aKademy2005
Most delayed review ever?
It took me some time to get back on my normal track. I brought a nice little “airconditioning” cold back home from Malaga. And some need for sleep and non KDE conversation.
What sticks to my mind about my time in Malaga after a week?
The people!
This aKademy, even more than the last one, was about people for me. Our hosts from Linux Malaga managed everybody to feel welcome. To me it felt a bit like visiting good friends in their home. Antonio, Cayetano, Eduardo, Juan-Mi, Javier, David, Victor and all the others (I am horrible at remembering names, but I clearly remember your faces and all the work you did), I am really glad that my life included meeting you.
I met most of the aKademy attendance for the first time. Being able to see a face and person behind the electronic conversation sure makes a difference for me. It gives the KDE community, I am a part of, an even more human face. I am a talkative person, not always to my favor, but even I needed some days of silent and lonesome computer use before being able to communicate again. 
Wherever you went there were people talking, discussing, having a coffee together, going for dinner, walking back to the residence, talking about last night adventures, … . I used my own computer only for some hours during all of aKademy and I am proud of it.
This aKademy saw many important decisions. The e.V. meeting especially brought some important new directions. I did the official minutes and was a pretty busy writing up the lengthy discussions and all the decisions made. Exciting times ahead.
The two conferences held too many good talks. I was amazed at the quality of the overall conference. Having a three track developer conference sure forced some hard decisions which talk to attend, but it shows the high amount of quality work going on in KDE.
I liked talking to our guests. Mark Shuttleworth is an interesting human and gave a nice talk about collaboration. Pete Goodall was fun to talk to. I got some more insight about some topics from him. (Hi Pete, Marteijn forwarded me the money )
I especially liked meeting our two guests from Nokia. I met them first during the social event and they are not only very friendly and open people they are also very knowledgable about KHTML and the surrounding technologies and the people involved. David Carson and Deepika Chauhan gave us some nice eyeopeners about the problems and challenges of the Symbian platform during their talk, but they were talking to the relevant developers far beyond that scope. Especially the emphasize on their desire to contribute back and to work from a common code base, showed a deep insight how OpenSource works. It was nice and refreshing that OpenSource is not only seen as a milk cow by corporations. David, Deepika, I am glad I met you.
Time to talk about the Social Events. They deserve the capital letters. The Novell sponsored night in “El Liceo” (credits to Cayetano for the correction) will keep the “best social event of a OSS/FSS conference” crown for the next 100 years. The KDE community sure knows how to party. This was proven the next weekend at the beach party.
The fruits of some of the discussions and meetings I had during the Coding Marathon will become separate entries or come to life later this year.
To sum it up: I loved my time in Malaga. The KDE community rocks.
( I will link to pictures once I have them uploaded somewhere. I did not know flickr has a upload limit of 20MB. Well, there is a start available )
