India’s first KDE conference

More than 300 KDE developers and students participated in conf.kde.in - the first dedicated KDE conference ever held in India- in Bangalore from March 9 to 13. The participants learned about contributing to KDE, programming with Qt Quick and lots of other aspects of developing free software.

conf.kde.in Group Photo

There has been a substantial increase in KDE contributions from India over the last few years. Translators, coders, web/infrastructure maintainers etc.

There was a need to come together, at a well organised conference solely dedicated to KDE. Since Qt has been the foundation of KDE since its very beginning, this was an important event for us, and I was there.

Through the five day conference most topics of contributing to KDE and free software were covered.

There were many interesting talks. I'll just mention three that caught my attention.

Kannan M. Moudgalya gave an excellent introduction to Spoken Tutorial. It's an Indian government effort to increase digital literacy by sharing online learning and course material, including voice recording of presentations.

KDE contributor Dinesh Sai explained how to make a Minesweeper in Python and Qt game in just 30 minutes.

VCreate Logic had an excellent introduction to Qt for beginners.

As usual such community driven conferences would not happen without sponsors, a venue and a huge voluntary effort by the organizers. Also, special thanks for the hospitality should go to R.V. College of Engineering in Bangalore, for hosting the conf.kde.in conference.