[Decibel] Summary of aKademy 2006

[Tobias Hunger]

Hello there!

I am back from aKademy in Dublin at sunday and thought it would be nice to 
write up a short summary of the event for all of you. I actually wanted to do 
this earlier, but I fell sick and spend the last two days in bed with the flu 
I caught in Dublin.

I gave a presentation on decibel early during the conference. Since I have 
already covered that earlier I will skip that here.

On Tuesday Friedrich W. H. Kossebau had organized a BoF Session on 
communication and collaboration. Robert McQueen used the opportunity to give 
a short introduction to Telepathy. My impression is that this has greatly 
helped the other people in the room to grasp the concepts better. The Kopete 
people (Olivier Goffart, Michael Larouche, Johann Ollivier-Lapeyre, Will 
Stephenson), who were already actively discussing during the telepathy 
presentation, gave a short introduction into their plans of extending kopete 
to become a even more full featured chat application.

Friedrich showed a small application of his that displays contacts from the 
addressbook on the panel. You can then use the information from the 
addressbook to chat the person up, send mails, look them up on google maps,  
etc. That is exactly the kind of application I want to see more of!

We had a lively discussion about what telepathy can offer to Kopete (Michael 
wants to write a Telepathy plugin). Josef Spillner presented some usecases 
and was curious how Decibel and/or Kopete will address them. These were 
mostly about how an application developer will use the services. We postponed 
this till after the session and discussed this during dinner afterwards.

We eventually got around to start on the "collaboration" aspect in the title 
of our BoF session. We all agreed that the free software community needs an 
answer to products like Microsoft Sharepoint which allows several users to 
edit documents at the same time, etc. To enable that we need a cross-desktop 
way to allow applications to talk to each other. Telepathy could offer a 
information channel here (which Decibel could help to set up). Applications 
could then export their functionality over this information channel, but the 
application developers need to work out a protocol to do so first.

All in all it was a very interesting BoF session, even though it was a bit too 
much focused on the communication aspect for my liking: This was due to the 
developers participating were mostly from the communications camp. We would 
have needed more office application developers to explore the collaboration 
aspect further.

Aside from the official discussions I used the opportunity to talk with other 
developers. This includes eg. Tobias König (about how to integrate 
the "permanent" contact data with the transient online/offline state 
information in the akonadi framework), Nadeem Hasan (VoIP) and Mathias Kretz 
(Phonon) and of course all the Kopete developers mentioned earlier (with 
which I had some fabulous dinners in the restaurants of Dublin:-).

All in all I had lots of fun in Dublin and got to know lots of new people. In 
addition to that I learned many new things and was able to promote the ideas 
behind Decibel and even managed to bring telephony to the attention of some 
developers who had so far not thought about this issue at all. This was a 
very worthwhile trip to the wonderful island of Ireland!

PS:  I need to thank Alexander Neundorf for his patience explaining CMake to 
me:-) 

Best Regards,
Tobias
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