And how's life...

Hi web,

Haven't blogged for a while - been very (VERY) busy with work and other stuff. I've recovered from the car accident, and so has Kenny. I even bought a new car. This time not yellow (somehow that color doesn't feel right for a car anymore), but boring grey. Aaah well, at least it's corporate-compattible...

Ow, and I got a new assignment, which is interesting. I now work at a small organisation (500 employees) which distributes 2.5 billion euros to the schools & universities in the Netherlands. Yeah, each person working here distributes 50 million euro a year on average ;-)

On to KDE related stuff - a lot going on. We're discussing freedom of speech & rules of engagement - that's one heck of a topic. I always find it hard to participate in such discussions, as I generally see how both sides have a good point. And when I try to keep it simple, I have to retract or say I was sorry for what I said... Meh, I'm not good in keeping a fight going. I don't think that barfight with Sebas is ever going to happen.

Aaah, and there is the report about social innovation in KDE. Sorry guys, haven't had much time to spend on that yet, but I will. I've got a nice piece of theory ready, giving the basics - but it's still very much company-oriented, and I want to make a KDE specific piece. Thus still work to do.

Last of all, can I say KDE 4.2 is going to rock? I've been participating in some discussions here and there, most notably a dutch Mandriva forum but also at places I gave a talk about KDE. The feedback is pretty much what we've been hearing a lot: looks cool, probably a lot of potential, but I miss *pet feature X*. Why did you remove that feature etc etc. And often the "you guys are pulling a Gnome on us" is thrown in.
Hehe, they really fear the Gnome, apparently :D

But from my experience in Trunk I can tell them most issues are fixed, most features are implemented - and of course I can explain what we are TRYING to do.

To re-itterate (feedback welcome):

The reason for the missing features is not that we actively removed them, but all the work we put in the infrastructure. We heavily improved the inner workings of KDE, and now have to port, sometimes even rewrite everything. It'll take a while, but it will make KDE more maintainable, improvable and of course cool.

Then, after more questions about missing features and /me talking about 'we want to improve usability':

Don't worry, we're NOT pulling a Gnome 2.0 on you guys. Yes, we want to improve our usability, but in a Better Way (TM). If adding a feature would lower usability, we try to come up with a way of doing it SMART. We like having our cake and eating it too, and in many cases, it is possible. But when it is not, we DO implement the feature, unless it's really really obscure and almost nobody will use it. Of course, doing things this way takes a bit more time and work and experimentation. So missing features are not due to the KDE developers going the 'dumb-it-down' way, but due to a lack of time.

Meanwhile, I always mention:

Creative ideas on increasing usability while not decreasing featureset, or even increasing the featureset without a decrease in usability are MORE than welcome. Even if we're talking wild ideas here - we're willing to try things, we know that's what it takes to innovate. You've seen us do it - and we'll continue doing so.

The good thing is our users trust us, and they are often pretty big KDE fans. They do get confused by all the apparent focus on bling & clean interface in KDE, and the lack of features. But when we explain the underlying reasons for the changes, they generally understand it. And they are willing to wait a bit more. Many DO complain about the approach distributions have taken: "If you guys tell us KDE 4.2 is the release we're all waiting for, why do many distro's switch to 4.1?". I can only tell them I think the distributions are imho making a mistake - but who am I to tell eg Ubuntu, Mandriva or Suse to change their way?

What does surprise me is how big the influence is of a few missing features compared to all the cool new stuff, which seems mostly ignored. This I think is a clear proof that the few features Linux misses, compared to Windows, really hurt a lot - despite all the things we do better. Of course, part of this is familiarity as well, something Gnome does just right: incremental improvement. Unlucky for them, it gets you only so far.


Wow, that was a huge braindump, without any pictures, so I'll stop right here. Let me just finish by saying I think this community is great. The recent discussions about freedom made me realize how much we all appreciate it - something binding us together, imho. Despite (often actually fairly minor) differences in opinion.

car accident

Hi there!

Some might have heard already how Kenny and /me got involved in a car accident yesterday...

The story is rather simple: we arrived in Amersfoort (where I live), and after dropping of Jos van den Ooever at the trainstation I wanted to show Kenny a bit of the center of the city. Now the center isn't very car-friendly, but we managed to find a little street which did show some promise. So we went in there - and suddenly full stop... We were out for a few seconds, then came by, saw flames coming out the front of the car. I had an airbag in my face, and generally felt like shit.

After we got out of the burning car and the police & firebrigade came, we figured we apparently went into a street which was 'guarded' by a rising bollard. And that thing decided to come up and look around just when we drove over it. It threw the car a couple of metres to the side, totally destroying the engine block. Actually that engine block was totally flipped in the engine compartment! The resulting fire was rather scary, but besides some water damage the goods in the care were fine. The care itself is a total loss, though.

Luckily we're relatively OK. Both have pretty heavy chestpain, most likely due to the seatbelt, but no permanent damage as far as we can tell right now.

So, that's the end of Akademy for Kenny & me ;-)
Not especially great, and I'll have to buy a new car, but alas - we had some kind of special experience, right?

If you're interested in pictures, look on kenny's site:
http://selkie.duffus.org/~kd/autoongeluk/

innovation BOF

The innovation BOF went both worse and better than I expected. It turned out to be hard to go from the theoretical level to more practical implications. But the audience was great, they came up with some very useful ideas, which I'll go through in a minute.

But first about the questionare I've blogged about and which I would like the KDE contributors to fill in. It measures things which according to lots of scientific articles are important for innovation. This is mostly kind'a vague, think about concepts like 'formalization' which measures the extend to which the organization uses formal structure & rules to get things done or keep ppl in line. The idea is to see if there are area's KDE is doing bad in, and then figure out what we can do to improve. The full questionare takes approx. 30 min in dutch, and I've removed a bunch of questions, but I can't promise it'll take you less than 30 minutes. It has been translated, and most of you take it in another than your native language, which might make it take longer.

It is very important to fill in all questions. I know this feels targeted to commercial organizations, so you might have to think of a way how this applies to you. Please try to do so, because I can't use incomplete questionares. Here it is: questionare.

In the BOF I essentially went through the constructs, explaining what they did and meant. Some nice ideas came out of the resulting discussion. Here are the notes:

To increase input from users and improve our incremental innovation (bringing a more polished user interface):
- get a 'suggest improvement' menu item in the Help dialog. At first this should report a wish, but in time it should probably point to an ideastorm (Ubuntu's site, Dell's site) like page. We should try to make it as easy to add input as possible.
- basket had/has some very cool user-feedback-gathering tools, it would be great if someone would pick that up. It would be useful during alpha's and beta's go gather (statistical) input.

When it came to the importance of psychological safety, autonomy and involvement in decisionmaking:
- forcing usability on developers would hamper innovation as it's bad for psych safety. It is important to keep things very closely ingegrated - integrate usability in the 'normal' tutorials. The ideas about a new development model, 'always summer in trunk' and such are also smart in this regard.
- related would be the rewarding of innovative ideas. Maybe have an interesting-branche-of-the-week article.
- and to improve serendipity we should keep ideas which didn't work very well around - it does often happen that things which didn't work in a certain context are a huge success in another place.

The final idea which came up was to have 'innovation sessions' at akademy for certain innovations. We could discuss ways of improving the application in major or minor ways, brainstorm about issues etc.

Now I have to think of what needs to be done to capitalize on these ideas, make them happen. Stay tuned for another blog, and of course the analysis of the survey data.

All in all, it wasn't as great as it could be, but it did turn out to be useful. And I've learned something (still have to figure out what exactly).

Love!

innovation in KDE

Hi everyone!

As most of you know, I'm pretty interested in innovation. Recently I decided I should go and try to do something for KDE in this area. After all, I've studied this topic in depth, and I might be able to put that knowledge to some use.

This will be done in two ways:
- there will be an innovation BOF at Akademy, tommorrow morning, 10-11.
- I translated and reworked the questionare I developed while doing my internship at TNO for KDE. I am asking all KDE contributors to fill it in (sorry, it's huge) and I will analyze the results, see if I can make some recommendations.

So - everyone who is interested in innovation and in identifying and doing something about the things holding it back in KDE - join me tomorrow in the innovation BOF (room 1).

And to every active KDE contributor: Please take the time to fill in the survey! You can find it at the following link:
http://www.thesistools.com/?qid=58132&ln=eng

It includes a bit of an explanation about the why and what. And it'll probably take 20-30 minutes to fill it in. I'll do whatever I can to make that time worth it, I promise!

Thanks in advance.

Akademy 2008 - day 1

First: Akademy rocks.

Now that's out of the way, I'd like to ask everyone who has made some great pictures to email them to me. You know, jospoortvliet on the KDE servers. Pretty please?

Further - Akademy rocks, really does. Having fun... But you know, if ppl would send pictures, I wouldn't have to worry about the daily articles having no pictures in them...

Aaah well, luckilly, it's fun here. I think I can say Akademy rocks. And if anyone has things which should be on the dot, besides pictures, please get the ideas to the press room or email danny and me ;-)

Last night was cool, had fun, beer, food (ate too much but that's rather normal for me). Did I mention I like Akademy?

Oh, and take a sec to thank those ppl walking around with these yellow KDE lanyards, as they're working their asses off to make Akademy rock as much as it does!

For those waiting for the daily article - as you might have guessed, it only needs a couple of photos and it's ready.

Akademy 2008

Hi there!

I'm going! As I couldn't choose which one of the two next pictures I found visually most pleasing:




And boy, am I looking forward to belgian beers & great KDE company... It's been a year, you know, since last Akademy. Of course I've seen some of you since then, but Akademy - it's just special.

BTW I'll be joining that unconference thing by hosting a meeting about innovation & vision. Most of you probably know how obsessed I am with those topics, and I happen to know a little about it so if you're interested in brainstorming how we, as in KDE, can become even more innovative, join!

I'll also be handing out a questionaire which I developed while doing my internship at TNO, a Dutch semi-government research institute. It is intended to measure how innovative an organization can be and to identify roadblocks for becoming more innovative.

Vision X

Last week I gave a talk at the Ubuntu Release Party in Amsterdam (NL, of course). It was fun, just like last year. And again I was surprised how much broader this meeting was than 'just' free software. Free Culture was heavily represented, and there even were talks about digital freedom/privacy projects like Little Sister (Dutch, sorry). And of course we saw Big Buck Bunny, the movie by the Blender project. I can tell you - it's a piece of art. Literally, of course, but also in the sense of 'an stunning piece of work'. Pixar couldn't have done it any better, and if you consider the resources it was done with - amazing.

As usual, my talk focussed more on the vision of the KDE project than on specific details. Of course my own interest in Innovation, both social and open (somehow that sounds funny) have quite an influence on how I see this topic. On the other hand, being in this community of course gives me at least some illusion that what I say about what the project as a whole wants is founded in reality. But a check, now and then, never hurts. I've talked about vision and future before, not too many comments that time, so now I'm gonna ask explicitly for comments.

Of course - I realize we are many. As one of your T-shirts says: different people, different ideas. But it also end with: same vision. Is that true? Do we share a vision? Does something coherent emerge from the fog-of-war surrounding the development of KDE? I believe so. Yet I really wonder what people would say if one asks them: "What is the mission of KDE?" and "What is the vision of KDE?"

So, think about it for a second. What would you say? I've dug up a 'mission statement' from a mayor company to help you think ;-)

Mission:

Improve the quality of people’s lives through timely introduction of meaningful innovations.

Vision:

In a world where complexity increasingly touches every aspect of our daily lives, we will lead in bringing sense and simplicity to people.

(Philips)

Observe:
- they want MEANINGFUL innovations
- And to get there by focusing on sense and simplicity, to help people cope with increasing complexity

Now KDE. Our website states:

It is our hope and continued ambition, that KDE will bring open, reliable, stable and monopoly free computing enjoyed by scientists and computing professionals world-wide to the everyday user.

The above seems to be our mission, that's for sure. Now, how do we get there? That's where the vision comes in. How do we fulfill our mission?

Not everyone will say the same. Actually, I don't think there will be much coherency - so, do we or don't we share a vision?

I will continue this blog next time, as I'm really looking forward to your comments (and maybe even other blogs - one can dream, right?)