 Hi, here we meet again. Yeah, the time is perfect for you to start, so go ahead. All right, so we heard a lot about bubbles. Now we're going to talk about helping people make a living around KDE and research and planning we've been doing over the last few months around that topic. So a bit of background. KDE is almost 25 years old and one of the things that's really important for us is keeping people around, right? Giving them the opportunity to contribute to KDE long term. As many people start contributing to KDE during their school or university years, many of them tend to drop out as they leave university, get jobs and so on. And one of the things we are trying to do is making it easier for people to stay around in KDE by making their living with work around KDE. So over the last few months, we did interviews with people from both inside KDE and outside KDE to better understand everyone's view on the topic and then aggregated that and expanded it with the past experience that board members had through their own jobs, through their own experience with contributing to KDE. And out of this process came a number of options we looked at for how to make this happen and how to help people make a living around KDE. And I will go through those options and then if we just will later talk a bit about what we ended up. So the first option we looked at was that we could have KDEV, the organization behind KDE, hire people to work on some specific apps or plasma to make this viable and make this work. We would need to find ways in the community to decide which apps and features or bug fixes we actually want to spend the money we have on because while we do have some money, it's not unlimited of course. And on the other hand, we would also need to make this attractive and secure enough for the person who takes on this position that they want to do this, that they want to potentially give up another job for that. From the organizational side, it is important to us that we make this sustainable because we don't want to hire someone for six months and then have to let them go, of course that is not who we want to be as an organization. And then we would also want to have this have enough of an impact on the specific app or plasma to make this worthwhile because if at the end of the day you're not seeing the benefit of that time investment, then that's kind of sad and not useful. And then in a similar way, we would then need to manage the expectations from people, how much of a change this can actually achieve. Now, if we did this, we're pretty sure on the positive side that our products would improve, right? We would make our apps or plasma better and bring increased momentum into the project. And it would also give us the opportunity to do project specific fundraising. So we could go out and say, hey, here, help us make when you better today, help donate to that specific effort. On the negative side, we might not be able to find the people who are suitable to do that work to do this for shorter periods of time. And as an organization, we would have to deal with all the hiring and people management associated with it. Another option we've looked at is very similar, but here we would not hire people to work on apps or plasma, but instead on the base software. Base software here being acute frameworks, all these non-end product components that we're relying upon. What we would need to make this happen is very similar to the previous one, except that here it will be a bit harder to show the benefit of this and see the impact of this. And it would give us less of an opportunity to do specific fundraising around this. A different option we looked at was that KDEV supports people in applying for what we would call LightWide grants. Grants that have very little overhead for applying to them and then doing all the paperwork that's related to them. What we would need to make this happen on the KDEV site is that we would need to have someone to help with the administration of those grants and support the applications for that. And in the first place, research some of those grant opportunities to make them known to people. On the plus side for this, here we would not really need to decide which projects to work on, but turn this around and see what's available and what's exciting for people. The administrative overhead would be rather minimal because these LightWide grants are by nature rather low overhead. And we would only be putting work into projects that at least one contributor is really excited about. On the negative side, those tend to be more short term and we might not be able to attract more senior people. And at the end of the day, we're pushing all the risk and most of the administrative overhead to the person that's actually applying to the grant, which is also not so great from an organizational standpoint. The other extreme on the grant side is that we could apply for more heavy weight grants and join research consortia and similar things. Our experience in the past with this has had limited success and the impact on our products, there are different opinions on this. We would need someone to research opportunities that actually fit our community, available grants that we could apply for and then spend quite a lot of resources on actually applying for those grants, which we might never receive in the end. On the plus side, this would really help us improve our professional image in such organizations and we would gain opportunities to push our products into areas where we're usually not and we would create new collaboration opportunities with external partners. On the negative side, these tend to involve a lot of administration and paperwork that we tend to shy away from. Also, the topics of those grants are usually not set by the grantee, but a lot of the direction comes from what is available and what gets funded. So it might not quite fit with what we as a community want. And last but not least, getting those grants is not generally easy and the probability of getting them seems generally low. Second to last opportunity we looked at was that KDEV could invest more in building up the ecosystem of companies around KDEV. We already do some efforts in this area with the trusted consultants program, for example, but we would have to increase the effort there. We would also need to ensure that there's actually enough business opportunity for those companies in our ecosystem to make this attractive. It would probably help if we had someone in KDEV to do business development there. And have a place where those consultancies could become aware of opportunities and potentially poor resources if needed for larger projects. On the plus side, it would definitely mean that our organization and products are taken more seriously because we have this company ecosystem around us. And we would not have to deal with much of the administrative tax hiring and so on burden that comes with a lot of the other opportunities. On the negative side, right now it doesn't seem like there's enough business opportunity going around to really make this attractive for several consultancies around us yet. And that brings me to the last one we have, which is that we support our community members in fundraising themselves directly via platforms like Patreon. To achieve this, we would need to find some solution that aligns with our vision to make this work and then help our contributors build up their domo grace through teaching them how to fundraise well and similar things. On the plus side, this would be rather easy to set up. On the negative side, there's the effort to actually fundraise would be pushed towards the person who wants to do the work taking away a lot of that time This type of fundraising needs a lot of effort to do all this cheerleading that goes with it. All the bureaucracy and taxes and so on, we would offload to the contributor, which again is not very nice. And if we really take this to the extreme, we're effectively making several KDE contributors compete against each other, which also does not seem right. But there is a risk that it would make us focus more on the short term than the long term because it has this tendency to focus on things that you can show and that are fleshy and in the moment. And last but not least, it would mean that we would basically be constantly asking our user base for money. We would constantly have many different fundraising campaigns going on at the same time. Okay, now last opportunity, KDEV offers bounties. Bounties are a good opportunity to get very specific work done. So we would need to figure out how we define this very clearly, what we want to get done and define a process for that. And then we would need to have support from maintainers to evaluate submissions if they meet the criteria of the bounty. And those would need to be very thorough because otherwise there's too much wiggle room and too much haggling about, okay, has this bounty now been fulfilled and should it be paid out or not. So on the plus side, we would clearly request what we actually need to get done. And it's something that we can start rather small and then scale later, which is very convenient. On the negative side, this is very piecemeal and it's hard to make a living off of this for an individual contributor. It's rather hard and complex to coordinate. And the line of what is acceptable as a bounty submission is hard to define and will lead to potentially a lot of squabbling by people who submit solutions to bounties. Now, all of these opportunities also need to somehow be funded, right? And we said we would rather invest in spaces that will build up revenue to sustain efforts in the longer run and not to constantly need to be fundraising new and again or rely too much on things that are very immediate and not longer term sustainable. So the options we looked at here were dedicated fundraising campaigns. So for specific efforts, general fundraising, please support KDE financially, continuing to rely on drive-by donations that people give us, the supporting membership fees, partnerships, purchases in app stores when people download our apps in some of the proprietary app stores and grants we talked about. And with that, I hand over to Nia Frutus to tell us a bit about the outcomes. Thank you, Lydia, for presenting all that research you did. Sure, it feels a lot. So, yeah, after doing all that research with Lidia and other members of the board, we needed to do something with that. We talked to a lot of experts, we talked to a lot of people from our community. We figured out some paths we could follow, and then we came down to doing some recommendations. So the proposal we came up with and proposed to the membership is that we believe there are three key areas that it's worth for the need to invest in going forward. As you can see, the first one is hardware integration. We talked a lot about this in other talks as well. This is about getting our products on various hardware devices and making them work better or making them work and ship in the hardware. The second one is app store support. So getting our products in more stores, getting the most out of those stores and trying to figure out how we can improve on that front. And then the third one is hiring someone to work on software development on the basis of the core technologies that we do. So if we can start quickly going through them. The main thing we want to have as an outcome from these three positions is that we want to grow our products. So we believe that through these three positions we can achieve to increase the momentum around what we are doing. So take our products and our efforts to the next level. We can create more opportunities for more community members to join these efforts that we're already putting in place. And we can drive their venue in order to make all these new positions sustainable and support them going forward. So they can support us in the long term too for our community to become to grow and become more sustainable. So starting from the hardware integration position. This will mostly focus on integrating KD software much better in different form factors. The person that we plan to get from this position will be working very closely with our hardware partners. We already have two very important ones like Pime64 and Slimbo. We want to improve the current partnerships we have. We want to grow and gain new partnerships as well. And we believe this person will be a major help in that front by offering better products. It means that our partners will be happy. It means that other partners will gain the interest of other partners and they want to come to us and partner so that they can grow together. So as we mentioned, as we improve our current position with big feathers partnership, this means that we can reach even bigger actors in the ecosystem. We can make a large impact as KDE in the organizations and in the projects around us. We can also be involved in the creation of products. This is very important if we are there where the hardware is being built, if we are part of the design process, if we are part of setting it up. This means we are playing an active role in the conversation with the end user. It means we have a say in how things are delivered to them. And this means we are in much better position than where we currently stand. Moving on to the app store support position. This is about making certain key products like our applications available on all the leading app stores and maybe potentially start selling them for a fee. The goal of all this is that it will allow us to be reachable outside of the host world. We all know the major app stores, things like Google Play and Android, Windows Store, the Apple app store, and maybe others that you can think of where we are currently lacking and we can improve in delivering our products in a much wider audience. So the outcome of having a person working delicately on this is that it will allow people to benefit from our apps. So they will be aware that our apps exist. People that know about them, like maybe if you're a member of KDE, then KDE Community, but you're using maybe Windows on your workplace, maybe you can now download KDE applications to do your job there. I'm already doing that with things like Oculus, KDE, and all the other applications that are available. These applications can and will create an entry point for people on these other platforms to be introduced to false solutions, learn about false and maybe adopt even more applications, adopt the ideology behind it and the way of thinking. We also get an opportunity to expand our brand in a broader audience. Of course, all these app stores introduce us to the world. We have all the users there that can benefit from our products and our products benefit from them. And of course, it again comes back to creating new revenue streams that the purpose that we're raising these funds, of course, is because we want to invest it back into our community, back into our people so we can continue and improve our software and our products. The third position is the base software development. When we're talking about this, we're talking about development on software that most of KDE products rely on and are built upon. We all know that KDE community produces software with some focus on key technologies like Qt, like the KDE frameworks and maybe other libraries. So the goal of this position is to pay special attention to these parts of our software stack. These are usually stacks that our current volume tier base is not very interested or they are not overly attractive for them to start working on. But at the same time, because they are at the base of everything we've built, we kind of understand why it's good and there are benefits in paying special attention to them and care because by improving this base of our developments, it means that our developers can be more productive, more efficient, produce better applications, better products and in general, enable the whole of the KDE community that builds products on top of this software base to improve and create even more awesomeness. So to quickly share some other options we are currently considering but we feel like it's not the right time to proceed with them. One is Bouties. Talking to other software projects and communities that are working with them, it seems like there could be good ways of integrating them but of course there are challenges as Lydia mentioned earlier so we still need to look into them a bit further and then see that we can implement it specifically for our needs and also we think that we are still early in considering this idea and we need to discuss it with the community, figure out processes and set it in place some way we can take advantage of things like Bouties to decide on what people will work on, how we price them and things like that. The other options we are already looking at but there is still room for growth going forward as grants. You probably saw Cornelius talk about the flower angle project or Canon and Anya project with them about building environmentally friendly software products. This is a remunerated way for contributors to work on KD products and so that's a good thing. However, as Lydia mentioned earlier as part of the challenges of this, let's say the option is that depending on how we do it can be distracting and it might not be so noticeable to our end users and the users of our main products that what we are doing here. So it's something we are looking into but we'll see when the time comes to implement it. Now, talking about the future again, here are our next steps. As you can see, if you are part of the KDEB, you must have already seen this discussion happening in the membership. We are already trying to include parts of this discussion into the costs for the 2020 budget in collaboration with the Financial Working Group and the Treasury. We are currently in the process of preparing the job appropriations descriptions and we should be in a position to publish these descriptions very soon starting from the first one and then we need of course to find the right persons and once they are onboarded to start gaining and profiting from them. So if I can quick share a very high level time plan of what we plan to do, as I mentioned, we should be publishing the first job out in July as we have almost all the job descriptions available if I just need to review them. Usually it takes some time to get those applications in and then figuring out filtering the right candidates starting to make the contact interviews and we feel that by September we'll be in a position to complete the first fire so we can then start to publish the second job out and go through the same process again by the end of the year. If things go well, we'll probably be publishing the third job out as well by the end of the year. It will depend on how the other two positions go. Of course, all the time plan you are seeing here, it might change based on the quantity and the quality of the applications we get and how long it takes us to go through them. So coming to the important part now of how you can all help, first of all, apply to the positions. You've been around to the community, maybe most of you, if you're not, maybe it's a good chance to join us. If you find there's a position that interests you, it's a great opportunity to contribute even more to KD, while being paid to work on this, which is great. If you are maybe not interested in this position yourself, maybe you can help us contact the interviews. This takes up a lot of the time of the board members. It can help us develop the process and make it more efficient for all of us. So if you feel like you can help us on that front do reach out to the board and we can, based on the position, maybe you can offer your insight and your experience in order to contact these interviews. And finally, if none of the above, then once we publish these positions, keep an eye for them and can spread the work once we're out, so we can gather and attack people from the wider, let's say, community and the whole of the ecosystem. We are very lucky in the past to have applications from people that were in our community and we think it's always helpful. But specifically for these positions, it might make more sense for people that are already close to our, let's say, technologies and the way we do things. So again, great opportunity if you are already a member and follow KD closely. So to wrap up, join us in the Academy booth to discuss more on the next step. I see we missed here the time of the booth. Let me quickly. I can repeat it. The booth will be on Tuesday, the 22nd at 5 p.m. UTC. Awesome. So join us, me and Ligia will be there and we can discuss more on these things. If you're interested, and of course, you can always reach out to the board at any time if you need questions, clarifications, or perhaps some ideas on how to proceed with this. Thank you. I think this is the final slide. If you have any questions, I see there's some active discussion in the chat already happening. Adam, do we have any questions? Yes, we do have one. Although, yeah, let me read it out. I know currently there are a lot of companies that support open source, but not necessarily free software. Do we make sure that those won't collide with our goal of making digital freedom? So I would say we're in charge of setting the agenda for those three positions. So it's up to us to set an agenda that's in line with our vision and I don't see how we would have a reason not to do that. And also as well, work closely with hardware partners. We are in a better position as we mentioned earlier to affect them and maybe chat and bring them closer to the way we do things. But as Lydia mentioned, it's up to us to make a choice to partner with people like nobody forces us. Ego asks, what amount of hours per week do you plan for the contracts? Per position. I don't think we have narrowed down to that for the hours per week. We need to figure this out. If you have ideas or you can join the both again to discuss about them. So they are going to be as the other positions part-time contact work. But it might vary depending on the availability of the person and what they are willing to work on, things like that. Another one from Cornelius. What are your thoughts on measuring the impact of investments in the development work? I think that's a really good topic we should discuss in the both. Because obviously we don't want those positions just to be there for the sake of being there. But because we want them to make it better and support our community. So yeah, if people have specific ideas how to narrow them down and how to keep track of that let's just discuss it in the both. Okay. And another one. Can we afford hiring senior engineers from example Europe and pay them sufficient to want them to stick around? So I would say we are definitely not going to pay the big bucks of big companies. I think people have to account for the fact that we are an unprofit organization and that this is our positions that are supposed to help our community and are financed among other things by donations and these partnerships that will develop as part of this work. So we're not going to be cheap with people but it's also not going to make you rich. I think that's understandable. Okay. That's all the questions we got so far. Thank you very much for this presentation and I guess everyone joined the both on Tuesday and the talk will continue there. The questions showed my various interests so do join us to discuss this further. We want to gather all the insights from the community and the people that have knowledge to help us on that front.