Dot article on activities needed, maybe more?

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hey Tokamak 4 attendants,

For Tokamak 4, I'm still looking for someone to write an article about the work on 
activities that has been done there. I've not followed these sessions myself, and I'm 
also having a hard time to wrap my head around the topic on mailing list discussions. 
That means that someone else has to write this article.

This would also nicely show other's involvement with Tokamak 4 aftermath. I'm about 
to publish the second article in the next few days, with a third one to come (mostly 
video material).

I've asked a couple of times one IRC for people to help me, with little useful 
response. I understand that people's time is limited, but so is mine and I've already 
been spending huge gobs of it on Tokamak organisation and aftermath, so it would be 
really nice if someone else can chip in here -- or maybe more than one person.

Also, please don't forget that by asking the KDE e.V. for sponsoring this event 
(which has been the most expensive (non-Akademy) developer meeting in its history so 
far) we agreed to properly report on what we're doing and what has been achieved 
during the meeting. My personal stance (both as KDE e.V. Board member and Plasma 
hacker) is that we're lagging, again time-constraints on my side being the obvious 
reason, but then I've received very little in the sense of help with the work ahead, 
so I've been chipping away on it when my time allowed it. The bottom-line is that if 
we leave one person to do all the reporting towards the e.V., it'll be a lot harder 
to secure funding for the next Tokamak (which I've already decided to have someone 
else pull off, it's simply too time-intensive for me, with all the other KDE stuff on 
my plate). Firstly because we simply didn't meet the expectations of the KDE e.V. for 
sponsoring such an event, and secondly, because if we fail in reporting, it's harder 
to get companies to donate to the e.V. resulting in not enough available funds to fly 
everyone in to such an event.

I don't want this to sound like a rant email and only be complaining, but fact is 
that I didn't receive any help from the Plasma team while this is the third time I 
ask for it. I get it, people are busy. But so am I. This worked for previous 
Tokamak's (I did those reporting bits for the other 3 already), but it won't work in 
the future, and it's falling apart right now as you can see.

Now the nice thing is that Tokamak 4 really was a blast, and that we've achieved a 
lot. And because of the size and variety of topics, I've decided to do the Tokamak 4 
reporting on the Dot in a series of installments rather than in one big article. The 
work around hardware integration has already published (perhaps you've seen it on the 
Dot), an article about Plasma mobile is forthcoming (draft version on my disk, needs 
illustrating, links etc.). Then a friendly chap from kde-promo is working on cutting 
and editing the video footage we brought (which was about 40GB of .dv files and ended 
up on my plate as well (good thing I found this guy to outsource at least that time-
intensive work!).

Concretely, what needs to be done is an illustrated article (just have a look at 
other sprint reports as examples) about the work on virtual desktops, activities and 
all the semantic stuff related to it. Explain the concepts, show screenshots, give 
examples, that kind of work. It doesn't need to be perfect in one go either, the 
group of Dot editors is usually very helpful in getting those things in shape, but 
the initial article has to be written by *someone*.

Also, I'm sure there are more interesting things that would fall through the cracks, 
if someone is in for writing about that, this would be a real service to the rest of 
the team (I'm thinking about the JS animations, Plasmate progress, and what not, not 
things that would make a full article, but noteworthy nevertheless.

Thanks for your help, and again, please bear with the if this email sounds a bit like 
complaining.

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

 http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org |  GPG Key ID: 9119 0EF9 
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