Akademy 2019 in Beautiful Milan

Akademy 2019 was hosted in University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan from 7th to 13th September. It was great to meet all the fellow KDE contributors again 🙂

Akademy gives a chance to bring together artists, designers, developers, translators, users, writers and other contributors to meet in person and discuss about achievements of the past year and plan out the goals for the next year.

Group Photo

First two days contributors presented talks on their respective projects. You can go through the talks as now the videos for the same are available.
All talks were so great and full of knowledge, but out of all there were few topics that fascinated me, and I would like to share those topics with you.

• Everything to hide: helping protect the privacy of our users by Ivan Čukić.
• All on board ! Are we there yet? by Neofytos Kolokotronis.
• Plasma for Embedded Devices by Marco Martin and Bhushan Shah.
• Taking KDE to the Skies:Making the drone ground control kirogi by Ekie Hein
• And my favorite talk was the KDE Goals – Panel Discussion hosted by Lydia Pintscher.

Last year in Akademy, KDE Goals were announced, which were:

1. Usability and Productivity for Basic Software.
2. Privacy Software.
3. Streamlined Onboarding of New Contributors.

So in this Interactive Session, Lydia discussed with the goal keepers how far they have reached and how was their experience while working on these goals, and then finally this year’s Goals were announced,

• Wayland
• Consistency
• All about the apps

This year unfortunately I didn’t give any talk but instead tried my hands in volunteering. I volunteered to be a Session-Chair, basically my job was to introduce speaker and manage talk room. It was such a learning and amazing experience to be a volunteer.

Having a word with the Keynote speaker Leonardo Favario.
{Photo credit Paul Brown}

Rest of the week was BoFs (Bird of Feather), Workshops, Meetings, Daytrip and Training.

There were many BoF sessions scheduled for a week and I attended the following sessions:

KDE PROMO :

We discussed on some marketing strategies, and did some brainstorming on few topics. Learnt how far we have reached on spreading KDE to new users and determined few tasks we would work on for this year.

OpenQA :

I work and contribute in OpenQA Project, in this session Harald Sitter and Jonathan Riddle gave a brief introduction on OpenQA and then we discussed the workflow for writing new tests cases, and I personally got a chance to learn alot of new things from Jonathan Riddle.

KDE India :

We discussed on next KDE Conference India, listed few places were we can host the conference, and I am happy to announce that conf.kde.in is coming back in 2020 🙂 It will be held in Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Technology from 17th to 19th January. If you love open source and wish to learn more about our community come join us in this conference 🙂

Privacy :

In Privacy BoF we discussed on various aspects, determined goals for this year, talked a bit on funds for next sprint and did brainstorming on few topics.

KDE Students Program :

Here we discussed about the students program, took feedback on what we need to improve, what should be the work pattern for this year and our main focus was on Season of KDE Program, It is an upcoming project so we were discussing on its timeline and structure which soon you will come to know 🙂

Daytrip

It is a tradition of Akademy that Wednesday afternoon we all attendees go out and explore a particular area. This time the trip went to the North to Varenna near Lake Como, Ahhh! it was indeed the most magnificent place, a day where I enjoyed the nature’s beauty accompanied with my incredible friends.

Enjoying Daytrip

Training

Communication Training:

KDE e.V. had organized Communication Training session for community members, and I am so glad I could attend this training. Our trainer Tilman Krakau gave some basic but very essential lessons on communication, how to coordinate with your team-workers and always try to understand the receivers’ point of perception.

Conclusion

Akademy was really productive, it was great socializing and meeting old friends and making new ones. Learnt alot of new stuffs and it was an amazing experience. I am really thankful to the KDE e.V. for sponsoring my trip.

And to those who aren’t part of KDE yet and wish to be, I have something interesting to share with you, Season of KDE is coming soon. It is a great way to join our community, learn new things and get comfortable with coding, and there is one thing I would like to tell about this program, it is just not for students it is open for everyone 🙂

See you all next Akademy, till then Happy Coding! 🙂

 

 

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