It's been only two days so far, but I'm really glad to have come here, at Akademy. First, and I guess it's not a surprise for anybody who ever went to a conference, there's the usual pleasure to see old friends and finally meet some people. And I promise I'm not being threatened by some group of crazy KDE developers when I say that the KDE community is amazing. Of course, not as amazing as the most amazing GNOME community ;-) Actually, having discussed about this here, there are certainly big differences between our two communities, but they are also both really similar in many aspects. It all makes me feel good about the co-located GUADEC+Akademy next year since I see how great it could be.
But the social side of the event is not everything: since I usually don't have time to closely follow what's going on in KDE, Akademy is a good occasion for me to catch up and learn. Learn about technologies, but alors learn important facts like the fact that some highly-visible KDE developer who shall stay anonymous (let's name him A.S.) is a foot fetish. At least, that's what he told me yesterday evening...
The real reason I came here was to give a talk about collaboration -- but not just between GNOME and KDE, although I guess the fact that a GNOME person gave it at a KDE event might give this impression. And the talk went quite well. The goal was not to convince people that it's a good thing (if some people are not convinced about this yet, then I'm not sure how I'd be able to convince them since others already tried before), but to get people obsessed about it. Collaboration should be something we do by default, in a proactive way. Sure, collaboration requires time and can slow things down a bit; and it's not even always possible or sometimes we just don't agree. This explains why pushing this collaboration back to later
can easily happen, but sometimes this later
is just too late... Also, on a more general note, simply getting more communication going between the relevant people in one specific area would definitely do wonders for this area.
My battery is dying right now, so I won't elaborate more about the talk and won't tell you about how poppler is an amazing success and how the fact that having different solutions for keyring/wallet creates a situation where we encourage Firefox to continue to use yet another solution because there's no common approach.
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