Call for Participation

Akademy is the annual KDE Community conference. If you are working on topics relevant to KDE or Qt, this is your chance to present your work and ideas to the KDE community at large. It will take place in Vienna, Austria, from Saturday 11th to Friday 17th of August, 2018. The talks will be held on Saturday the 11th and Sunday the 12th. The rest of the week will be Birds-of-a-Feather meetings (BoFs), unconference sessions and workshops.

If you think you have something interesting to present, please tell us about it. If you know of someone else who should present, please encourage them.

What we are looking for

We are asking for talk proposals on topics relevant to KDE community and technology, including:

  • Topics related to KDE's current community goals:
    • Usability and Productivity for Basic Software
    • Privacy Software
    • Streamlined Onboarding of New Contributors
  • Design and Usability in KDE
  • Advanced Qt and C++ topics
  • QML and declarative programming
  • Overview of what is going on in the various areas of the KDE community
  • KDE in action: use cases of KDE technology in real life; be it mobile, desktop deployments and so on
  • Mobile/embedded applications, use cases and frameworks
  • Presentation of new applications; new features and functions in existing applications
  • Testing KDE software
  • Release processes
  • Collaboration between KDE and other Free Software projects
  • Improving our governance and processes, community building
  • Increasing our reach through efforts such as accessibility, promotion, translation and localization
  • 3rd Party libraries / frameworks relevant to KDE
  • KDE and the wider world.

Don't let this list restrict your ideas though. You can submit a proposal even if it doesn't fit in this list of topics as long as it is relevant to KDE. To get an idea of talks that were accepted previously, check out the program from previous years: 2017 and 2015

What we offer

Many creative, interesting KDE, Qt and Free Software contributors and supporters — your attentive and receptive audience. An opportunity to present your application, share ideas and best practices, or gain new contributors. A cordial environment with people who want you to succeed. This is your chance to make a big splash!

Some travel funds are available. If your financial situation is the main reason you might not attend, please apply for them. Akademy travel costs may be reimbursed based on the KDE e.V. Reimbursement Policy. You can apply via https://reimbursements.kde.org

Proposal guidelines

Provide the following information on the proposal form:

  • Title—the title of your session/presentation
  • Abstract—a brief summary of your presentation
  • Description—additional information not in the abstract; potential benefits of the topic for the audience
  • A short bio—including anything that qualifies you to speak on your subject
  • Feedback wanted—if you consider yourself as a beginner speaker or would like to receive more feedback and guidance from the Program Comitee to help you prepare your speech

Submit your proposal by March 12th, 23:59 CET.

Akademy attracts people from all over the world. For this reason, all talks are in English. If you need help with preparing your talk, please contact the Program Committee.

Your submissions can be in any of the following forms:

  • Technical talks are 30 minutes (possible extension to one hour)
  • Panels are 30 minutes (possible extension to one hour)
  • Fast track talks are 10 minutes long. They are featured in a single morning track.
  • Lightning talks are 5 minutes long

Technical talks and fast track talk lengths include time for Q&A (questions and answers). Lightning talks do not have Q&A.

For panel discussions of this year's Akademy we would love to see them focused on any topic related to KDE's three goals.

The workshops are included in the 2nd part of Akademy and can last for up to three hours.

Akademy has a lot of content so we will try hard to fit it into the schedule and make sure that presentations start and end on time.

If your presentation must be longer than the standard time, please provide reasons why this is so. Longer talks may be turned into workshops or special sessions later in the week, outside of the main conference tracks. In that case, we suggest a lightning-talk format teaser to promote the workshop. You don't have to submit detailed proposals for the workshop parts yet. This will be done later in an informal way. This call for participation focuses on the talks part on the weekend.

For lightning talks, we will be collecting all of the presentations (we suggest at most three slides) the day before the lightning track. All of the presentations will be set-up and ready to go at the start of the lightning track.

Akademy is upbeat, but it is not frivolous. Help us see that you care about your topic, your presentation and your audience. Typos, sloppy or all-lowercase formatting and similar appearance oversights leave a bad impression and may count against your proposal. There's no need to overdo it. If it takes more than two paragraphs to get to the point of your topic, it's too much and should be slimmed down. The quicker you can make a good impression,both on the program committee and your audience, the better.

We are looking for originality. Akademy is intended to move KDE forward. Having the same people talking about the same things doesn't accomplish that goal. Thus, we favor original and novel content. If you have presented on a topic elsewhere, please add a new twist, new research, or recent development, something unique. Of course, if your talk is plain awesome as is, go for that.

Everyone submitting a proposal will be notified by mid April, as to whether or not their proposal was accepted for the Akademy 2018 Program.

All talks will be recorded and published on the Internet for free, along with a copy of the slide deck, live demo or anything else associated with the presentations. This benefits the larger KDE Community and those who can't make it to Akademy. You will retain full ownership of your slides and other materials, we request that you make your materials available explicitly under the CC-BY license.

Who we are

Meet the Akademy 2018 Program Committee:

Markus Feilner, Adriaan de Groot, Jos van den Oever, Aitor Pazos, Marta Rybczynska, John Samuel, Cornelius Schumacher & Bhushan Shah

If you have any questions you can email the Program Committee