We had a KDE-fr BoF yesterday. Until there, their were efforts done at several town PoV, but not really at the nation size. That’s why Benjamin and I decided first to do the aKademy-fr. We chose Toulouse (in the south) because we are from there, and because the community is really getting bigger and bigger with the years and the ervin’s efforts. It seems to be a great thing, well received by the french community. Guys from every where are willing to help us. Mister Renard is alreayd thinking in having the aKademy-fr 2012 in Paris. That’s great news !

We also talked of several other points I am trying to sum up here.

In which state is the KDE-France association:
It seems to be closed, most of the people there just disappeared. We have to look if it is possible to open it again, or to get it alive. By the way, it is not our priority to have this association alive. We already have several LUGs in France and the KDE e.V. can also help us when we need an official association. The global side of the KDE e.V. is also a good point when you need something official. The point is, we’ll make it alive as soon as possible, but there are already a lot of work to do before. Talking about that, we also noticed that most of the french LUGS were becoming distribution’s LUG… I mean, there are less and less “open source LUG” or “KDE/Gnome LUG” or whatever, there are “Ubuntu/Mandriva/… LUGs”. It is kind of scary because it splits the people, remove a big part of the share spirit we knew in the LUGs. We won’t talk about the fact most of the time, there are companies behind distributions…

What’s the state of the KDE community and activities in France:
Ervin’s as talked about the Toulouse state in his conference. The community seems to really be in a good way. There are many events managed now. There is not enough activity in Paris. There are only few people, and no students. The trouble is that the only one that are motivated have not the time to manage the community things. In fact, that’s the main trouble I can see here: we are not enough. We have to enroll more people, every where we can. A good solution would be to be more listenable, and to go to people is they don’t come to us. This idea leads us to the following point.

Which activities/parties/camp whatever should we be involved in to become more visible:
We have chosen more or less 3 events. Solution linux will still be followed by the KDE French community. We also have to make a big effort on the RMLL. We had not enough people there for the moment, we have to go with more people. Some guys are ready to move there when it is necessary, so we have to point them they have to go! Another movement we can really see (at least in France) is the Ubuntu community growing and growing. They manage most of parties, and meetings. Aurélien Gateau was explaining us they were looking for KDE guys to make talk there, but they never find a way to contact us (we’ll come back on the contact side later). Whatever, Aurélien is in a good mood with them and will introduce the FDE French community to them, because we are ready to make efforts there. It would really be appreciated by every one to have these kind of collaboration. That’s why we have already planned the aKademy-fr in the same event of the Toulouse Ubuntu Party, and also the drupal conf. It becomes a big event and we’ll be listened there we hope. For now, we cannot do more than these main events because we are not enough, and all the free days we have from our jobs are going in there… we cannot enforce every one to do the same thing. Now let’s talk a bit more about the how-to-contact-us- and how-to-make-the-community-alive.

What are the ways to be listened:
Several ways are possible for us, every thing is good if it keeps the attention of someone. But we have to focus on the best way and most used ones. A good one is the mailing lists. It seems to be really active on kde-francophone, and not on kde-events-fr. We’ll try some crossed-send mails to involve some active kde-francophone guys into kde-events-fr. That’s reality that the french translation team is really alive, and active. They are about 30 people more or less active, but not inactive. 10 of them are REALLY active. That kind of guys like the community would like to help the community side too, they just have to know how to do. We are working on that. Another way to show the world we are alive is the website and forum. fr.kde.org were broken, and it should be alive before the end of August again, YEAH! It will be a wordpress integrated website, so it will be easy to put news on it, and we’ll do it for sure. Events will be announced, some news “blog looking” will be added as often as possible. We also HAVE to be more active on the forum.kde.org KDE-Francophone side. I’ll handle point and point friends to look at it more often. To be on #kde-fr on IRC:freenode couldn’t hurt neither, so let’s make the chan rocks!

So here were the moments of the BoF of KDE-fr. We also give ourself some tasks to go in this way, or to do the future events be a success

See you soon.