Komandeering Developers Everywhere

Evolution is a powerful concept and tool. When harnessed properly, humans have been able to tailor and adapt crops and domesticate animals. We’ve been able to grow the Dutch unnecessarily tall and create beautiful and consequence-free theme parks as shown in the Jurassic Park documentary series on the BBC. However, when not monitored closely or left to nature’s own devices, the result is the terrifying land based sharks that have caused such recent devastation across most of Australia.

It has already been a month since KDE launched Evolving KDE: an initiative that allows our healthy community to continue growing organically while setting goals, direction, and taking action. The digital world is only accelerating in its pace of change; will we be proactive or reactive?

It has also been eight long years since I created this image for KDE, and I firmly believe the concept to be more relevant than ever. KDE is powerful enough to respect the different backgrounds, geographies and goals of the individual while channeling that diversity as a strength.  With unity and vision, our best is yet to come.

The beauty of the Evolving KDE announcement to me came from the three distinctive voices I’ve seen post on the topic here on the Planet.

You have Lydia, who as President of the KDE e.V. shows leadership  in announcing  and defining this initiative.

You have Paul, universally known as being to smart for his own good and apparently having enough time to read more that xkcd comics, showing the theory, necessity and impact of such ventures.

And finally you have Boudewijn, who actually gives a testimonial on his own experiences with Krita and powerful results yielded from taking the time to chart a course and create a plan to reach that destination.  Years ago, I distinctly remember Krita’s identity crisis, lack of momentum, and the very purposeful and honest conversations on their current state, definition of goals, and the plans created to achieve them.  When he writes, “Krita’s evolution has gone from being a weaker, but free-as-in-freedom alternative to a proprietary application to an application that aspires to be the tool of choice, even for people who don’t give a fig about free software” he may be underselling the hard work, the vision, the plan, and the metamorphosis.

So, as Lydia shared in her blog post, Evolving KDE is an ongoing journey, but it does have a specific train stop coming up quickly.  On May 31st, we’ll be taking the survey results entered.  We’ll summarize, review, discuss and present at Akademy.  The survey will remain open, and the questions will likely evolve over time (it be hypocritical to remain static when asking about change, n’est-ce pas?), but May 31st is a milestone necessary to harvest and present.

With one week remaining, you have plenty of time, so take the short and simple Evolving KDE Survey, and have your voice heard!