah, talk to us. And then this is.
Thank you. Hopefully I didn't get this too long, but we'll see how we go.
So what have we been doing? Well, continuous integration basically being the rock star of this year.
Lots going on. Previously we had some issues where if you did a craft build, it would hit WebEngine.
Web engine likes memory likes lots of memory
and it would cause an out of memory era would
crash vms cause lots of issues so we introduced some new high memory workers
they have 128 gigs of ram so web engine build issues no more windows and vbc
builds don't crash anymore and life is good we also introduced the notary service
which the board was kind enough to fund that's what ingo we've spent this time on.
So we now have all of our signing stuff for Windows, for Mac,
for flat packs, the website deployments, all that other fun stuff is done using the notary service.
It keeps the signing keys away from your CI jobs, but still lets the CI jobs
have things done that need signing or privilege.
Really good way of separating secure stuff you need to keep private from general
CI stuff because the builders can't be trusted.
Those builders run everyone's jobs.
Anyone random can register an account, log in, essentially start running CI
builds on them. They can't be trusted. The keys can never go anywhere near them.
Which is one of the big problems with the binary factory. Those signing keys were on the builders.
No more. The binary factory is now gone, dead, finished, shut down and gone.
Very happy about that. Jenkins was a bit of a nightmare, but it's gone now.
FreeBSD builds. They transitioned to running as Podman containers.
That involved doing a bit of work with upstream. Patches went into two different
bits of FreeBSD, I believe.
I can't remember how many I had to do I think it was two or three
yes GitLab and it was Podman itself so
now all the free BSD builds you've noticed don't fall
over anywhere near as much as they used to they now just
run and work reliably although it
wasn't perfect KDevelop does some
really weird things in their tests and they still manage to
hang the processes with what HTOP shows as a T and eventually means you have
to rebuild reboot the worker apparently even containerization can't save us
from everything and we also had some first steps towards adding support for
alpine or musel based builds which i understand helps with a bunch of embedded stuff,
and there was a huge amount of planning and research towards planning towards vm based builds,
which we essentially need for snaps you can't build
snaps in anything other than a vm if you try and put any kind of container around
the snap build process it just doesn't work it blows up horribly and the same
thing happens with flat pack you can sort of hack around it but it doesn't work
very well and you certainly can't run the resulting flat pack so we're getting closer towards that.
You might think it's easy but it's not all the kind of existing stuff that sits
out there is designed around public cloud usage so your google cloud your aws your digital ocean.
Or your google one we don't have that and of course there was also a lot of
queries from and various developers around CI jobs.
And then we had a whole bunch of other stuff regarding the general infrastructure.
We replaced our GitLab server. Previously, it was a container running on one
of our servers, but GitLab kind of outgrew that. It's now sitting on its own iron.
It's been working pretty well. We've been seeing some overload issues lately.
I've seen people complaining about it.
I'm keeping an eye on it. It looks like we've got a bunch of bots that are like
spidering it, probably for AI stuff.
I've been blocking them. I whacked a Google IP range the other day.
It was Google themselves indexing us, interestingly.
We migrated to DNS control along with CloudNS managed DNSSEC.
Previously, we had an awful setup with Bind and DNSSEC and occasionally Bind
would get confused and I'd have to update the DNSSEC keys by hand.
It was all kind of awful and fiddly and setting new domains was a real pain.
DNS control and CloudNS makes it an absolute breeze. It means we don't have
to have a DNS set keys sitting on one of our servers that was getting old and
unmaintained and was an out of date release of Debian anyway.
We rolled out a release keyring, which means now for those of you who are distributions
going, where do I find a contributor's GPG key?
There's a Git repository you can go to. They should all be in there.
If you are someone who independently releases your own software,
please make sure your key is in there.
It's at sysadmin slash release dash keyring on GitLab.
We retired Civi's ERM. And there's a bunch of other CMS instances that are in
the process of being retired as well.
Crit has moved towards being a Hugo-based site now, and I believe Kdenlive is
starting to move slowly but surely down that road.
So even WordPress is going to be extinct soon.
I think we've only got two Drupal 7 instances left. I'll be happy to see the back of those.
And we also went through the process of registering with Microsoft to be able
to do a bunch of Office 365 integration.
They are so much easier to deal with than all of the other lot.
Hats out to the people at Microsoft software make that life easy because the
others are a nightmare and there's been a quite a bit of significant
work put into planning for a new infrastructure we're looking at moving away
from LXC based containers on bare metal that we do now towards using uh Proxmox
hypervisors and a cluster to make lives a bit easier because a lot of software
these days demands being docker,
essentially demands being its own VM even the likes of discourse you think you
can have multiple discourse instances on the same server? Nah, it's not compatible.
Key goals and plans for the coming year. Got quite a bit on.
I do want to finally retire Fabricator. The only thing left in there now is tasks.
Get that over to GitLab, then we can get rid of that. For the curious fact for
the people who aren't aware of it, the Fabricator database is a couple hundred
gigabytes because it's got a copy of ESPN in it.
And I'd really like to get rid of it because if something happens,
restoring from backups will be near and impossible.
I don't want to even think about it. i want to start
provisioning the new infrastructure and starting to migrate all our
services over to it consolidating a bunch
of stuff getting rid of the old servers moving towards current
and update lts versions we've got a mixture of
various 2204 2004 i think there's some 1804 out
there as well unless you're talking about fabricator which is on
1604 and moving continuous
integration over to being vm based which is
easier said than done i can give a whole talk on that one
that will be we'll see how we go with that and
we'll also be looking to migrate away from digital ocean our
cluster will take over the duties of hosting the stuff that's currently there
there's not a huge amount of stuff there thankfully but we'll see how we go
oh and there's also the email infrastructure that is quite old and decrepit
at this point we're on mailman 2 still which is basically unsupported likely
looking to move to mailman 3 there and changing for other bits and pieces.
The contact us like kind of speaks for itself you know where to find us and
you can certainly know where to find me because i'll be around this week but uh any questions.