KDE Community websites: The past, the present and a vision for the future

Speaker: Frank Karlitschek

1. the past: The creation of KDE-Look.org in 2001 and the growth since today. The contribution of KDE-Look.org and KDE-Apps.org to the KDE project

2. the present The new features. How people can help.

3. the future: If KDE and the free software wants to get a big part of the desktop marketshare we need to focus on our strengths. Trying to catch up with the features of other desktops is not enough. Our strong point is our huge worldwide developer, supporter and user community. But if you install a current KDE desktop you can't see or feel the community. It looks like a closed source microsoft or apple product. We need to use our unique selling point more and integrate our different web communities into the desktop applications.

I would like to present and propose an open standard for web<->desktop integration which goes beyond GHNS. I will also provide a reference implementation of the functionality till other websites implement the specs.

Features would be: Document Sharing between users, integration of knowledge base content into the help system, contact other user who have the same printer and know how to configure it, contact other users who are working on the same kind of document at the moment via chat. Life help from other users via screensharing, integrate friends from different web 2.0 communities into the desktop. See the status of my web 2.0 friends and communicate with them without a browser, and more.

4. questions and answers.