Announcing 2018 Season of KDE

[Boudhayan Gupta]

Dear all,

KDE Student Programs is excited to announce the 2018 Season of KDE
Programme. Participant and mentor applications will open on 1st
December 2017, and the working period will start from 1st January 2018
and will last either 40 or 80 days, depending on the length of your
project. As always, 2018 Season of KDE is not restricted to students;
participation is open to the general public.

The official announcement is available to view at:
https://dot.kde.org/2017/11/19/announcing-season-kde-2018

The 2018 Season of KDE will be a little different from the last few
editions. In particular, we've made a few changes to the programme
since last year:

* We're limiting the number of projects to just 6. Both KDE and
WikiToLearn will share this quota.

* Participants can now choose to do a shorter sprint project with a
duration of 40 days, or a longer full project with a duration of 80
days.

* You can now finally apply as a team! Individuals may propose either
sprint or full projects, but proposals for full 80-day projects can
now also be made by teams of up to two people.

* Do you want to make KDE work better on MacPorts or Homebrew? Do you
want to improve LibreOffice's integration with Plasma? We welcome
proposals that involve other open-source software projects and their
integration with KDE. More details in the official announcement at [1]

* This year, we decide on a winning project based on an objective
criteria, and all participants in the winning project get to travel to
Vienna, Austria to attend Akademy 2018 between August 11 and 17, 2018.
We'll pay for your flights and stay.

As always, we encourage prospective participants to start discussing
projects with us right now rather than wait for the application period
to start. Join the kde-soc at kde.org mailing list, hop onto our IRC
channel (#kde-soc on Freenode) or contact the maintainer of your
preferred project or team directly.

We're re-using the Google Summer of Code 2018 Ideas Page at [2] to
collect potential code-based project ideas. Please note that Season of
KDE also accepts non-code contributions (i.e., infrastructure,
documentation, design and outreach projects) which are not listed on
the GSoC Ideas page. Participants are encouraged to think outside the
box and propose their own projects.

Thank you, and let's make this year's Season of KDE the best year ever!

-- Boudhayan Gupta, for KDE Student Programs

[1] - https://dot.kde.org/2017/11/19/announcing-season-kde-2018
[2] - https://community.kde.org/GSoC/2018/Ideas