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.

The weekend opened with an unconventional presentation by Aaron Seigo, presenting a rapid-fire slide-show of contributors' photos with the text "KDE is" preceding each batch. His point was simple but important: that the KDE Project is about building a community around free software, and then taking that software into communities. With the long timespan of the KDE 4 development cycle, and the creation of the Marketing Working Group at last year's aKademy, KDE is rethinking its identity and Seigo's presentation was an early hint at the results of their research.

The keynote was followed by two parallel tracks, looking at KDE 4 and cross-desktop technologies respectively.

In the KDE 4 track, Ellen Reitmayr from OpenUsability and a popular KDE contributor, described how developers should and could keep users in mind when desiging their software. Having sketched some basic usability concepts such as the persona, Ellen tried to tackle the difficulty faced by application and library developers in incorporating this advice into their work. I'll come back to this theme in discussing the day dedicated to usability issues.

Ellen was followed by talks on Plasma, Phonon and Solid, three of the 'pillars' of KDE 4, sub-projects that are rethinking core aspects of the desktop. Plasma wants to drop the notion of a static desktop, with panels and an icon-dump desktop, and put dynamic and extensible technologies in its stead. SuperKaramba, merged into KDE 3.5, hints at the possiblities that Plasma aims to create. But more than weather widgets and other toys, the Plasma developers hope to change the way we interact with the desktop to make it much more useful and usable.

Phonon is replacing Arts, KDE's sound server, and then going several steps further. It's a wrapper for multimedia libraries such as Gstreamer, Xine and NMM, allowing application developers to easily incorporate multimedia functionalities into their application without having to worry about supporting the right underlying technology. Amarok, the music player, has featured something similar for quite a while now. During aKademy, Matthias Kretz showed how, with half a dozen lines of code, one can now easily play and control media from any source with standard user interface pieces regardless of the underlying platform.

Solid aims for something similar with hardware and network interaction. Technologies like udev, HAL and DBUS have recently brought huge advances in hardware interaction to the Linux desktop. But KDE runs on platforms other than Linux, and supporting these moving targets can be difficult for application developers. Solid will offer a single point of access for information about connected hardware and networks, making KDE applications far more aware of their environment. An example offered was that KMail will no longer complain about not being able to reach servers if your machine doesn't have a network connected.

Both Solid and Phonon were imported into the KDE SVN server during aKademy, a celebrated milestone that will help silence the "vapourware" critics who have been sceptical about KDE's promises. Seigo, the lead developer of Plasma, admitted that it was some way behind the other two pillars, but claimed that he was so swamped with aKademy administration work that he has been unable to properly focus on development lately. Hopefully that should now change.

Another track deserving particular attention focused on KDE in Asia, historically an underrepresented region given the phenomenal activity of contributors in the continent. Localisation in Cambodia was discussed, involving a complex script that is left-to-right but non-linear, and which is unfortunately not fully supported in rendering engines such as Qt, Pango and ICU. Opportunities for KDE in India were presented by Pradeepto Bhattacharya, a KDE developer who founded KDE India and is working hard to popularise free software in his country.

On Sunday, hidden amongst twenty other talks was a presentation on the obscurely-named English Breakfast Network. Adrian de Groot, a long-term KDE contributor, was frustrated with the incomplete API documentation, which was infrequently generated and also contained a lot of errors. So he set-up EBN, a service that regularly builds the documentation and examines the logs, reporting errors so people can fix them. Since then the EBN has expanded to include a user documentation sanitiser, a coding standards checker and some basic usability testing.

The reason I report on the EBN is that de Groot has been part of the KDE Quality team since it began over two years ago. But with the EBN, KDE finally has an automated system that reports on the quality of KDE's work. We often talk about the increasing professionalism of free software projects. The EBN is a perfect example, an unassuming little project that will supply the equivalent of Raymond's mythical "many eyes", making the bugs shallow and hoping that developers take notice.

Being the most prominent log analysis geek in the project, de Groot did some interesting work on the SVN commit logs over the duration of the conference. Usually there is a peak in activity during European daylight hours, and especially around noon, which reflects the geography of the project. During aKademy, which saw a surge of 3,000 commits, there were spikes just before lunch and dinner in Dublin, with huge dips during mealtimes. It's an indication of just how many contributors made it to the conference.

These dips also betray the most important aspect of these conferences: socialising. Seigo wasn't being facetious when he showed endless funny photos of KDE contributors. His point was not only that communities produce and want to use great software, but also that it's fun and rewarding to be part of a community.

Walking around the streets, cafes and pubs of Dublin with people from around the world is a wonderful way to learn about the individuals, technology they're interested in, their culture and more. You've not really lived until you'd had Dutch contributor Adrian de Groot reciting Lewis Caroll's timeless poem "Jabberwocky" to you in his peculiar American-tinged English accent over a pint of ale! Aaron Seigo is always willing to recount embarassing stories, and you'll rarely be short of lunatics to accompany on evening trips around the city.

Monday saw the meeting of the KDE e.V., the membership organisation, which I cannot report from because its proceedings remain secret for now. It overran by several hours, a tradition kept for several years now, but by all accounts it was at least productive. Imagine, if you will, addressing every major flamewar that arises on a mailing list during the past year, and you'll have some idea of the atmosphere!

On Tuesday the coding marathon began, a period when developers can get work done side by side, rather than relying on IRC and email; the trendy term is a "high bandwidth" meeting, a neologism that seems to have gone mainstream in the business world. The main focus for the day was the OpenDocumentFormat, with a series of presentations addressing the political and technical opportunities enabled by the new international standard.

Dr. Barbara Held, the Enterprise and Industry Directorate-General of the European Commission Program for Interchange of Data between Administrations, spoke about the status of ODF in the EU. Whilst the IDA have recommended it as part of their European Interoperability Framework, EU rules stipulate that it cannot be favoured over other standards that also have ISO/EIC recognition (such as Microsoft's OOXML). Because ODF is developed by an industry consortium, rather than a public body, it isn't even deemed to be a genuine "open standard" in the EU until a body like ISO recognise it as such. It seems that we are far from standardising on ODF in Europe.

Rob Weir from IBM proposed an OpenDocument Developer Kit, which would provide a higher-level abstraction of the format's features to application developers. The presence of the IDA, IBM, the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), NLnet and KDE demonstrated the wide support for ODF, and the diversity of organisations implementing support for the initiative in their applications. ODF has often been criticised for being "OpenOffice.org's file format", but with KOffice now surpassing OpenOffice.org in many areas, that label deserves to be buried.

The following day focused on human-computer interaction (HCI), a term that encompasses accesibility, usability, documentation, graphical design and internationalisation. The intention was to "show, practice and deepen intersections with development", contuinuing work that has been rising in profile within the KDE community in recent years. Each session consisted of a presentation followed by detailed discussion, ranging from new HCI guidelines to the implementation of the Tango icon specification in KDE.

As part of the latter presentation, and at other points during the conference, KDE artists Kenneth Wimer and David Vignoni showed off some of the new icons for KDE 4. Oxygen is a theme being developed from scratch, rethinking the use of icons in KDE at every level. The hope is that a well designed icon set will support usability and accessibility by learning from and planning for the ways in which people use them. The outcome is also visually stunning, making a break with KDE's somewhat cartoonish past without looking too similar to its competitors.

Speaking of visual excitements, the developers of Okular took the chance to show off their work during the hackathon. Okular is the replacement for KPDF, KGhostview, KDVI and potentially other document viewers in the KDE family. With a consistent user interface it will allow users to look at documents shared as PDF, Postscript, DVI, DjVu, CHM, fax, TIFF, XPS and ODT. It also features all of the features that made KPDF the premier free PDF viewer, and now in addition sports annotations, proper text selection, an overview mode and more. Having just finished an MA dissertation in philosophy, which meant reading an awful lot of PDFs, I only wish they'd thought of this sooner!

Another team to make progress was the plucky group of masochists who maintain KDE's web sites. With the GNOME web team making huge strides towards completely restructuring and redesigning their web pages, the KDE team sat down in a pub to bash out their own strategy. Such was their dedication that they passed up many an invitation for pub crawls and club visits to get the right solution.

The most immediate change was a switch from the old look to a new, slick Oxygen design, rolled out across all the main KDE web sites. Underneath the veneer the web pages remain much the same, however, and sifting through endless pages of outdated text to produce an informative and inviting web site is going to be a massive task.

Thankfully they have plenty of time and goodwill from the community. Having been to aKademy in 2004, it was strange to feel a similar vibe again two years later. Many things have changed in the KDE community, with working groups bringing a more strategic approach to everything from marketing to human-computer interaction and release procedures. The project has also grown, with new projects like Okular and now-firmly established stars such as the music player Amarok.

But the energy and expertise within the KDE community remains the key to its future. Seigo opened the conference with this message, and by its conclusion the conference had proved him right.

This article was published in issue 68 of Linux User & Developer.