Dot article about the calligra sprint in Essen / Bangalore

[Inge Wallin]

I have been working on a dot article with feedback from Friedrich Kossebau. 
Following an experiment from the KDEPIM sprint, I'm going to put up the 
article here on the list for feedback before I submit it to the dot.

Since the ML can't handle attachments (I think), I will insert the text here 
below instead. The parts about what happened in India is from a blog from 
Shantanu Tushar, and I don't feel that I have enough about that part yet so 
please fill in with more details there.

	-Inge

Calligra Sprint Held on 2 Locations
-----------------------------------

The first calligra sprint in a long time was held On the weekend
9th-10th of March with people gathering already on friday. This is
nothing unique - but what was different from previous Calligra sprints
and I think from all other KDE sprints was that it was held at 2
locations at the same time: the Linux Hotel in Essen, Germany, and the
offices of ThoughtWorks in Bangalore, India.  There were 11 people in
Germany and 8 in India.

Communications were solved using video conferencing in Google
Hangout. This worked surprisingly well with both picture and sound
coming through with decent quality even with the very long distance
between India and Germany.

The Serious
-----------

One thing that was different from previous Calligra sprints was that
there was actually a lot of hacking going on. Saturday was assigned
for design discussions and Sunday was used mostly for BOFs and
hacking.

Among other things, the following was discussed:

 * Calligra Active

 * Even better separation between the engine and the UI and a big
   refactoring to better use the Model/View/Controller
   architecture. Older versions of KOffice / Calligra used KParts to a
   large extent and we want to move away from that in our internal
   architecture.  Of course, KParts can still be provided by wrappers
   so that e.g. Konqueror can still show ODF documents.

 * Friedrich Kossebau presented the state of his MVC-oriented
   framework "Kasten", which might not yet be ready to serve as new
   base for Calligra, but has so far at least inspired quite some
   ideas how to redo the Calligra architecture.

 * How to make Calligra work better on Windows and how we can create
   packages for MacOS X.
 
While the discussions during Saturday were held in the larger group
the ones on Sunday broke up into smaller groups. BOFs were held for
Krita brushes and filters, a DOCX export filter, Calligra QML
components, and many other that I might have missed.

Last weekend we hosted the Indian part of the Calligra Sprint
<http://community.kde.org/Calligra/Meetings/Spring_2013_Sprint/>at
ThoughtWorks Bangalore office. This sprint was a focused meetup of the
developers to come together and collaborate with the format having a round
of discussions over current problems and the design changes to fix those.
This is followed by 2 days of implementation/spiking out the new ideas.

The sprint was ended with a renewed sense of community and a group
photo taken using the projector to show the Indian group combined with
the German group.

The Fun
-------

Naturally not everything that happens is work.  This sprint also had
lots of laughs and social gatherings. In the German part we cooked our
own dinners featuring pasta with lots of different types of
sauces, from completely vegetarian to pretty meaty.  The master chefs
were Dan Jensen, Arjen Hiemstra and Thorsten Zachmann.

On Sunday we had pizza for lunch, which gave Lukas Tvrdy the
opportunity to play with the electric car in the Linux Hotel, a
Reanault Twizy.  Since it didn't have side windows and the rain poured
down, the pizza boxes got a little wet, and so did Lukas but he seemed
happy anyway.  

<DO WE HAVE ANY PICTURES OF THE PASTA DINNER?>

And we also got a taste of the wild Slovakian life when we tasted the
famous Tatratea liquour brought by Matus Uzak.  

<WRITE SOMETHING ABOUT THE SOCIAL PART OF THE SPRINT IN BANGALORE HERE.>


The Calligra community would like to thank the KDE e.V. and KO GmbH
for sponsoring this sprint and Thoughtworks for letting us use their
office.  Without them this sprint would not have been possible. We
would also like to thank the Linux Hotel for it's community friendly
offerings of their really nice and well-working venue. And thanks to
Claudia, the KDE e.V.s business manager, for her quick and
uncomplicated handling of any issues.


<INSERT GROUP PHOTO HERE>, e.g.:
[image: 
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8234/8543634811_d4c580ac49.jpg]<http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8234/8543634811_d4c580ac49.jpg>