Dear KDE Community!

Dear KDE Community,

meet the mailing list where you can now talk about non-technical topics relevant to our community: kde-community. From a debate about our next conference to discussing our collaboration with other organizations and our goals as KDE community, this list is for anything which does not fit on the KDE development lists.

The goals are described clear enough:

The purpose of the mailing list is to provide a place for non-technical information and discussions which are relevant to the KDE community as a whole. All people who consider themselves to be part of the KDE community are invited to join. Conversations on the mailing list are respectful, considerate, polite and constructive following our KDE Code of Conduct.

The list collects announcements, information and results from discussions in other places and offers a place to get feedback on non-technical questions or plans of relevance for the whole KDE community.

As the 'collects announcements, ...' part already hints at, we expect people to try and make a habit of summarizing discussions which do NOT take place in public on this list once a conclusion is reached. This should be the central place for KDE governance debate.

You can find the list and subscribe here.

History lesson

Summer last year Cornelius wrote a blog about setting up a kde-community mailing list. It had been discussed on the KDE e.V. list that it doesn't make much sense that we have no public place to discuss governance related things in KDE.

Most of these discussions take place on the private KDE e.V. mailing list. Mirko Boehm proposed to simply open that list: what is discussed there is relevant to the whole KDE community. While there was agreement on the principle of opening up, there are things which are discussed there that probably should not be open. They are few and far between but some discussions about financial or personal matters do benefit from a less public place. Some argued that public discussions can also harm our public profile and it came up that bikeshedding could get even worse.

An alternative was proposed by Jos vd Oever: create a new list and put discussions there, unless there is a strong need of keeping them private.

After this, however, the discussion kind'a died out (I am summarizing more than a handful of mails here...). The subject came up at the e.V. board meeting in Berlin and we agreed that there's no good reason to Just Do It™. If nobody likes the idea the list will remain empty. Natural Selection FTW! I went ahead, asked our Amazing Admins to set me up, configured it and made Cornelius and myself admins who will exact our vengeance on everybody we disagree with who misbehaves.

So that's the story. The result is the KDE Community mailing list on the KDE servers. Is it official? What, you active in KDE and you don't know how nonsensical that question is? As always, the list will have to prove itself... I can only ask: please subscribe and bring your non-technical questions, comments, reminders and proposals to this list. We'll yell at the folks on the internal e.V. list if they bring things there which should be public.

And don't forget: if you want to talk to each other in person, this is where you do it. Go and book ;-)

Looking forward to your hugs at Akademy!