Akademy is the yearly conference of the KDE community, and of KDE e.V. What makes the conference isn't so much the technical content -- see Kevin's sketchnotes for instance -- but the people. Seeing KDE Brasil grow the way it has is great (hey, people, please post a date for LaKademy). Aracele gives a good overview. Even bigger is KDE India, what a bunch of happy and talented contributors. Shout-out to Abhijeet for being one of the far-flung travelers.

I could only stay until wednesday morning, so I didn't talk with anywhere near all the people I would have liked to sit down with. I did sit with Tobias, so that half of the KDE-FreeBSD team was hacking together, and with Leinir, and there was beer with Paul, .. with a conference of 200 people, the list of darn-didn't-talk-to is always going to be longer than the list of good-seeing-you-again people. Such is life.

In the sense that Akademy is about me, and you, and making connections within the community, I'll share one more anekdote: I stayed in a dorm room at the recommended hostel, and the first morning, still in my shorts, had a brief conversation in German with some guy about the ventilation mechanism in the bathroom. Then I pulled on my KDE India shirt, and the conversation turned a corner: hey, are you going to that KDE contributors thing? Turns out that roommate was also going, to his first Akademy.

Turns out, mr. Schiffner was "just a user" who "just runs the 20 Linux desktops" in a company. Wow! I'm really happy we got some "just users" at the conference, because where it's important for the developer community to "put a face to names" to improve communication the rest of the year, it is also important for users to know that there's regular people behind the software, as well. Personally I'd be really happy to have some user-talks; talks about deployments or specific use-cases of applications; a KDEnlive talk from a movie-maker would be keen. (That said, Paul did give a talk somewhat like that, about KDEnlive and promo films).

So, take-away things from Akademy are:

  • Debugging KConfig is full of surprises, even now, and having KDE-FreeBSD CI is really useful.
  • The Netherlands is just a local transportation network, for Itinerary.
  • Distro's generally all feel the same pain.
  • Nobody wants to think about LDAP.
  • People are more important than things.

Coming back from the conference is always a bit weird; there is tons of neat stuff from the event still whirling around in my brain, and there's 900 unread email messages in my inbox that need attention. I've sorted through most of it, done some communications things, pushed a bunch of commits to Calamares, and am now gearing up for an event next week in Brussels. But in september, things will be calm again.

(PS: gosh, I missed Carlos Soriano at the event, who has written a really cool I-went-to-Akademy from another kind of outsider's perspective -- we're all in this Free Software thing together.)