[dot] KDE Regional Groups at Akademy

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1159614995/

From: Giovanni Venturi <jumpyj at tiscali.it>
Dept: kde-l10n
Date: Saturday 30/Sep/2006, @04:16

KDE Regional Groups at Akademy
==============================

     Last Wednesday the KDE regional groups Birds of a Feather session
took place at Akademy 2006, Dublin.  The focus of this BoF session was
to share experiences that regional KDE-groups have had in building a
community. A regional group is generally country based, e.g. KDE-IT for
Italy and KDE-NL for Netherlands.

     The issues addressed were:

    * Attracting new community members, especially translators and
      documentation writers.
    * Hosting and maintaining a regional website.
    * Organising local events, such as tradeshows, contributor meetings
      and social community meetings.

     We discussed our experiences with the maintenance of our local KDE
websites. The different regional groups have been found to need a common
framework for the website, with a common part shared among regional
websites and a regional part managed according the regional group's
needs.

     The common part is, for example, the news from the dot.kde.org web
sites translated into the related regional language. The regional part
could be articles on the KDE world (a review on Konqueror, Amarok, ...
for example). These articles cannot be present on all regional websites
because this should produce the double writing of an article: write it
in your language and than translate it in English. This causes a lot of
wasted time and not all people that want to give help knows English.

     These changes to all KDE regional web sites will not be available
soon because the framework is in preparation. It will works in this way:
the administrator of a regional group will get the website structure
from KDE SVN and apply to his website server. They will be adviced about
changes to the PHP code through a mailing list.

     At the moment a CMS such as Joomla or Drupal can be considered a
good solution because the people who want to add content to the website
do not need to know PHP or HTML. They simply insert the article and
publish it.

     KDE Italia divided their site with 2 kinds of content. Some
translations of the very important news from dot.kde.org including KDE
and some other software releases (Amarok and KOffice releases) and
articles on KDE (DCOP, Konqueror) with the possibility to represent a
point of reference for users and developers.

     KDE Hispano divided the site in three parts. The announce of new
software releases (KDE releases, KOffice, etc), howto articles (how to
install KOffice 1.6 on Kubuntu Dapper for example) and generic article
on KDE.

     KDE NL has a web site system based on CVS committing.

     The possibility of a regional KDE forum is needed to increase the
contact with KDE users, but the maintenance of this requires human
resource to check the messages removing spam, and avoiding flame war on
the forum. At the moment only KDE Hispano has got a forum integrated
into Drupal CMS and managed by 2-3 people.

     The regional groups should also organise KDE events when possible
and try to give feedback to the other regional groups on what has gone
well.