As you may have seen from other posts on https://planet.kde.org, KDE’s annual Akademy conference is over and people are starting to blog about their thoughts on it!

This is my fifth Akademy, and my third one attending in person. As always, it was great to meet up with colleagues and old friends in real life! A kind of magic happens when a bunch of technically adept people with strong social relationships gather together in a room. There was a lot of it on display this year, even despite the punishing heat and spotty Wi-Fi performance!

The talks this year were quite good (as always), and I hope that at least one of mine could be counted among them. I gave a talk about my KDE Goal, “Automation and Systematization“, and a short lighting talk about Welcome Center, in addition to helping to present the KDE e.V. Board report. I particularly enjoyed the lightning talk by Kai Uwe Broulik about his custom solar PV array monitoring system using System Monitor, which I would love to get running for my own system!

But my favorite part of Akademy is always what comes afterwards: the “Birds of a Feather” (or BoF) brainstorming sessions. My favorites were the ones on Tuesday organized by Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss on the subject of internal communication. These were very productive and resulted in multiple actionable tasks as well as an impromptu hacking session/sprint on Thursday to update old wiki pages, consolidate information, and use the default Wikimedia theme! Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend, but this is a subject I’m really excited about as I think documentation and internal communications are critically important topics, so it was wonderful to see so many other people excited about it too. If you’d like to help, please update any stale information or whole pages you find at https://community.kde.org. If you find a stale page but don’t feel comfortable making any such changes yourself, just edit it and add the text {{Outdated}} to the top, and someone else will handle it.

Overall, it was a useful productive and great time! After so many trips to Europe over the past 6 months, I’m now looking forward to some nice, uninterrupted stretches of normalcy where I can sit down and do some much-needed hacking and KDE e.V. work that’s been piling up, and actually implement some of the ideas and changes that we’ve all been discussing!