aKademy 2006 kicked off

Saturday, 23 September 2006

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

KDE Developers and Contributors Conference aKademy 2006 kicked off

KDE's annual world summit aKademy has been kicked off at the Trinity College Dublin to work on the next-generation desktop, KDE 4, and desktop standards. The aKademy conference will run through Saturday, September 23, through Saturday, September 30.

Aaron Seigo started off the conference in the morning with his talk about the identity of the KDE project, followed by speakers such as OSDL's John Cherry, John "J5" Palmieri of GNOME fame who stated that the two major Free Desktop projects really do have more in common than what separates them. Other talks include the Asian track, the KDE 4 track and the community track.
Most of the talks have been recorded on video and will be available for download later.

The KDE Contributors Conference will run from Saturday, September 23 to Sunday, September 24. The conference will feature tracks on cross-desktop development, KDE 4 planning, programming, community building, and an Asia track to help build bridges to Asian communities.

Monday, September 25, is the KDE e.V. General Assembly Day for members of KDE e.V. only. The KDE e.V. is a non-profit organization representing and supporting the KDE project in financial and legal matters.

Tuesday, September 26, is the OpenDocument Day at aKademy. The event is open to all developers interested in working on the OpenDocument Format (ODF). Topics will include interoperability between ODF implementations, new uses for ODF, libraries and tools for ODF, and extensions for ODF.

The aKademy conference will also feature Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Day on Wednesday, September 27. This event is organized by the Human Computer Interaction Working Group, formed at last year's aKademy. HCI Day will focus on accessibility, usability, internationalization, the Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), artwork, and documentation to create a better and more usable KDE interface for all users.

aKademy will also feature a coding marathon, to run daily from Tuesday, September 26, through Saturday, September 30. Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions will also be scheduled daily from Tuesday through Saturday. The preliminary Birds of a Feather sessions already scheduled include BoFs for Kubuntu, KDE PIM, Collaboration and Web Services, Marketing KDE, and Regional KDE Groups. BoF slots are still open, and may be scheduled through Cornelius Schumacher.

aKademy 2006 is organized by a local team of volunteers headed by Marcus Furlong, the KDE e.V., and other members of the KDE community.

aKademy is made possible by a number of sponsors: The host sponsor is the School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin. Kubuntu and OSDL are this year's Gold Sponsors. Intel, Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB, NLNet, Trolltech, Xandros, Ricoh, and Nokia are this year's Silver Sponsors. Enterprise Ireland, Google, Staikos Computing, and Novell are Bronze Sponsors. Linux Magazine, O'Reilly, and RealNetworks are the Media Sponsors, and aKademy 2006 is also sponsored by Tight Poker.

Supporting KDE

KDE is a Free Software project that exists and grows only because of the help of many volunteers that donate their time and effort. KDE is always looking for new volunteers and contributions, whether its help with coding, bug fixing or reporting, writing documentation, translations, promotion, money, etc. All contributions are gratefully appreciated and eagerly accepted. Please read through the Supporting KDE page for further information.

We look forward to hearing from you soon!

About KDE

KDE is an award-winning, independent project of hundreds of developers, translators, artists and other professionals worldwide collaborating over the Internet to create and freely distribute a sophisticated, customizable and stable desktop and office environment employing a flexible, component-based, network-transparent architecture and offering an outstanding development platform.

KDE provides a stable, mature desktop including a state-of-the-art browser (Konqueror), a personal information management suite (Kontact), a full office suite (KOffice), a large set of networking application and utilities, and an efficient, intuitive development environment featuring the excellent IDE KDevelop.

KDE is working proof that the Open Source "Bazaar-style" software development model can yield first-rate technologies on par with and superior to even the most complex commercial software.

Trademark Notices. KDE^® and the K Desktop Environment^® logo are registered trademarks of KDE e.V.

Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the United States and other countries.

All other trademarks and copyrights referred to in this announcement are the property of their respective owners.

Press Contacts

If you have a press enquiry related to aKademy, please direct it to the aKademy team: akademy-team@kde.org. Alternatively, you can contact the following representatives: KDE project: KDE e.V. Board Head of local organizing team: Marcus Furlong.