 good morning. Thank you for waking everyone up. Thank you for being awake. Let's talk a bit about evolving KDE and how we can shape our future. It's been a long time since Matthias-Etris wrote this email that started KDE. That was in 1969. And 96. Sorry. You're awake. Very good. And one of the things he writes is, Unix popularity grows thanks to the free variants, mostly Linux, but still consistent, nice-looking, free desktop environment is missing. There are several nice either free or low-priced applications available so that Linux X11 would most almost fit everybody's needs if he could offer a real GUI. That was almost 20 years ago. I think we can say we have that. But the world around us is changing. We have mobile phones, we have smartwatches, and we have these weird things. And all of us know that this is happening. All of us feel that, yes, technology around us is evolving in many, many different ways. But it seems to me that for a long time we've been kind of not acknowledging it as a community. Individual people, definitely, but as a community we've been kind of like a deer in a headlight. So as the world around us is changing, so are we. This is a beautiful place where it's been growing and not taken enough care of. No one took the time to take away a few things, to remove some unnecessary pieces or some unhealthy pieces. And I think we have kind of the same situation in our community. So we need to look at where we actually are and what we want to do to get us ready for the future. And this is where Wellwin KDE comes in. It's basically an effort to try to get us to look at where are we, who are we, where do we want to go, and how do we get us there. We started out with a survey to ask everyone, our contributors, our users, about their opinions, their feelings, and their view on our ecosystem. And what I'm going to talk about in the next few minutes is what we took out of those answers that people gave us. So first on the topic of where actually are we. We have a great community. People appreciate that we are friendly, that we are open, that it is very easy to find someone who can help you with a problem. We meet at academy, we meet here. There's a lot of very good social interactions. As one of the people who filled out the survey said, there is a sense of working for the greater good that drives the community. It is welcoming and friendly and able to integrate people from very different backgrounds and cultures. For me, it represents the ideal of what a free software community should be. I think that sums it up very nicely. We have great technology. People, for example, we have pretty frameworks 5, which is getting used in all kinds of places now, and which really can take our technology to more places than it ever has been before. And we should be proud of that. We are a place where people can have an impact, a real impact on the world where people can really make a difference. And it is something they value. This is my friend Ashish. This is a t-shirt he always wears when he flies. We are a place where we really provide users with the tools they need to be free, to keep their freedom in a world where this is more necessary than ever. We are a place where people can scratch their own itch, where they can really solve their own problems. We are a place for learning, where people can grow and learn how to interact in a global diverse community, where people can learn to program, where people can learn to work in really complex systems. And we should be really proud of all the mentoring we do through Google Summer of Code, Season of KDE, and all the other unstructured learning and mentoring that we do. And one of the people who filled out the survey said, the right variety of people involved in the past years, it did teach me to see the world in different ways. But there are also downsides. People say they don't find the time and energy to contribute to KDE, which is an indication for me that they don't prioritize it higher than a lot of other things in their life, which might be fair, but maybe in some places that priority should be shifted. Some people say they have a really hard time to see how they can get started, how their skills can be useful for us. We still seem to fail, despite all our efforts, to really show people that it's very easy to get into KDE, that it's very easy to start with something really small. We spent so much effort on that, and still it doesn't seem to stick. Strategy and focus. We don't really have it. And people feel that and people demand it. And one interesting thing someone said was, while we are not always moving in the same direction, we always want to move forward, which I think sums it up nicely, the current situation. But that brings me to where do we actually want to go? Where do we want to general all that energy that we have, and all the good ideas that we have, and all the talent that we have? To figure that out, we definitely need vision, strategy, and focus. Which things should we be concentrating on? What should we be doing? So some of the things people say is, for example, we should be on more devices. We should be in the cloud. We should be defending users' freedoms there. We should be giving them a conversion experience. No matter which device they use, they want to have KDE on it, and they want it to be a seamless experience. People want us to create truly excellent software that is not just better than any other free software, but that is really truly excellent and can compete with whatever is out there. And that is hard, but it's doable, as some of us in the community have shown. At the same time, we need to continue to stay friendly and open, and this will be a struggle. People want us to continue to defend freedom, both by providing them with real free alternatives to a lot of the proprietors and that is out there, that is infringing on their rights and on their freedom. And at the same time, we should be collaborating more with other organizations to advocate for some of the things that are wrong and that hinder our work and that hinder people's freedom, which brings me to more concentration on the bigger picture. Over the last years, we have spent so much time on ourselves that we sometimes lost the focus of where we are in a much bigger ecosystem, how we fit together with other organizations, how we see our role in the world, and that is something people want to see changed. The good thing is we are actually partly there already. We have cases where parts of our community really do this. We have Creature, for example, which was named so many times as one of the projects that has a vision that is truly excellent, that can compete with whatever is out there. We have things like KDE Connect that really brings us this connection between where we were and where the future is. We have KDE Frameworks 5 that really brings us out of the usual suspects that we've been serving so far. So how do we get the rest of us there? There are five things that we need to do. The first of which is we need to find a way for us to define a vision, a strategy, and focus. How we're going to do this is something we need to discuss over the next year, over the next week, over the next month. Once we have that, we actually need to have a really hard look at all the things that we have been doing over the past 19 years and figure out which of those are still useful in the way we have them, which of those need to be tweaked, and which of those maybe we need to stop. How are we going to do that without a vision, strategy, and focus? So we need that first. Having that allows us to say no and that allows us to say yes to many, many different other things. And this is something we really need. The third thing we need to do is really have a look at our current onboarding processes and how we show people how to get into this community, how to get started. So many different sub-projects have junior jobs, getting started guides, and so on. But we have no clear pipeline to get people there. We need to fix that. We need to simplify, make clearer, give them better tools to get started. Our main web presence, we really need a better message and clearer page share. We really need to make it easier for people to understand who we are and to get them to what they really want. Our current web presence isn't zeroing that. And the fifth point, we need to look at all our outreach menus, social media, the dot, the planet, and so on, and really find ways to improve them. So we reach a wider audience with our message. Now none of this can be done without a contribution from all of you. So please think about what's the one small thing you can do to get us there? What's the next step that you can take to help make that happen? And we have a buff on Monday tomorrow, and I hope to see many of you there to discuss this, and we have some time here for questions as well now. Are there questions? We'll play the runner-up. Please go ahead, I had a sleeper there. Now by the way, I had some very good coffee this morning. In your career, your own mind, do you already have some inkling of what things we've done in the past we should stop doing? Do you have some sort of mental awareness? And be honest, we won't be fighting if you don't have this. Let's stop doing it. Yes, I have some ideas, and I think we should start by things like why do we have so many music players? Why do we have several screenshot programs? We should really take a look at why and find a good reason, find a good answer to that question. So you said we should say no to more things and we should focus on things and we should have a strategy as well. So we can decide what we do and what we don't want to do. So I'm wondering, one of the great things is that many people bring their own passion, many people come with their own ideas, and actually there is a pretty welcoming community for all kinds of crazy ideas where people don't have to ask for anything, they can just do something. And what holds us together is more the values and how we work together in the community. So is there really a need to say no to many things? I mean we're not in a cooperation where you try to implement a very consistent strategy where you only address one market and try to make a lot of money and we also want to give room for all the creative people who do crazy stuff. And what would you say about that? I raise you breathe, which I think is very consistent, very nice, is an amazing step forward and still allows us to have crazy other things. We say no doesn't necessarily mean it can't be done, but we as a core community need to say this is what we concentrate on and this is what we don't concentrate on. Anyone else can do that, that's fine. They can continue to do that and maybe that's exactly the way how we get crazy new ideas for the next 20 years and that's fine. But unless we have a clearer story about ourselves, it's very hard for people from the outside to say okay this is where I belong, this is where that I what I can associate with this is this is aligned with myself. And I know this isn't going to be easy and I know that some some people will disagree with that and that's I think okay because the place we are in right now is not sustainable. We just had a nice time this morning about how less and less people in general in general contribute to free software or to volunteer courses like what was it the firefighters and concentrate more on for example oh I want to do this great startup I want to raise a lot of money and we are seeing this in the number of people who from India for example apply for some of course programs instead of saying I could make a shitload of money if I start a startup which is probably not going to happen but that's something people think and we need to counter that we need to find ways to to be more attractive again and to find our focus. And every time I see this picture I just like to go over I think the main reason why Plasma 5 is still so professional and so good and in professional way a good way or a boring corporate way is that it has some consistency and I really like the idea that the whole point of simple as that fault and it's powerful and needed is a really good mantra that I think at least all the provocations that are in the main repository are actually applied to me obviously do have like extra gear and playgrounds etc which are exactly there for playing around and I'm a huge fan of the playground and extra gears. So in my view it would be really very cool if KDE, whatever KDE stands for these days would be consistent at least and made a repository whatever the main repository means these days. I think the emails and you mentioned some steps in a certain order but I was missing the first step I should say the former speaker mentioned already what is KDE so we have to define the way and KDE is not a technology anymore but there is a lot of looking at KDE is there technology terms so like desktop is consistent or how many music players do we need but from my understanding that the KDE or EV and the community was always not about technology and staying out and letting the people in the community decide what they want to do. So my question is you mentioned the survey, was there any data or outcome of the survey because I didn't see that so what is the community saying what they like to see? That's basically the things I mentioned as this is where we are and this is where we want to go. If you want access to the raw data I can give that to you. There is a written summary on the KDE community list that you can read. Okay but there's not like half data like 200 people took the survey and 50. Okay 202 people took the survey. Roughly half of those were users and roughly half of those were existing contributors. Most of them were a good part of them came from Europe. The people who contributed contribute for five years or more most of the time. Yes that is what I have in mind right now but yeah there's more online. Can you just link the community to the slides and answer that question? Yes my plan is to write this up as a blog post over the next days and I can also put up my slides but I don't think they are too useful without commentary. Excellent. More questions. Currently in KDE we have a bit of a struggle with who does the work decide. And that's almost when people start feeling it's nowhere and then they start working on it. But what we don't have and what you have just listed is what are the problems we are facing in free software and maybe we could focus on that and try to plan towards fixing those issues. But that's a very different approach to KDE at the moment so far because so far it was just come around and have fun in a coding playground. But it would be better to go towards more focusing on the social movement and fixing the spotless integration and that sounds awesome but it's a big change of direction. Honestly I don't think so because again look at Krita, look at Breeze, look at crazy filmers 5. They were all done to scratch an itch and to solve a problem but at the same time these teams managed to get a clear goal and to find their path and to really succeed at what they had planned. And we can do that in more places without compromising what we have been. We just need to find a way how to do that and it's possible. We have shown that we can do that. And then have we looked at other communities, I think Krita is a great example, but have we looked at what other communities are doing to both provide vision and focus? I mean I imagine there are other open source communities that produce multiple, I'm going to call it a map. I mean Mozilla is one that comes to mind with these multiple products. There's no way I would give you in terms of branding what's the community versus what's the product and when you think about Mozilla you can instantly imagine exactly what it is that they work on and if you want to determine exactly what it is that you're going to get into. There was a time when you thought for better or worse when you thought of KDE it meant the cool desktop environment. So when you let them contribute or you let them use whatever it is that that product was associated with, it was really clear. I love the movement towards KDE as a community and I do like the movement to plasma frameworks and applications as products, but I'm curious whether or not you think about community and how other communities can kind of imagine community versus products and focus on birds. Yeah, I have my feet in several other projects as well and for the ones I am familiar with it's I think one of two cases. Either it's a big struggle just like we have it or it's a very top-down this is what we are and you're either on board or not and I hope we can find a way somewhere in between and we have to figure out how to do that and looking at more other projects I think is a very good start. We are a friendly community no fighting here. Okay, so I just want to follow up on what you just said and say that I think that having a focus on a vision doesn't go away with having fun and when you have a focus on a vision you do this, that's what most people do but it doesn't mean you can't do anything else. We're not tired of hitting people, we're just deviating from the main policies, right? So it's not that we're going to tell people to stop doing anything because I don't think as a worker and I don't ask you to do anything. And again we have done the same thing for the manifesto and I think it has really benefited us in having a clearer answer to is this us or is this not us? Mine was mostly a concern. I think I have a very defined focus on vision for the individual projects. It's actually awesome. I agree that the narrowing of focus on freedom is actually really awesome or so of course in the last one I've been more into design and what we have with our individual projects and the recommendations and things like that have been awesome. But applying something like that on the whole KD level, I'm not sure it's a good idea. I wouldn't really want to see like a new, even a new Nplus1 music player project that hears you are really welcome there because we're at the main or your project. So it's not about telling the Nplus1 music player you can't come here but it's about saying okay you can be the Nplus1 but the first one is the one we focus on. This is where our resources go. This is where we concentrate on. This is what we market. This is what we recommend to our users. And if you're Nplus1 and you get so much better than the first one maybe then you should be number one but yes. So do you have ideas about to... I mean I obviously still think it's needed. So do you have ideas about to convince the community that maybe still is a good idea after all? The survey was the first step to show okay so many people believe that this is something we really should be working on. And the other thing is I think we really should look at what has failed in the past and why and see how we can do that in a different way. I don't have the answer yet but please come to the buffer and let's talk about it. So it's mostly coming to the very standard to application on stuff like that. So the I experienced over the last years that we as a project have a hard time because we have such a long application that we get laid for it and that is something which over the time really frustrated me and brought me to those who were not aware of it because it was like okay no matter how good a job I do we get laid for the other parts. So from my perspective getting down and saying the name of the applications you are not part of the standard but are also kicking out applications when they do not put the quality anymore is something really neat. So I'm sure you all have heard of the whole lead start up in the olden time and success for a reason. Usually things that the bottom does not work. Usually ground plants do not work. Usually species and having big greens do not work. You have to be a job. You have to be with it. That's how you have to get feedback and you have to react to it. So having a plan of uniting the entire community under a big vision that we will follow like an irony that's not going to happen and we should all forget about it and be more agile. We should try more things and we should be fast changing people things and trying to fix what we should do and in that regard I actually believe that because of what Thomas said my advice would be let's just experience and things will happen and things like success that create that will happen and like Chicago is a good project of journalists and it's kind of great success and things like this are going to happen. So if we are open to change and we welcome it something a vision will happen and most of the community will follow or not but this will currently happen. We don't have to create that decision because usually we do that. So I've been on board for four years now in KDG almost 10 and what I'm seeing is that people are desperately waiting for this to happen and it doesn't really happen except for the cases we mentioned already. So some help is needed and unless so we can decide that we don't want to do that but then it's not going to happen. If that's what we want that's fine but from the other comments I sense that that is not the case. The impression I had in those areas where we have got a particular focus and it appears to be mentioned and frameworks where these have seemed from my point of view to be one or two people in each case have come up with a driven ambition at least at the start and together with the people that are. If we want to create a focus and I do think we're going to need like a sort of core person of people to lead that group to follow that and is that dangerous to sort of put so much into leadership positions into you know is there's obviously also danger of personality in that she's not so is there when you get when you sort of allocate a certain way. Yes yes I think so and I don't have to perfect answer to that yet and I think this is something we should be discussing there and looking at the time. Yes I think this is the right point. Join us let's disagree and agree and disagree again. Let's discuss later and in the hallway and in the 500 red that we have right now. Thank you Hylia.