Hundreds of KDE contributors converged on Dublin in September for the annual KDE conference, aKademy. With two days of presentations, the general assembly of the membership organisation and a five day coding marathon, attendees were bombarded with news, ideas and beer. The main focus of aKademy this year was of course KDE 4, the next generation of the popular desktop, due to be released sometime next year. But with time given over to the OpenDocument movement, human-computer interaction research and the general assembly, aKademy reflected the diversity and maturity of the project.

With approximately half a thousand registered participants attending over the course of ten days and sponsors including HP, SuSE-Novell, Trolltech and IBM, this year's KDE World Summit--aKademy--proved to be the most successful yet. Held in the Ludwigsburg Filmakademie, it provided experienced developers and novice users alike the chance to learn more about and discuss the K Desktop Environment project.

The tenth and final day of the KDE World Summit 2004 - aKademy - presented visitors with a second opportunity to learn more about some of KDE's key technologies, and to hear of how KDE has been successfully deployed by others. A track on groupware and collaboration tools gave developers the chance to show off their work, whilst a track on success stories turned the tables, allowing visitors and developers alike to hear of KDE being used in deployments ranging from 10,000 desktops to the famous Live CD Knoppix.

Day nine of aKademy saw the start of the Users and Administrator's Conference, and the celebration of the international Software Freedom Day. With the end of the developers' section of the summit, the hacking rooms began to thin out, but the loss in numbers was accommodated by (for the most part local) crowds of users filing in to hear from developers and other users and administrators. And for those following the SUSE-Novell developments, a keynote from a Novell employee was not to be missed.

Day eight of aKademy marked the end of the coding marathon. As though restless with their desktop, KDE hackers turned their attention to a tutorial in live cracking, an impromptu demonstration of command line tools, and a brief rootkit panic. Despite the shift in focus, I found some time to talk to some members of the documentation team about their plans.

In his speech at aKademy, Bernhard Reiter of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) both celebrated Software Freedom Day and reminded the KDE community of what freedom in software means. The FSFE was founded in 2001 to promote and defend Free Software, and to coordinate national Free Software organizations, throughout Europe.

Day seven of aKademy here in Ludwigsburg (Stuttgart region), Germany, saw KDE developers finally tackle the tricky question of release schedules and whether they should skip straight to KDE 4 or have an interim release of KDE 3.4. Plans for SVGs in KDE theming were discussed, with some welcome news for those who have been waiting for graphical goodies. And as the name of this section -- coding marathon -- of the summit implies, keyboards remained busy all day.

Wednesday at aKademy provided KDE hackers with their first day without a special focus. The KDE PIM (Personal Information Management) developers had a discussion session, I led a Quality Team session on media and promotion work, and the usability playing ground continued; otherwise, developers roamed around chatting, hacking, partying and sleeping (a little).

Writing about aKademy can begin to feel a little like writing a soap opera guide without the romance (so far). To save your patience, this report from the first two days of the coding marathon will focus largely on the scheduled content, and in particular on developments in accessibility, usability and local KDE groups.

FreeDesktop.org always raises a little controversy in conferences - any group trying to integrate some of the most competitive projects in the free software community is bound to do that - and this year's KDE World Summit, aKademy, was no exception. Daniel Stone, freedesktop.org's release manager, gave a well-received presentation on the project to KDE developers, covering both the future of the project, and where he sees KDE fitting in. What follows is a writeup of his presentation, and some reflections from when I caught up with Daniel and Aaron Seigo of KDE later in the summit.