Akademy-BR 2010 – Day 1

Almost everybody here waiting for rain ceasing and having breakfast when we finally could start Akademy-BR 2010 activities around 9:30a.m. After a brief opening session for introductions, sprint working guidelines, and expected deliverables, the breakout groups were formed and the sessions started in two meeting rooms we organised in the hostel.

People interests range from source code development in KDE-Games, Rocs, KEduca, Plasmate, to promo actions, and artwork. The girls (Amanda, Camila, Taiane, Jordana, Yasmin, and Aracele) are basically focused in defining a KDE Brasil Promotion Plan for 2010 but also in coding activities (Plasma) and translation.

In summary, what we have been doing:

• Summer of Code 2010 submissions: we managed to submit six GSoC 2010 proposals where five of them are related to KDE. Luiz Romário has submitted a proposal for adding OpenGL support in KStars, Alexandre Raymond wants to develop a new front-end for Git including a flexible KPart, Wagner Reck has submitted a proposal for enhancing Rocs functionalities to support automata, Taiane wants to work in a Plasma Educational desktop, and Vitor Boschi has submitted a proposal for a generic HTTP server for KDE. Arthur Nascimento has submitted a proposal related to gcc;
• KDE-Games sprint: Tomaz is leading a KDE-Games sprint devoted to card games development and helping the newbies in general KDE development;
• Rocs: scripting execution is now performed in a secondary thread and support for plugins has been improved;
• KDE Observatory: a major refactoring is being done to speed up performance by using a new database of consolidated commit data instead of acquiring information directly from kde-commits archive. In addition, a data engine is being created to centralise data to multiple KDE Observatory instances;
• Promo meeting: a brainstorm session for defining the priorities of KDE promo actions for 2010 in Brazil has happened and the focused points were: to share promotion stuff among regional KDE groups (talks, short-course material, videos, etc), to create KDE Brasil channel on YouTube to store KDE talks, interviews, experiences, etc, to spread KDE in non-technical areas by visiting high schools, to plan the KDE Brasil participation in FISL and Latinoware, and to revive KDE Women;
• Chord Melody generator: Alexandre Amorim is working in a new application for generating guitar chord melody arrangements from melody and chord sequences as input;
• KEduca: Metasys team started the talk with the  other KDE guys about the best way to port Keduca to KDE 4. During this talks was decided to rewrite the aplication with a more flexible structure and with a better user interface;
• Artwork: Anderson Viana has shared its time to develop the official KDE Brasil logo, Rocs icons, and promotion stuff for FISL and Latinoware.
  After the hacking session we all went out for dinner, some beer and cachaça, and the more excited ones :) went on for dancing and drinking !

I promise you some pictures in next post :)
See you,