out of the universe

PS: Please only add tasks with a mentor.

If you are unsure how tasks should look like: At the Qt Contributors’ Summit I did a Social Skills for Geeks session together with Hanne and Alexandra. I’ll try to post a summary of the session as soon as I have the video.

One of the things that we talked about is managing and wasting time. Together with the attendees we came to how much time is wasted by sending useless emails to mailing lists. One of the reasons for that is that people are not aware how many people will get their email and spend at least a few seconds of their day on it. To improve that situation I asked KDE’s sysadmin team to give me the subscriber numbers for our public mailing lists. Here are the numbers for a few of them:

Keep in mind that these numbers are the lower boundary. There are quite a few people on top of that reading mailing lists through GMane and archiving services who do not show up in these numbers.

Have these numbers in mind when sending a useless email to a mailing list. But also have in mind how many people you can potentially reach with important messages.

I’ve been hanging around in KDE’s sysadmin IRC channel for a while now and you know what’s the best thing about scanning the backlog every day? You get to see whenever a new developer gets added to the committers list, making him/her able to commit to (nearly) every bit of the codebase. That’s really really awesome. And while watching this Tom, Eike and I thought that while we’re creating a lot of accounts it seems to have increased a lot in the last weeks. Since we wanted to be sure Tom and Eike ran some stats. And tada – here’s the result: That’s the new accounts created for KDE’s SVN and git repositories since January 2008. As you can see our feeling was right. Last month 39 new accounts were created. That’s more than 1 account per day! That means more than 1 new developer per day. Pretty amazing if you ask me.

Hats off to KDE for being able to attract so many talented new people and for being able to integrate them in the community.

PS: Policies on when an account request is granted have not changed in that time.

I’m super happy that KDE could accept 51 student for GSoC this year. It’s an impressive number and they’ll make a difference in KDE this year. But this number also means that we had to say no to many students. A lot of tough choices had to be made. Now I can’t magically make more GSoC slot appear unfortunately. But I can do something else.  I can run another Season of KDE together with an awesome team of mentors and co-admins. And that is exactly what I am going to do. So here’s the details for this year’s Season of KDE:

If you have further questions please come to our IRC channel #kde-soc or send an email to the admin team at email@example.com.

In previous years we had 1, 4 and 8 successful Season of KDE students. My personal goal for this year is 16. Are you going to be one of them? You should be!
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