Randa Meetings

It is almost exactly 10 years ago that the first edition of the Randa Meetings took place in Randa, Switzerland. Back then it was a single sprint, called Tokamak 3 (That’s what the Plasma meetings were called back then). It was hosted in the small Chalet of the parents of Mario, and after this very successful inaugural sprint the meetings grew and we needed a bigger house to accommodate all the participants.

We found a new home in one of the biggest houses in this small village in the Swiss Alps. The 150 years house was a hotel at the beginning and was then used for several camps hosting generations of people.

This big and old house hosted our Randa Meetings for several years but unfortunately we have to tell you that it is, at least for now, no longer available. The former owners couldn’t afford to renovate it and thus needed to sell the house. So the new owner of the house is now the municipality of Randa and they have decided against opening it for rent this year. We don’t know much about their future plans, but we are trying to stay up to date so we can inform you about another possibility for Randa Meetings as soon as we can. But honestly we’re not very optimistic for futher Randa Meetings in the same house in Randa.

No need to be sad or afraid that the meetings are dead though, as the team behind them is already looking for and thinking about other possibilities and locations for future “Randa” Meetings.

Last but not least we would like to thank you for all the support during the past years and especially for last year’s jury award for Mario Fux and the Randa Meetings team. Stay tuned and cu soon.

Yesterday we went shopping to nourish some Free Software enthusiasts next week. According to the shopping list we’ve ready:

• Several kinds and kg of vegetables
• Some boxes full of fruits
• A lot of Swiss cheese (like more than 10 kg)
• Some meat and sausages
• Milk, orange juice, coffee, tea and some beer and wine
• Lasagne pasta and rice (some kg too) and 7 kg of Spaghetti
• Two buckets of yoghurt and a bucket of jam
• Almost 100 eggs
• And last but not least several kg of Swiss chocolate…

As you see some of it in the picture below this stuff is ready in the meetings house in Randa. But the participants need to pay (15 CHF per day for 3 meals and chocolate, beer and wine are extra) this for themselves as they would need to at home too.

Some food (and chocolate) for the Randa Meetings participants

But there are other expenses as well: travel costs and accommodation. Some of the participants just can’t afford these things and thus we need to support them. And that we can support these people to come to Randa to work on your favorite KDE software we need your financial support too. So please go to our fundraiser page page and give. Thank you!

Oh and btw besides me the first participant already arrived… and the others will arrive tomorrow during the day when we start to make KDE more accessible for a whole week and just as a start.

As we need to have a final date for registration to start the organisational part of the meetings we have chosen Sunday, 16th of July, 23.59 UTC as this date.

So if you want to make KDE more accessible register soon. And for the case you need travel support got to the reimbursements page of KDE.

Two days after the Global Accessibility Awareness Day we go live with the registration for the Randa Meetings 2017. Thus we would like to bring as many people to Randa this September to make more of our and other Free Software more accessible.

Another topic during this year’s Randa Meetings will be KDE PIM but it’s for sure not forbidden to work on accessibility feature of our PIM stuff as well.

So please come and make KDE more accessible. CU there.

We are going to close the date selection Doodle for the Randa Meetings 2017 on Wednesday next week. So hurry up and add yourself if you plan to come to Randa next year.

In less than a week QtCon will start and Randa Meetings will be part of it. On Saturday at 16:30 you’ll get an interesting story about 7 years of Randa Meetings. Mario Fux will talk about his experience organizing the KDE Tech Summit in the middle of nowhere in the Swiss Alps.

Besides Mario you will have the opportunity to meet and talk with the president of the Randa Meetings association: Simon Wächter. Don’t miss this chance and get a second opinion and maybe some insights.

And now on a different subject, which is something we might have as one of our main topics next year: Accessibility and Personal Information Management (PIM). Accessibility doesn’t just mean to make our software accessible for people with various disabilities, but also to make our software accessible on different operating systems, different devices and with different user interfaces (graphical with keyboard and mouse or touch or speech and other senses). Regarding PIM I don’t think you need more information about what this is: e-mail, contacts, events and all this synchronized and stored in a safe way.

For the case you think it’d make sense to bring another group or topic to Randa as well don’t hesitate to contact us: #randa on IRC, mail, QtCon or via snail mail (see randa-meetings.ch for details).

So if you can contribute something to these topics, work on Free Software in these areas and want to come to Randa next year: please join the date selection Doodle for 2017.

KDE Konqi with MS Windows logo

Help old Konqi to bring more KDE Software to MS Windows, MacOSX, Android and other platforms. The registration for the Randa Meetings 2016 is going to close tomorrow. From this point on we will work on the travel budget and to get it approved so people can buy their tickets soon.

And here again the main topic for RM2016: multi-platform end-user application development. This includes stuff like improving KDE Frameworks 5 (KF5) on other platforms like Microsoft Windows, Android or Apple’s MacOSX, presenting and discussing how software distribution works on other systems than GNU/Linux (Windows installers, app stores and application bundles) and learning from the experience projects like Krita, digiKam, Rkward, Kdenlive & Co collected. We’d like to bring this information to more KDE Applications and work on this during a full week.