It has been a tough decision, because we had three awesome proposals, but after a period of getting feedback from the community and some conversations between the boards of the KDE e.V. and the GNOME Foudation we have settled on the Gran Canaria bid for holding Akademy and GUADEC as co-hosted event in 2009.

This event will be something new and it will be big in many ways. If you read about this year's GUADEC which is happening in Istanbul right now and see the anticipation of Akademy in Belgium on Planet KDE you get a glimpse of what energy will come together at the co-hosted event next year. We have a chance to put the Free Desktop on a whole new level by exploring areas of collaboration between the two big free software desktops in yet unknown depth and showing the world that the free software ideals which unite us are more important than the competition which sometimes is between our projects.

I'm happy that we have a strong local organizing team behind the event, and I'm looking forward to work with them and the GNOME people to make Akademy 2009 an outstanding event for both our communities and everybody else who wants to take part in the future of the free desktop.

Two great pictures brought to you by Wordle in combination with my blog and Planet SUSE.

Beautiful.

Today I'm writing in my role as a member of the program committee for the Akademy 2008 Contributor's Conference. We have received a lot of great proposals for presentations and are still in the process of selecting and assembling a program. So speaker notification will be delayed by something like a week.

Regardless of the question, if you will present at the Akademy conference or not, I highly recommend to join Akademy. Register at the Akademy web site, book your travel, and go to Belgium in August. I can promise that we will have an exciting conference program and I'm pretty sure that Akademy as a whole will live up to the high standards of community gathering we are used to from previous Akademies.

LinuxTag is a blast. I'm here for the third day, have met a lot of fantastic people, listened to great talks, and had a lot of fun. On Wednesday there was Aaron's KDE 4 keynote, where he also showed the tremendously exciting Marble with OpenStreetMap integration. Yesterday Till talked about Kontact, which now runs on all platforms including Windows. Liquidat has screenshots, or check it out live at the BSI booth. Another fascinating project I saw is the Open Bicycle Computer, a bike computer built from scratch as open project.

Today at 13:30 there is Nat's keynote The future of Linux is software appliances. Go to room London to see it or check out the live stream. It will be worth it

Today there also is the KDE track and tomorrow will be the openSUSE track with more great talks.

Linuxtag excitement!

At SUSE I work in the incubation team. We are exploring new technologies, creating prototypes of future systems, and trying to find and shape some of the features that will be part of upcoming SUSE products and the ecosystem around that. It's a fascinating job, challenging, fun, and always exciting. For somebody like me who loves to create new things and enjoys working with an awesome team of innovative people this is a dream job.

At the moment we are looking for some new team members. So if you are interested in joining a great team, working on technology from tomorrow, making Linux rock the world, see Nat's blog for more details. If you have questions please don't hesitate to contact me by email or talk to me in person next week at LinuxTag. I will be there from Wednesday to Saturday.

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Akonadi is hot. I completely realized that when I saw the fantastic submission by Nuno and Thomas for the Akonadi logo contest. This logo captures the essence of the Akonadi architecture in a very beautiful way. I remember well when I drew the first version of the Akonadi architecture on the whiteboard at the Osnabrück 4 meeting more than two years ago. The round shapes made it hard to put it in digital form, though. So after taking a tour through the drawing applications of the free software world without lasting success, I decided to write a program to create the diagram. When I saw the Akonadi logo contest and some of the submissions there, I thought it would be great to have a three dimensional version of the architecture diagram, and now Nuno and Thomas just did that. Wonderful!

But why is Akonadi hot? I think the main reason is that it's living the KDE 4 vision. It's the condensed experience of ten years of KDE PIM development put into a beautiful architecture. It has portability built in by the platform-independent central storage and the toolkit-neutral access protocol. The Akonadi backend has recently been moved to kdesupport to be usable by non-KDE projects as well. Finally Akonadi really implements the promise of KDE 3 in terms of functionality of a central PIM storage which is conveniently avaliable all over the desktop.

Akonadi somehow is the missing pillar of KDE 4. With KDE 4.1 this gap will be filled and the Akonadi platform will be available for development of the next generation of PIM applications to advance free software on the desktop one more step in direction to world domination. I'm looking forward to this. Really.

Yesterday was a busy day on the akademy-talks mailing list. Proposals were rolling in constantly. This is because today is the deadline for submissions of presentations for Akademy 2008. So you still have a chance. Have a look at the Call for Presentations and submit your talk now.

There are so many interesting topics we would like to hear about at Akademy:

• You have ported your application to KDE 4? Tell about your experience.
• You run KDE on one of the fancy small devices, be it an Internet tablet, a phone or a tiny laptop? Show us how this works.
• You are working on one of the pillars of KDE 4? Tell us how to make use of them.
• You are working on a distribution which includes KDE? Present to us what made your life hard and what made it wonderful.
• You were a GSoC student last year and are still with the project? Let us know what you have done.
• You have written a cool Pasmoid or a rocking Akonadi agent? Submit your talk now. We are also accepting lightning talks, if you feel like five or ten minutes are enough to present your work.
• You are working in the community as a non-coder? Tell us about what else than writing code is important for KDE.
• You are using KDE in your business? Share your experience.
• You are working on a related Free Software project? Give us ideas how to collaborate.
• You are doing something completely different which is related to KDE? Submit your talk now.

I'm looking forward to another wave of exciting talk proposals. Keep it going.

Last weekend I visited the seventh Linux info day at Augsburg, organized by the local Linux User Group and held a talk about KDE 4. It was a nice event and the talk was well received. There is a lot of interest in KDE and people are generally excited and looking forward what we will bring to them with the KDE 4 series. If you are interested have a look at the slides of the KDE 4 talk (in German).

As Franz already wrote there are a couple of exciting free software events coming up. From March 4th to 9th there is CeBIT, the world's largest computer trade show. KDE will have a booth there. If you want to help to show KDE to a broad variety of visitors there, don't hesitate to contact kde-events@kde.org. It's interesting, it's fun, and it's a great help for KDE. The KDE e.V. is able to help with travel costs if needed.

For me next stop will be FOSDEM this weekend. I'm part of the SUSE crew which will have a strong presence there. Check out the openSUSE developer room to get the latest info about the upcoming openSUSE 11.0 and a lot of other interesting topics around openSUSE. FOSDEM is great because there probably is no other place where you can meet that many free software people on one weekend. See you in Brussels.

I saw a nice form of recruiting software developers on web.de today. On the page which appears when an error on the server occurs they have a box saying "This wouldn't happened to us with you? Show it to us, apply for a job as software developer". That sounds like the commercial version of "Send a patch".

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But the photo on the page disturbs me. I have never seen a group of software developers where everybody wears a white shirt.