Well, there was this comment on my previous posting, which I will quote, and reply to in its entry. I think this is important, so I'm bumping it.
"Stop it.
Yup, another highly relevant KDE posting on KDE planet."
KDE is about more than simply software and technology. While pondering KDE marketing over the last several years, I've often thought about the definition of KDE. Of course, there's the classical definition, referring to the Desktop Environment, or even a commonly accepted alternative referring to the Development Environment. However, KDE is much more than that.
KDE is the also infrastructure that enables the project to exist, such as svn servers and build clusters, the dot and planetkde, the forums and mailinglists, the wikis and irc channels...
KDE is the also community, including the programmers and artists, the marketing team and translation team, bugsquad and the beta testers, the KDE e.V. and the forum moderators...
While, for many users, KDE is solely a Desktop Environment, and no thought is given to the people of KDE.
PlanetKDE exists, and has existed, as an amalgamation of people. These are all people who are in some way connected to KDE. These people are real people, who have lives, jobs, loves, dreams. These are people who eat, cook, program, travel, draw, stargaze, and occasionally build their own kernels.
The KDE community is made of people, not of code. This is very important as it keeps the people within KDE communicating, and working well together. Building a sense of community is something that is important to the long term health of KDE as a project, for without the people, there is no code. To this effect, KDE has been somewhat successful, via conferences like Akademy, or the occasional focused developer sprint which have introduced faces to people that had previously been known as an irc nick or an email address. If you ask members of the KDE community who have had the privilege of attending these events, they will to-a-man (or woman) tell you how useful it is to get to know the people you are working with on a personal level.
PlanetKDE is not just some official mouthpiece of the KDE Marketing Team. It is a place for KDE developers to showcase themselves, as people, to the rest of the KDE community. If they are working on something neat, they'll blog about it. If they lost their luggage on the way to the Canaries, they'll blog about it. If they've accomplished something personal, like obtaining a degree, well, that's important to the KDE community, and to their friends within the community. I want to hear about it.
Given the function of PlanetKDE is not that of an official mouthpiece, and never has been, perhaps then my posting about an internet connection might not be so bad. For example, I talked about my connection being "pretty shoddy anyway" which might help explain why I haven't been able to sign into the #kde* irc channels from home (only at work when I'm, well, working...).
Just because it's not relevant to you, as a single individual reading planetkde, does not mean that it isn't relevant to some other member of the KDE community at large.
Cheers, and thanks for reading the planet.
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