 Thanks for joining. Now we're gonna do the KDEV board report. This is something that we used to do within the AGM, but then we realized that it was a good idea that everybody who also is not part of the KDEV could join and see it, so that's why we're doing it here on the main program of Academy. For those of you who are EV members and are scared of it, there will also be a version of this in the AGM for, like, I don't know, making sure that you get all of the information. Before we get started, let's do a super short introduction of ourselves. We can do it with the first slide if you want, so you can see our names. I'm gonna start myself. My name is Aleish. I am the, oh yeah, of course. Yeah, my name is Aleish. I am from Barcelona and I am the KDEV president nowadays. Hello. Hi, I'm Adrian. I'm a roving board member, I guess, and that's all. Lydia. Hi, I'm Nate Graham. I am another roving board member. I'm from the USA. I was just elected last year and I'm happy to see all of you. And hi, I'm Lydia. I'm on the board for quite some time. I'm currently vice president and we also would have Aike here, but for personal reasons he unfortunately can't be here. So we will do this with the four of us. Yeah. Hi, Aike, if you're watching us, well, he knows everything we're gonna say anyway. So in this AGM, we, like, there's three of our roles that end this year. It's gonna be Lydia's, Aike's as well, and mine. The three of us have announced that we're running again, but if any of you wants to join and fight us in a voting battle of democracy, you can do that. It will be very interesting and fun for all of us, I'm sure. Cages will be provided if you want it to be a cage match. Right. Fledgling weapons only. Yeah, more on the practical matters of the EV this year. We have six new members. We have one new member less than last year, but a good bunch of new members less than a couple of years ago. Well, if you know somebody who is doing good KD work and think it would be good fit, remember to invite them. It's always a good idea. But for now, let's thank, oh, I wanted to say that. Well, Raju, Neil, Gompa, Justin, Felix, Natalie and Simon. Thanks for joining the KDV this year. Oh, yeah. About that one, something I wanted to mention. Also, a big thanks to Adrian who has been working on new software for managing our members. This has been a big topic in the past, and we hope that with the new work now, it's going to be amazing. Thank you. Yep. The button got pressed. Spoilers. No, the button gets stuck. Well, it's the next button. It has like two buttons. Okay. Yeah, that's good. So yeah, one of the big tasks we do besides of you, even members is having like individuals supporting members who part of what they do is donating. There's been like big changes on how donations happen. The individual supporting members are still on the previous system, and they're being migrated into new fun ways of doing their stuff. But we also started using over the recent years GitHub and more recently even Donorbox, and that's also ways that what people are starting to do is individual supporting process. Yeah. Just the one. Yes. So those were the individual being like individual people who do it for their own sake. These are organizations that participate obviously in a kind of different amount. We've had a good number of new ones for the last year, and thank you very much to the three of them being Coupon to Focus, Titan, and Ambition, but not to diminish the rest. The systems, Google, SUSE, the Kid Company, Canonical, Slimbo, and Tuxedo. All of them are KD patrons being organizations that are part of the KDV, and they take part on other spaces like the advisory board for most of them who will get there. Also, we got a new supporter, which is Anioka. Anioka, actually, it's one of the minus two. They moved from Patron to supporter. This one. The advisory board. So the advisory board is a way for organizations to have a say with KDE, not a say in KDE. They're not steering, but it's good to have that conversation in somewhat private to help those organizations understand where we are going and those organizations can say something about where they would like us to go, what their interests are. The advisory board consists of both sponsors, patrons, such as Blue Systems and Canonical, organizations that make heavy use of KDE software, the City of Munich, and other interested organizations. So these are people that we talked with with some regularity. There's advisory board calls where we can hear each other out on what is interesting. So we'd like to thank Blue Systems, Canonical, the City of Munich, Debian, Fosna, Nigeria, the Free Software Foundation, the Free Software Foundation Europe, Open UK. You saw pictures of Open UK earlier today. The OSI, SUSE, the Document Foundation, the Cute Company, and Cute Group, SlimBook, Tuxedo, and our new advisory board members, Kabuto Focus, G10 Code, and Ambition. So that's the advisory board. Besides the advisory board being the place where we can talk to our supporting organizations, we also have other friends, partners, and affiliations. This is ongoing collaboration because it's technical, sometimes because we've shared an office or we just feel like doing cool stuff together. So Lix and the Cute Project and Frey and Randa meetings are our friends that do cool stuff. KDE Spain is the local organization in Catalonia and Spain, and they have an academy ES, a similar kind of event as to what we're having here. We're partners with GNOME, of course, to organize the Linux application summit. That's once a year, get together to talk about applications going out there. The Chaos, we are part of the application ecosystem working group, Neofotosis are one of our friends there, affiliated with the Free Software Foundation Europe, the Open Source Initiative, and the Open Invention Network. Those are free software promoting organizations and the Open UK that do things like patent protection, licensing, innovation. KDEV is, as an organization, also member of a number of things, the OSI, the OIN, OASIS, and the Document Foundation. That means that we have our little say in how standards are built. We have a little say in patent protection for the Linux ecosystem. That's all very useful. That's the way we're involved in the larger ecosystem around us. Let's switch to a smaller view. KDEV is no longer a purely volunteer organization. We're really happy to have a bunch of contractors and employees that help us achieve the goals of the EV. The goals of the EV are to support you, all of you, in getting cool KDEV stuff done. First and foremost, we should mention Petra, who does all the things. We will go through these in more detail briefly, but I'd also like to mention Joseph, Annika, Paul, Adam, Dina, Diago, Ingo, Natalie, and Nicholas. Now we'll tell you all about them in the next slide. All right. So, Petra, I'm sure many of you have come across. She's incredible support for the board, maintaining our office, making sure that you get your reimbursements, that our paperwork is in order, all these things. Really important for KDEV to run. Similarly, Dina, you might have come across her. Amazing help in making sure this academy runs together with the local team and the rest of the academy team, as well as the Linux app summit. We couldn't do this without her support. Then we have Adam, who is supporting everything around the goals, making sure that the gold champions have what they need, that they can meet every now and then and discuss. And the same thing for the academy team, supporting meetings and so on. If you, at some point, need project coordination support, let me know and we can figure it out. Which brings us to Lana and Joseph, who have joined us for the KDEco program. They have done amazing work in making sure that KDE is taking part in the Plower Angel project, that all the paperwork gets done, that all the community outreach gets done, that we get the eco certificate and so on. The funding for doubt has by now ended and we're looking for new funding. Lana, unfortunately, left us due to the end of the project, but we hope to work with her again in the future. And Joseph has been focusing more on community topics, which he will talk about in a talk later today or tomorrow, I'm not sure. You should try it. I think we skipped one. Yes, we did. Yes. All right. Next up on our list of contractors, we have Paul and Anika, our marketing team. Paul and Anika have been, they're sitting right over there. Paul and Anika have been responsible for helping to improve KDE's presence around the world, make sure everybody knows about us. This year has been quite a busy year. They have been doing a lot of work around the fundraisers and communications regarding that. The KDE network is a topic that has seen a lot of work as well to make sure that people are organized around the world. They have also helped a lot creating content for external events and helping to promote those. They've been updating KDE's presence in social media and making sure that people who are still using proprietary networks and have not yet made the jump over to free alternatives know about us and are able to hear about KDE news and they've also helped to create the four kids and four activists and four all sorts of other people pages that you can find on kde.org slash four. These are really cool pages. And finally, they also help out with release notes and release announcements for our big releases, especially plasma and KDE gear. So a lot of work. And next up, we have our newest contractor, Natalie, who is our hardware integrator. She has started just very recently. She's been working to improve the user experience in plasma on devices like the types that are shipped by many of our partners. We have a lot of partners and supporters these days who actually sell hardware, which is a really exciting topic and something that's very near and dear to my heart. It's something that I like to see. And so Natalie is helping to make sure that this hardware works better with our software. She started with power devil and general power management topics, which are always very important, especially for devices with batteries. This also is a part of the KDE eco initiative. So there's some cross pollination going on there. And we're going to be seeing a lot more from Natalie soon. Ingo, we did announce last year that he was the first of the make a living positions we created, including Natalie and then Nico that we're going to talk about later. And well, Diego, I think that we also put in that bucket at some point. Ingo, he has been working on bringing or making it easier for all of you to achieve your applications in different platforms. There's been good progress on Windows Store and Android so far. We're starting to see how to finalize that. We're going to have a puff, right, Ingo? Over the week, actually, yeah. Right, Ingo, because it's on the slides. Well, be there if you have an application that you want to see shipped and reach out to Ingo if there's something that you think that could be done at, like, a KDE level to have you do that. But it's very important for us that your applications get out there and hopefully, like, help fundraise somehow and become part of this healthy cycle of or have your users are making KDE bigger, right? And Nicolas, he started, say hi, started this year around February and we've been working. So the idea for this position is to be working on the different aspects of our software that are shared and that help all of you to, like, work and create your KDE software. At the moment, this has mostly meant to help with the port and everything to the sixes, the good six and primary six, plasma six and everything in the six now. So that's what we've been doing so far. Yeah, 666. That's what we've been doing so far. We'll see what the future is gonna bring us on. And the last of our make a living contractors is Tiago. Tiago picked up the long running documentation improvement project. We spent some time a long time ago examining what does our documentation need to be really world class. Tiago has been picking up individual topics each that last a month or two to improve. So he's improved the Kirigami documentation, has been annoyed at Kconfig, haven't we all? So he's he's available for writing and general documentation review. Feel free to reach out to him if you have documentation needs. That's it for the contractors. And we will move on to events because KDEv supports contractors pays for contractors to improve the KDE software but also helps with events because events are great because it means you can actually look people in the eye and make funny gestures at them. Yell at them in person to fix your bugs. Yeah. Yeah, see, where else would you weigh? Yeah, where else would you get Kevin to stick out his tongue at you? So we're really glad to have all of you here at Academy Academies, our yearly, our biggest, our farthest flung event. Big thank you to the sponsors who may make this happen. One of the topics each year at Academy is where's the next one going to be. So if you feel the urge to organize it in our name, then then do so. Anywhere else in the world, given the temperatures here right now, I think we want the next one to be in Norway in November. But that's up to you. Feel free to organize a new one. We don't just do the big events. We also do, next slide please, sprints. Sprints are far more focused small or events that pick one special software topic or organizational topic. You see that we have EV board sprints. That means that we get together, either in real life or online and spend a weekend working on administration. There's been a KDE plasma sprint, there's PIM, which traditionally tries out the cake in Toulouse. There's the KDE eco sprint. We've had a bun, we've had a handful of sprints, but not nearly as much as we'd really like. And so I'd like to repeat the call to everyone in the KDE community, sprints are for you. And we're here to help you make those happen. So if you've got a topic, reach out to us, reach out to Adam, and we'll make it happen. Next to our own conferences and our sprints, we also of course show up in lots of other places. So for example, so far, we were at Fossum this year. KDE eco was present at LAS and the Bundestag. We went to something very new, the All American High School Film Festival to get a bit out of our bubble and talk to other people about cool stuff like KDE in life. Latino wear, the one to summit, cute world summit, cute come Brazil, mega con, another one of those things to get us out of the bubble. If you want to represent KDE at events, you should totally talk to the promo team and the board to get help for that if you need it. On the side of conferences of our own over the last year, we had the Academy last year, the Linux app summit this year, Academy ES, and of course, this Academy where you are. And to make all this happen, we need money, which fundraising gives us. There are quite a few things happening about fundraising. As we already talked about, we got new patterns with co-want to focus G10 code and ambition. Together with the fundraising working group, we refocused our donations on the platform Donor box. We ran an end of the year campaign. We ran a fundraising for KDE in life, both of which were very successful. We have started thinking about how to raise a partnership prices starting in 2025, because membership as a pattern or partnership in KDE is comparatively cheap. You can still get in before 2025. Grants have been successful in that we got the KDE ECO grant. So far, we have unfortunately not been successful in getting a follow-up grant. If anyone can help with that, has ideas, please come talk to us and talk to us. Thank you so much for your time, Joseph. Last but not least, we are thinking more about how to actually get paid apps into the proprietary app stores as a source of revenue for KDE. And of course, as the saying goes, do good things and talk about them. So we also have to tell the world about what we do as well. We published a report for 2022. Just the other day, it's a long and beautiful document with a lot of behind-the-scenes looks at what's happening in KDE and KDE. If you haven't read it yet, highly recommend it and spread it to your friends. So I already mentioned the fundraiser for KDE in life. And at the Academy, we talked about how we want to work with the KDE life team as part of this whole make a living discussion that we try to find dedicated funds for them to improve KDE in life as a kind of test balloon to see if that is something that works for KDE and the team that wants to do dedicated fundraising. The fundraising side of that has proven fairly successful. And we're quite happy with that. And we're quite happy with the effort that both the KDE in life team and the promo team but also the fundraising team have put into this to make it a success because it was quite a bit of work. Now we have the money and now we need to spend it on improvements to KDE in life, which is one of the next things that will come up. And I'm sure you will hear more about it tomorrow in their keynote. So overall, this try-around dedicated individual project funding continues, but things are looking pretty optimistic right now. So now is the time when we talk about some of our favorite things, the highlights of the year, everything that you all accomplished with our help and we accomplished with your help. There are some really great things. We talked a little bit earlier about sprints. We were very happy to see that sprints started happening again after the isolation of the COVID pandemic, which was no fun. We definitely want to see more sprints. This is something of our bread and butter, so let's see if we can do some more of those. We also concluded the Blower Engle project. The funding has run out, but it has essentially been successful. We got an app certified and we've created a lot of interest and momentum behind it. I think you saw a lot of engagement about KDE EV and the goal topic before. It now continues as a community goal, so that's really great. We also have our fundraising platform. Lydia just spoke on that a little bit, but moving to donor box has been really hugely impactful for us and getting a modernized fundraising platform gives us many good options going forward for the future. We also have cute six porting, which is going on. This is something that's been happening in the background for a while and now starting a few months ago, it's happening in the foreground. So we're really very happy for all the work that people have done on here. I want to call out Nico in particular, who has put really a lot of effort into this, and the net result is that many people in the audience here, myself included, are able to actually live on Plasma 6, get master right now. Okay, I'll shut up now. It's pretty great. And we're also, in general, seeing more interest in our hardware, among our hardware and software partners, and Lydia's reminding me that I missed something that was behind the microphone. We filled all of the make-a-living positions. This was a multi-year effort to start hiring more people and we have now done it. So we did a lot of the things we said we were going to do and it's pretty great. Next slide. So what we said we would do, number one was reassess our financial situation, we definitely wanted to move towards more sustainable funding models and we also wanted to make sure that we were spending enough of our money to keep out of legal hot water. We have now succeeded in doing that. We have also modernized our donations platform. So on the fundraising side, in general, what we set out to do has been a success. We trialed project fundraising, as Lydia mentioned a little bit ago. This has also been a success. We're going to be using this experience going forward to do some more things that's very exciting. We also wanted to make sure that our infrastructure was modernized, the move to GitLab has been proceeding, everybody is using it now and in the near future we're going to finally 100% move into that, cutting off fabricator so that is going to happen as well. The next thing is to support the new KDE goals. This is something that's been happening over the year. Speaking personally as a gold champion, I feel very well supported. I can't speak for everybody else but that's at least one out of three. We're going to try to have a cross goal sprint here, possibly the spring, summer, keep an eye out if that's something you'd be interested in attending. There's going to be more information about that soon. In general, we would like to see a little bit more community involvement involved in the goals. These are definitely community goals, as nice as it is to have gold champions with lots and lots of time to work on it. Sometimes that isn't always possible and so it's great when people take the initiative too. So that's something that we would like to see in the coming year. We also want to learn a little bit more about our changing ecosystem with regards to how software is distributed and what our position is in the greater free software world. This is something you're probably going to hear about in many other forms over the coming conference and we're going to continue to keep an eye on that. Finally, a big topic this year was to get us all back together in person. Now we can pretty much all say that the global pandemic is finally over and it is very important for us that we're all able to sit here in a conference and enjoy each other's presence. So that's pretty great and I'm happy that we've been successful in that. So our topics for next year, you will see that there's stuff that continues over the years since last year. It's not because we think that it wasn't successful but a lot of topics like span over a good amount of time. Like Nate was saying, kitty goals are working very well but we do miss people joining them. It would be interesting to understand what would be the correct dynamic for that to happen because like Nate, I was a kitty goal leader for a while and it could feel lonely at times. It's a very like social issue but I think that from the kitty view we can have that happen. Like for example through that sprint, like finding the right way to help the goals is going to be a good source for success for the goals which are in the end a success for kitty itself. The financial situation that we keep talking about, well like you know we had big injections in the past that we had to learn to manage what we've done to make a living program that has increased our spending considerably. We need to marry these two together through donations through everything and that's what we are doing and well there's no pandemic anyways but we do believe that like meeting is part of the goals for the kitty view, turning the kitty from something that is virtual and theoretical into something practical and where people get to work together is a big part of what the kitty view does and well we need to make sure that it's part of our goals. As Adrienne mentioned before it's about the conferences but it's also about the sprints of different meetings that we can have and well whichever is the right ways that we have to coordinate among ourselves in any case. On the last few years we're talking about the make a living positions about well how do we do this. We're moving into a mindset of okay we are now spending that money we need to make sure that we're delivering there. Not to put pressure into all of you working on that on there but actually it's on all of us right like we need to make sure that these positions deliver as well as like not us being contracted but us as like whoever benefits from from these positions so because all of them I think that we all agree bring important things to the to the community but well nobody can change the world on our own we need to work together. So for us making sure that the make a living positions are successful is very important because it's what is going to bring we believe the well the story of the next few years of the kitty view in general. One friend that we've also been seeing and it's not entirely unrelated to what I was just talking about is getting our products closer to our users with us getting being very distant to our end users a little bit in this theoretical virtual kind of product that maybe we've been and while that works and it's super fun well it makes us a little bit less relevant finding ways to like touch on what everybody cares about and being able to act on it is something important. Now you could think this is something more related to what the kitty community does and the different developers but well our experience or my my experience is that as a KTV we have a lot of well possibilities that to help there and if if there's ways we can do that we will continue doing so like we are already doing now like I think that you all agree. So this have been the key topics that we see for the KTV for this year. Obviously everything is discussable bit at the AGM, bit on the hallways, on the chat rooms online or we're going to have an office hour during the buff days where we can talk about whatever you want to talk about we don't really have a list of topics or anything to touch on there so feel free to join. Like I said earlier also if you're thinking about either joining the KTV or even joining the KTV board you can reach out to us and we can talk about it like you're welcome to do either of those things it's all fine and fun I think I would say it's a good thing to do. So that's what we wanted to talk about I think that we have some time for questions if any of you have them. I just have two questions so I was thinking do you think that positions for make a living at KDE could also provide some kind of reporting on their activities for the last year. A lot of us actually don't get to see much of that work and I mean I'm kind of disconnected as I would love to go and then the other one is that I don't know if you would consider finding help there too but when it comes to design integration I feel like sometimes like some of us designers just have a big bridge to cross when it comes to realizing some of the work we want to do and unless we go and finally some developers that might like what we're doing we have most of the times no chance of making a certain change happen in the system and so I just wanted to suggest that and ask that question to find some kind of UI integrator or something like that. Maybe it's easier if you do the questions one by one. On the reporting something we've told our contractors always maybe it's more relevant for the make a living but in general it's for all of them is that communicating is important and even part of the job for the make a living like you will see them like blogging or sending emails on the different mailing lists I mean that is how the kind of tools that we have available we can always do more of that well note that we also need to pay for it so that's how contracting works but I think that we're not doing terribly bad that way we will be seeing more of that there's two of them that are like not even one year in or actually none of the make a living are one year in to the position so we also need some kind of flexibility there more communication is would always be better but yeah it's an evolving topic this is something that we're pretty new to at KDEV so anything that you have to share regarding what's working and what's not working I think is very helpful the message that more communication would be desirable is a good message I think we don't want to make HR policy here at this meeting but it's definitely a helpful thing for for you to tell us and I think that we can be thinking about that going forward so thank you looks like we're getting an answer out of the audience to you turn it up I think it turned it now now so to sort of answer the end his first question on my beer behalf what I've been doing or trying to do is do like a monthly blog post of these are things I've done this month as part of being KDE software platform guy I have been slacking off a bit for the last two months which is not great and I should get back to that habit but that's at least my ideal of working and communicating and I also would like to sort of take the reverse and turn it into a question how could we or how should we establish some sort of communication channel from the community to us contractors what the community would like us to see doing so I think that that's what we've been suggesting to all of the contractors in the past is you get sponsored but you get sponsored to work within the community so in the community we have plenty of channels for us to communicate and just using these in the most efficient manner should be enough like if that's not enough we have like bigger problems right you're here everybody go talk to Niko and tell him what you want from him that's what he's saying right now in general like extrapolating a lot about for example how we how each of the contractors communicates is delicate right because the different positions will also be very specific about what they do like for example on Niko's case like there's like smaller tasks that you can be talking about but like no like super flashy things on the case of Ingo he has been seeing like bigger things and he has been blogging about the features when they get more done and I don't think that one or the other is a better approach I think that it's like on a case by case basis doing it will make more sense when we start seeing like how Natalie does that like I'm sure that they'll find the correct way and like deciding that they all should be doing this thing is also like the wrong approach on the second question from Andy was about take that one go for it okay so I think if I can paraphrase your second question it was basically can Katie even hire a designer or something like that is that is that good like purely from an artistic perspective right but I mean somebody who can like write code and integrate yeah somebody like they can order around so it's an interesting idea one thing I'll say from an HR perspective is that we don't currently have any positions open right now this is by design we wanted to fill all these positions and then reassess our financial situation what we really really don't want to do is hire a bunch of people they do a bunch of great work we run out of money and then we need to fire a bunch of people so that would be terribly undesirable right now we're in a situation where we're deliberately spending more money than we take in so that we can reduce our reserves but those reserves don't last forever and we're not trying to spend our reserves down to zero so before we can open any new positions we need to increase fundraising efforts so that our burn rate doesn't go down as much as it is right now again I would like to emphasize this is intentional and deliberate we're not the organization is not going bankrupt we were deliberately trying to spend down our reserves by hiring for these positions now having done so we need to make sure that there's a sustainable funding source so that we can keep the people who we have hired continuing to be hired so we don't have to get rid of them and also expand anything in the future I would say if you have any interest in future positions please help out on the fundraising side this is super important we now have really great tools that make fundraising easy so at the moment I think the design topic and the interface between design and code is probably going to have to remain a community topic a VDG topic at the moment I mentioned this one of the topics when we were talking about KDN life was how we're going to manage the different like the separate fund raising this was something that we never really wanted to do because but it's work and over the last year what's happening well over the last year I could work on some tooling for our well for his treasury work so at the moment we have the opportunity to do better work there so maybe if you're creative we can find things we can do together we're getting one last comment slash question it is a comment sorry continue from what Nicholas said the promo team we write a log every two weeks that is normally for Nate but we can make it public so that everybody can see what we have done during those two weeks a lot of the stuff is anyway publicly visible because it goes out of social media and stuff like that but if people want to see that we can make it public too so that I was going to see exactly what we have done every two weeks and that wraps up yeah thank you for coming