Latinoware 2012

Last year, amid an atmosphere of nostalgia, KDE – the second largest free software community in the world – celebrated its 15 years of activity at Latinoware. In the audience, old acquaintances had the chance of recalling important actions undertaken by the group during its trajectory.

For this edition, one of the goals of KDE will be to show that anyone can get involved and contribute to the group, regardless of the user’s level of technical knowledge. “Many people are still under the impression that writing code is the only way to help a free software community. My idea is to present other possibilities and their importance within the free software production cycle,” comments Aracele Torres, who will be one of the speakers at the event.

Last year, KDE celebrated its 15 years of activities: the group currently has over 2000 collaborators worldwide.

In her lecture, she will introduce some of these possibilities, such as the areas of translation, promotion, artwork, documentation, software bundling and testing. Check out the full interview:

- Can anyone can participate in this fascinating world of free software?

Yes, the key to getting involved in the free software community is to be interested in contributing.

- What are the main difficulties of “newbies” in the area and how they can be reduced?

I think many of them are unaware of the free software production cycle. They are not aware, for instance, that anyone can contribute and that participation in the cycle is voluntary and based on merit. Because they are very accustomed to proprietary software, they tend to believe that free software also works well under the same hierarchy system. In the case of this difficulty, I believe that ideally the free software communities should aim to provide beginners with information on their basic functioning mechanisms and possibilities for insertion and collaboration these provide.

- How can people contribute to KDE? Where should they begin!?

There are several ways. If you know how to program and would like to contribute with code, there are several programs with which you can help develop. The first step for people who want to start is getting involved in the community. This can be done, for example, through participation in the KDE mailing lists. For those who would like to be involved with KDE in Brazil, I recommend subscribing to the KDE-Br list (https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-br) and get to know our activities better.

I also recommend two great pages, where they can find several tutorials and important information about KDE and how to contribute to it: the KDE TechBase and KDE UserBase.