 All right. This is going to be a bit of a different talk than I usually give. I must warn, I'm going to be changing hats in the middle of the talk, and this is going to be an exercise for you because I am not wearing a hat now. Also, I am not going to be wearing a hat later. I did think, let's do the thing where you have a hat and then you change with another hat, but then I decided don't do that because you don't know how to wear a hat. Also, I don't really have hats, so it would have been a bit awkward. So instead, we're going to start with a slightly confusing slide of a French landscape that maybe some of you will recognize. What we're going to talk about today is about how while we've been working in a highly professionalized field like software is, and while we've been working on very difficult topics, sometimes the professionalization of our space has been limited. And what I would like to do is, on the one hand, offer a perspective of what this looks like from a firsthand experience. And then second, put forward the vision that we see from the KDEV on how we can improve this situation that we are in right now, so that we can see people staying around for a longer time and so that we can have people give the attention to our products that our products need. So my first hat on, whoa, I'm blurry, my first hat on is the one where I'm called Alech Paul. I am from Barcelona. I have been employed by Blue Systems since 2011, which means that this November it's going to be a decade that I've been with Blue Systems. I've also collaborated with KDEV in the past somewhat professionally, namely through the Google Summer of Code program that I imagine that most of you have heard of, but not exclusively. I've done other contracted work as part of my professional life, but you can see most of it has been largely around KDEV and I'm proud of it. Now, what I wanted to reflect on here is, let's say you're a business and you want to work, you want to create a product and you see KDEV's availability over there. How do you turn what that community is pushing forward? Let's remember what KDEV does is for free and you can reuse all of that work for free, which is obviously economically very interesting. That doesn't mean that it's unequivocally interesting, but it's definitely worth that you can reuse and start working with. Now, what I suggest all of you who think, there's a business opportunity here, how do we make profit from it? What you need to say is, all right, there's all of these components that I need. From KDEV, we've been very forward about making our systems very configurable, being very reusable. We've put forward a lot of frameworks so that you don't have to take all of the things, so the first step would definitely be, what do I need from all of that stuff, no? The first thing that you will do is look at the product, let's say you're doing a toaster. Well, you will look at the different components that you might need. Maybe you will need solid to make sure that you're warming your hardware at the maximum, whatever, right? But the first thing that you will find is that there is ongoing work, there is people who are thinking in terms of how do they improve their thing. On a daily basis, they definitely don't care about your toaster or whatever product you're doing, or at least they don't care in principle, because they have never heard of it. Sometimes even they won't be able to think of it because your own employment conditions don't allow them to. So the first thing that you need to do is to reach out to these people and say, all right, what are you people going on about? Let's see if we can work together. And it's this step where you start understanding what they do and what drives them that, well, it's the first moment where you can measure what kind of involvement and what kind of collaboration you can establish at this point, right? Then as soon as you decide that this makes sense, and obviously it makes a lot of sense to do it with Katie, because obviously Katie is a very nice community to work with. What you will have to do is to start to coordinate with these people because you will have certain interests. I now realize that my example of the toaster was very bad, but I guess that you understand what I am talking about anyway. You will have to go to the solid people, you will have to go to the maybe plasma people and say, all right, I need this set of changes to happen, how do we make it possible and available to us to be able to create our own product, right? And it's at that moment when you start to see the kind of work you will end up doing because like we established in the beginning, you won't be doing all of your product from scratch. Admittedly, a big part of the success of free software has been that nowadays people don't have to ever again do a product from scratch because they always have something to set their feet on, right? I can't imagine, I wasn't doing products back then, but like 25 years ago people did start creating a tiny kernel for every little product that they were doing. Right now, big parts of the success of such very important projects like the Linux kernel or even Android indeed has been that they are free software and that people can leverage them. And this means that you don't ever need to start the project from scratch. And what we now think that is from scratch is never as from scratch as, well, it probably was once was in KDE. We offered the opportunity for people to define their from scratch to a fairly high level area as long as they collaborate with us and as long as we can find common spaces where to work together. That of course goes in line with being able to work properly with products like Qt, for example, or maybe nowadays Weyland, etc. Now it keeps happening that people look at our stuff and say, all right, I'm going to pick this thing and I'm going to fork it and I'm going to use it to make my brilliant lovely toaster because I know so much better than these poor people how to create my product. But in practice, at least it has been my experience that this is always a narrow minded position. Whatever you create a product, for example, at the very least, or in the European Union, any electronics need to have two years warranty. And what you can say, all right, as long as I don't touch it, I will be able to continue supporting this thing. But we've all seen this falling apart every now and then. Continuing the development of devices has been a big problem. It's something that we can very clearly see in the case of Android where you see devices that have been announced with the greatest of honors that they disappear from the market as soon as a new version of Android arrives because, well, nobody dares to port that over. And the very reason that this is happening is the very reason that it happens when people fork us or they fork the little scanner, which is you need to do a lot of work to be able to maintain over time a certain stack. And I don't think that any of us are interested in collaborating with products that you know for certain that as soon as the newest or the next Linux kernel that happens, the next version of whatever appears, you won't be able to support it and you will start to pile up on bug reports that you know that you cannot fix because your changes won't reach the deliverables that you gave to your users or so. There's something that we, for example, also discussed very about at length when we're talking about apps, we don't want to create apps that when we fix them, our users don't get the fix. Well, if you forked one of our apps because you needed to add an icon, you needed to add a new button, then from that moment, every fix that anyone from the kitty community does or every fix that anyone else does in that product, it won't reach the users, which is, by the way, probably the number one frustration of every free software hacker and developer and contributor that has ever existed. The impossibility of being able to address something that you know how to address is just that you know that somebody decided that, well, therefore it was more important than being able to solve issues. So in practice, what I want to say is that if you're working on free software products and you have to take this decision between do I collaborate or do I just fork? Well, don't fork, work with us. Make it possible for us to work together and create a strategy that spans over the years rather than a couple of campaigns for creating tiny apps or whatever that could make sense. Yeah, I think it's obvious enough. So what it doesn't look like when you know that you're creating something that works together with the rest of a community, because in practice, the community will still not bend over your will, obviously and understandably and as it should be, but while you still need to have this kind of assurance, well, we've seen this happen in several occasions around. There's very successful projects all over the place that do partnerships with different companies and it's a matter of share responsibilities. If you, your organization shows that as long as you use that product, that product is not going to break. When you contribute things, they don't break it for other people. If you sometimes even put something on the table that the rest of the team maybe wanted but never found the time to do, it will make it easier also for them to decide that at some point to say, all right, let's work together. Let's see what I can do for you. Or in practice, just they will be testing it and they will be using it and if there's a small pet peeve that they find that isn't, well, something that you never found or you didn't care or because it's not the hardware you're just testing on, they will fix it and this is something very important, right? Because when the next version of your product happens, what it will be tested on other software and you will have a much wider portfolio. By the way, I think that I am saying very obvious things but I also had the feeling when I was preparing this talk that there's very obvious things that we never say and then I never know if it's obvious to everyone. So I might be captain obvious today if I am. Well, I'm sorry. So tiny the button. So in practice, there's this weird sentence I put together here but it's about helping the community help you to help them and maybe we can look at it from the end, right? As soon as you help the community to some extent, the local teams, they will accept you as part of their team, as part of their community, which is going to mean that they will be able to help you, right? As soon as you start contributing to them, as soon as you start reviewing their much requests, as soon as you start making sure that the project moves forward, well, it's already a mutual help, which will also mean that they will be helping you, right? Because if you're working as a team, whatever they do, it should also have an impact on what you do at least on a bigger picture kind of perspective. And of course, this also means that you sometimes have to develop certain things a bit slower, but I have had this feeling of telling people, you know, this saying of if you want to go quick, go alone, if you want to go far, go together, I think that for software is all about that, right? It's about making sure that in the longer run, we can still support each other. Of course, that you can do the very specific things if you just forget about these people who have their own kind of thoughts that are not yours and your thoughts are always better and more important and interesting. But in practice, if Katie is still here, it's because what we create at large is more important than the specific ideas that everybody had, but also that the specific ideas that everybody had ended up creating what we reached out, which is especially important this year, right? Like we are celebrating 25 years. This is an amazing feat, and it only speaks for all of the people who have been putting their small thoughts and well-working together to create this big thing. Now, it's a matter of talking to people. It can be very hard to some people, I guess. It's definitely harder nowadays that we're in a pandemic and we don't get to hug each other. I can promise you, those of you who were not around when we actually used to make it that we didn't used to punch each other, so that was a nice thing. There was much more hugging and discussions, right? Even as Nuno was talking about earlier, there's a lot of friendships that have been created by this mirror talking to people and a lot of the discussions that Nuno had with people, a lot of the friends he made, and I'm sure that a lot of the rest of us, I know that from myself as well, they have been, well, friendships not only based about the technical topics, but also business topics and beyond. This is very important because it also brings new opportunities that are not the whatever reason that you approach the community in the first place, but the fact that you're in that conversation also makes you a little bit more powerful. But to be able to be in that position when you can have a truthful and honest conversation with a community, you need to be clear. It happens sometimes that people say, I want to like to create this product around or I come from a company, right? And they have 25 NDAs and they cannot really tell you anything, but they're very demanding of course because, well, they know what they're talking about, but you don't. And then you end up in this position of, all right, you do your thing and then I'm going to worry myself about my own problems. But in practice, this is how you end up having a fork and thinking that you're amazing, but this is also how you end up making Katie not as good as it could have been because I am sure that part of those ideas behind the NDA were useful. And also as soon as you fork, like I was saying, you also end up in a position where all of the work in Katie also doesn't apply to you and it puts you also in a worse position. Being transparent is also even very related. If people see what you're doing, they will also be able to get excited about what you're doing and even want to be part of it. If you're transparent about what you're doing, people might want to join you even to be hired by you at some point and if you're transparent, they will see the value of what you're doing and maybe let you do your thing and they will be doing their thing and together we will create something amazing. Being reliable also goes in the part of the conversation. You can be saying a lot of nice things, a lot of people are very good at saying nice things, but in the end they don't end up delivering and it's also something that it's frustrating because you have this company or this group of people who say we're going to do all of these things and then until the changes don't get into your Git repository, you feel like it's not getting there but then as soon as it does, as soon as you see that all the changes got there, that you're leveraging whatever feature, whatever contribution, whatever set of icons, whatever ideas that were put on the table, well then you have the opportunity of having that conversation that you wanted to have and even have it on the longer run because in practice I don't think that anyone looks at any professional problem in a short term, at least not someone who really wants to produce something that matters to their clients. When you talk about things that matter, you talk about longer runs. Even longer runs that we can afford from within KDA, it's also something that different kind of product, different kind of organization can also help us offer because, well, the nature of open source I would say and free software is that you need to be slightly quite quickly paced so that people can join and help as soon as they can. Now, this is a blue systems meeting from 2016. I would like to say that I couldn't find any picture that is more recent because I couldn't find it. Well, no, I couldn't find anyone because I couldn't find it. You will know most of the people, those of you who have been around KDA, those of who you don't, well, you can research them, they're all very nice people. Half of them are not with blue systems anymore but also this is kind of how it works. Most of them, though, have stayed around in the KDA community, which also speaks for how important sitting your business on a reliable community it means. Well, as I am talking to the blue systems people right now for a second, thank you very much for this almost 10 years right now. But now it's the moment where I'm going to change my virtual hats because in virtual conferences you have virtual hats, I don't know if you know. And now I remove my blue systems person hat and I put my kitty hacker hat on, my nowadays KTV president hat on. I've been on the KTV board for the last seven years. I checked yesterday, well, month plus or minus, but more or less that. And I've been in KDA developers for the last 14 years, so I guess I am in the middle of the scale right now. And what I'm going to talk to you about now is a little bit how everything I discussed earlier relates to what, well, to my persona right now with this hat and as well how we are trying to fix the problems of how hard it is to become a professional around Haiti and continue contributing when you realize that you're not a student anymore and you need to pay certain bills. With any hat also comes a glass of water. So for the longest time KTV started in 1999, but well for me actually the important thing is that KTV started in 1996, which is going to be 25 years this year, second mention, but it wasn't until 2017 when we hired the first people to work actively with the community. The KTV had had people before, namely Claudia, Hi, Claudia if you're watching and Petra later on, but they were more on the administration side. And at some point and for different circumstances we decided to hire a couple of marketing contractors and I think that this was one of the biggest changes that I've seen from well working in KTV in that well first we were all trying to do our best and in our free time meaning not that I think that the contractors don't but at some point we decided to okay let's introduce two different people who are going to fill in a position that should have been filled in by the community but for any kind of reason it's not really working out. And I am talking about this because well you once have seen Lydia's and Neonfitos presentation the other day about make a living. We're suggesting a certain amount of changes and I think that it's important that well somebody talks about this at some point right. What's the big difference between well my former hat about being a blue systems person the hat that I don't wear but the contractors nowadays wear and the hat that most of you as community members wear right. Well in blue systems namely I basically have a boss that tells me what to do which well it generally has been aligned with what Katie has needed and you will have seen a lot of my colleagues as well as myself working together with you but also you have seen people from other organizations that all they joined with Katie when they needed something from Katie but well only then. The big difference here with the contractors is that they get hired to fulfill the vision of Katie at large and well necessarily subpart a section of our community in the case of the marketing people we hired them to help with the promotion of our products and well helping us get out there but also always with the background of what Katie is what Katie stands for and well furthering that because well Katie V which is committed to supporting Katie is well hiring them for that right and this is a challenge right this is a challenge because you become this one person that is working among a lot of people who are in a community doing their thing casually and well first they are they have to work a minimum amount of hours or I mean with the HR understanding of the minimum amount of hours it's not like we're forcing them to work but well it's their duty to work on for these hours on a certain topic and as such they need to coordinate with a community of people a community let's remember that wasn't all that active at least when they start because if an area of Katie is generally populated but we're not going to hire people to work on it right and make it alive and make it do things and well also try to work with people who don't have all of the time in the world and when they do have time they do work on the things that they feel like it's fun and interesting but I think that it's also very important that we look at this as an opportunity and well I am not only talking here to the actual contractors but that we see like the rest of us as well it's an opportunity for Katie to have something that organically didn't get filled there's things that humans were not always interested in working on like you could say promo and by the way for example the case of promo we had had people working on the community actively in the in the past it never was ideal arguably but we always did things but it's it's important that we see that we have the opportunity right now because marketing or maybe the documentation case is is more relatable we have we have had documentation over the last 25 years I am sure that one of the first commits that someone did in Katie was to add the first documentation because while explaining how things work the APIs and technical documentation be it user documentation is something important but then well I don't know I don't really see the chat but raise your hand if you love working on documentation because while the next question is why are you not working on documentation much more in the past it's an opportunity to see that Katie has the mechanism right now to articulate work in that area so that actually people can continue working on what they're passionate about what they want to do which is something that I have the feeling that we in Katie we do generally well we've had people work on very hard topics in the past and resolve them with excellence the fact that there's hundreds thousands millions of computers around the world running our software is nothing but proof of it right and one can only expect that if we manage to polish these parts that are the least attended we will be able to reach different parts from our community that were never been able to reach before and this just happens by working with the community it's even working from within the community these people are put there in the middle and say now do free software things which is basically what we end up doing when we when we join Katie I mean of course when you join Katie you say I have this great idea and I'm going to put it in practice my personally first contribution to Katie was working in K-Algebra and actually K-Algebra itself so it's not like I arrived one day and I didn't really know what to do and it's not like our contractors really don't know what to do right but it still is well being put in the position where you have to work with new people or maybe all people from slightly privileged circumstance which is just at least that you have some time that you have to spend on a certain topic beyond the positions we already discussed well there's also the make a living position for positions that I'm gonna gonna talk about a lot here because well like we said Neofitos and Lydia also discussed it but they also again another well moving a bit closer to the daily matters of our community with our community that creates free software and they are going to be people creating part of this free software their positions that have been designed specifically to further certain areas of our community that well we feel that can expand our reach in ways that well I cannot really scream enough to people work on this and it's gonna be amazing even if I am wearing that magnificent president hat I don't know if you imagine the present hat but I think that it looks a bit like a wizard hat like like candle candle left us but the presidents we have a mystical hat virtual hat that we pass on in Lydia it looked a bit too big but it also looked amazing but anyway I'm gonna try to remove that image from your heads and continue on the topic so for those of you who haven't seen the presentations we're gonna have three new positions one that is working on what we call based software which is at least to be defined but it basically should be stuff along the lines of cute frameworks Katie frameworks maybe well some underlying problems we might have to be addressed upstream but in general the idea is to make sure that people can create with what we create and within us with the best of assurances we'll have a person who will work and think about how to make hardware projects from within Katie like like some projects that we've already seen lately and facilitated there's always certain small annoyances that are generally not even within our repositories in our code bases but that without these things being so getting solved well your products never flourished like we always expected they would well this little wizard will help us with that and then a third position who will be a person helping us get in certain app stores and making sure that everyone around the world and somewhat which are software and well make best use of it because in practice what we create is for everyone to enjoy not a select number of people anyway right now maybe this is the weird part of my talk but I think that is the more important part as well like how do I help how what is my role and by my role I don't mean let's just roll with any of the hats but like any of ours who are part of this community in making sure that this is a success KTV is spending a sizable amount of money in doing this and what we're doing it because we think that it's very important that KTV is catered for also because we have to for legal reasons to well not have surpluses but in practice to make sure that the community doesn't stagnate in the comfort zone of whatever the status quo is right now right now how can you help what you should be working with these people are the new contractors and even the previous ones like they are fellow community members you don't need to treat them like they are blessed which somebody some people might think or have thought in the past that they were but also you don't have to just let them do their thing in a corner right you need to be able to communicate with them you need to communicate with them you need to make sure that you understand how they work and what they're working on much like you need to understand how your other teammates work because like I was saying earlier if we're not transparent with each other it's very complicated to work together properly right something that is also very important is that what we need to work in the same direction here we could show these cheesy picture of two dogs pulling on on a different side or pulling on on the same direction obviously those pulling in the same direction will always go faster and further I think that the all of the positions that we put forward they're very exciting for anyone in the community and working with them can only mean that your contributions will be more valuable or relevant in the longer run than they would be if you were working alone because in practice the this everything boils down to if you're in a company and you work alone nothing works if you're in the community and you work alone nothing really works and if you are a contractor and you work alone nothing really works but if we work together well we're on to something right something that also is important especially when Dave again is that some of us we've been around for a very very long time and we know a lot of unspoken rules within the community well first of all we shouldn't have unspoken rules or unwritten rules or whatever we should be able to well to express what are our ways to work in general we've done a lot of work with this with the manifesto with the well with our vision with the statutes of the KTV if you wish but in practice there's always certain things that one needs to know one is to know who's who assuming that they that they know also doesn't have anything but maybe something that you can help with is by offering this experience right so that we need to understand that none of the contractors have magical powers not the ones that we have right now and I would safely admit that I don't think that we're going to hire anyone with magical powers everyone's hours are limited they are for those people in the community and they are for those people contracted well let's understand that and like I was saying earlier let's talk to each other like peers and equals which is what we are even if there's some people who have a small advantage of being well contracted for a few hours to work on certain things something that a lot of people fear and well you should not just maybe fear but actually like work against this we should be taking and doing the work that we wanted to do anyway we should well don't be afraid of taking tasks because somebody is contracted around the topic or the area if you are very interested in Android don't stop yourself working on Android topics because there's an apps contractor if you're very passionate about YouTube videos like Nicolais for example don't stop yourself from doing it because there's probably it wouldn't make any sense right it wouldn't make it better for them and it wouldn't make it better for you because in practice our resources are always limited and they are for everyone it's also very important that let me turn the lights on because it got really dark it's very important that you apply to the positions as they appear the the better candidates we have the better we will be able to have outcomes positive outcomes in practice there's always a certain onboarding time that is necessary and it will be the case for anyone but if you've been around for a long time if you are familiar with the topic it will always be a bit easier for you to join and help in and in practice reach out to us as the KTV board if you wish reach out to the contractors if you want to talk to them because like I said they don't have magical powers which also means that they don't do these weird electric pray things we also we always should be able to talk to each other and it's only by both having the discussions that we will be able to work better together right but what I want you to think about is that this is a collective opportunity this is not just the thing that the KTV is doing nowadays but that it's our chance we have to to attain certain opportunities that right now have been just unattainable to us and it's going to be through well hard work because I am sure that all of the people we have and we will have on board will work hard to drive us in this direction and if we help them if we work together we will be able to well reach millions of people through our app we will be able to well help lots of developers start developing our application applications for us with us through better documentation through well better base software so that they don't have to start well working around problems we might have in our base systems but just doing their things right embracing this collective opportunity you can only well take us to the other side and I am sure that there's good things to have to find there and this only can happen by working together this is the academy presentation for 2018 because like I said earlier I suck at looking for pictures I also I'm a bit tired of seeing the Milan picture when we have a normal academy picture so 2018 it's it's very nice working with you all and it's going to continue to be amazing I wanted to talk a little bit about the future but I think that here's the important thing is that well let's focus on what we have on the table like Carpe diem a little bit let's embrace this opportunity let's make sure that that we make the most of it and make sure that well all of these goals that we had are with our reach when the time comes and well then we get to talk about the future about well what how has our organization changed after after this work and how do we make the best of it like we're doing nowadays right Carpe diem now this is a picture okay this is this is karma this was the picture of my desk because Adam didn't show it yesterday and I am sure that Adam today hacked my PDF to not show my desk once more so that's on you Adam it wasn't all that interesting anyway so if you have any questions that's probably a good moment to have a bit of a conversation if there's some time otherwise well you can reach me at this is my name this is my email this is my matrix handle down there and the other one is all my telegram and Twitter as well and master done because I am not very original with my my naming so what's everyone thank you very much for this presentation I'm glad that the hack was successful and you did not sidestep my my ban on your desk pictures so we do have a question thing already in the in the widget here from the audience and by the way you probably missed because you you had the presentation but there's already a a condolp Photoshop with your face on you probably be sent it shortly after after the presentation so the question comes from Jonathan we have a goal to get more apps on more app stores but haven't attracted many people to do that fairly easily grant work of packaging apps should we and not sure which of your many hats this is aimed at I am super sorry but can you repeat the question please sure we have a goal to get more apps on more app stores but haven't attracted many people to do the fairly easy grant work of packaging apps should we I must disagree there's a lot of people in KDE who have been doing this work it's a matter of making sure that their work is compensated somehow I think that big part of the problem with being a free software hacker in your free time is that the challenging problems are interesting but the most boring ones are boring and we have seen what people pumping the packaging for example Windows on Mac on Snap on right at this point we need to do the extra mile work right which includes QA it includes actually just testing that things work reaching out to different applications and see how how they want to do that and I have the feeling that the people who have been doing this work well it wasn't their persona right if you're the kind of person who will sit down in front of your computer at midnight with a cup of coffee or a cup of beer and start hacking maybe you're not the kind of person who will go chasing around different people and doing QI on applications this is a guess but I think that it makes sense and actually I would say does it make sense to you too it doesn't need to be you Adam but maybe whoever is listening although if you want to speak your mind I don't mind I think I'd rather go to the next question not to discuss too much on the Q&A part of the talk this next one comes from Abbott's from your perspective what seems to be the biggest fear in hiring contractors and have them work along with volunteers well we've had this discussion in the past I think that it was very strongly ingrained in our DNA at some point maybe not the DNA but maybe in our sight that we didn't hire we did the work in our free time and that's how we managed to do all of the things and we've admittedly gone a long way one of the obvious fears could be that if somebody now is being paid to do something why should I sit down at midnight with a cup of coffee slash beer and start hacking on that packaging I care about and my personal conclusion and what I think that has been discussed with the different people also when we were doing for example the make a living thing is that we generally do this thing because it matters to us and we do the thing we want to do but there's always going to be certain things that we're not going to want to do that much for example there's parts of our contractors work that they're doing nowadays and they're doing excellently that I have never done it hasn't been by chance it's maybe not in my soul to do that maybe I should have been doing it but then it would also have meant that I would not have been doing other things so in practice the fear is will they be taking my tasks will they be will I lose will to work on the project will I be jealous of certain contractors because they're being paid and I am not and I think that we shouldn't be jealous I think that we are mature enough to be able to work together but I don't know I mean maybe whoever did the question I sorry I didn't hear the name properly maybe they cannot see themselves being jealous and that's how it should be in practice we've all seen that we can have some people in our community being paid for the work they're doing and we can also appreciate I would say the work they do rather than just be jealous and saying which I think it's great and it speaks of our maturity and I think that we can only use this opportunity to do better software than to be bitter to one another okay thank you very much for the answer just as a side note as a contractor for the KDEV myself I can say that being a contractor has integrated me more with the community than I'm not sure exactly how else I could be so much so quickly integrated so that's also something to keep in mind maybe that's a presentation you should be doing next Academy right maybe those are all the questions that we have thank you very much again for the presentation and for answering the questions