Akademy 2018 in lovely Vienna!

Attending Akademy - the annual KDE contributors summit - is always a quite intense experience. This year it happened from 11th to 17th August in the lovely city of Vienna, Austria. It was a quite special edition. We got a higher number of attendees, including some people who have been doing KDE things for more than a decade but only now had the chance to show up and talking to people in-person. In addition, we changed the conference program a bit, moving the reports for the Working Groups from the KDE e.V. General Assembly (restricted to KDE e.V. members) to the general Akademy schedule. Also, this year we introduced four training sessions covering topics not exactly technical but of paramount important for a community like KDE: Non-violent Communication, Online Fundraising and Campaigning, Documentation writing for non-writers, and Public Speaking Training.

This Akademy was also quite emblematic in a personal level. My three-year term in the KDE e.V. Board of Directors comes to end and it's quite rewarding to recall not only a lot of nice accomplishments we (the board) managed to achieve, but also the challenges and lessons learned from such a journey into the heart of a huge FOSS community like KDE. It's the time to say a big 'thank-you' to my current and previous board partners and wish all the best to Andy. I'm sure the board got a quite entusiastic, skilled, and commited new member.

This year was the first in the past four or five Akademies I didn't submit a talk proposal :). In spite of that, Akademy is always a place for a lot of work in chairing sessions, attending BoFs and training sessions, and talking to people about any KDE-related topics. I, Aracele, and Filipe held a BoF about KDE in Americas. The goal was to share experiences about the KDE adoption in North and South America, as well as coming up with some actions to leverage as user and contributors base at the continent. We talked a bit about promising communities arising in Colombia, Argentina, and Cuba. For the first time ever we're considering to organize the next LaKademy (the Latin-America Contributors Summit) in a country other than Brazil.

Another quite inspiring activity I took part in Akademy 2018 was the Non-violent Communication training session, where we got introduced to the basics of understanding people's needs and how to properly react to them in a sense where collaboration and a friendly environment are always kept. We had the chance to do some practical exercises where we could notice that such advices are not always so easy to follow as they might appear to be :).

So, this a short glympse about my Akademy experience. Now it's the time to get involved back in some other nice KDE stuff I used to do before joining the board. Please keep tuned for some news from the Minuet land.