Report of the board

Good, good, good, good. Then yeah, this uh in this talk we're going to do a slightly different talk that we've been doing so far. We're going to be doing the more report. As a bit of a reminder, this is uh something we used to do in the AGMs being the KDV uh assemblies that we do every year. Uh what we decided to do eventually was to move it to academy so that it was not only part or only some content that was part of uh what we are doing to our membership uh but also to the wider community including those of you online. It's important that uh well everybody uh knows uh or whoever wants can know that what kind of tasks are we taking on and what kind of things are we thinking about right especially those of you who want to join one day and are wondering should I be a member or not right um to get started let me introduce ourselves first um do we want to go through all of us >> you can introduce us >> all right Um, well, I am Allesh. I am the president these days. But here we have Lydia Pincher. She was our president for a while. Now she's a vice president. I don't know why I say it like that. Here we have Kwan. He's one of our new members of the board and so is uh David Redondo and Akahine who's our vice president and uh treasurer. Now um well this is an elected board and uh we have three year terms and Lydia's and my uh position are up for vote this year on the AGM which is going to be um couple of weeks into October. Uh so if any of you want to uh well join this team and all of the tasks that you will see that we are uh thinking about you may uh step forward if you're a member and participate in the vote. >> Thank you. Um we selected a few uh things we want to spotlight as part of the report. And the first thing of course is that Katie turned 30 and as part of the work we did on the board and as uh the EV at large is supporting u the celebration around 30 years of KDE. Um and KD is really a first success story that we can all be proud of. Um but of course we have 30 years behind us and hopefully so many more ahead of us. Um and especially in the last uh few years uh we've reached new heights by getting closer to our users organizations around us um building alliances uh like we did for KD Eco. And yeah, uh there are also a few trends outside uh our little bubble that are working in our favor at the moment. So things are looking bright for the next 30 years. And of course uh our supporters also uh feel that. And here are just some of the nice comments that people send when they donate to KDV to thank us all for our work. uh like you're the bomb. Also, um I fondly remember my time interacting with KD developers and maintainers. Uh thank you for creating a technical community with a culture of respect. Um and it's always nice to see when these emails are coming into our inbox uh to spread some love. All right. Uh so the sovereign tech agency project it's the largest project in the history of the organization at least by financial volume. Uh to put that into perspective the monetary volume of that project alone in 2026 is bigger than the rest of our annual budget. um that meant that uh we had to approach it um quite carefully and it took in fact I would say if you really trace it back almost 5 years to make it happen because it didn't just start with applying um for a grant from the sovereign tech agency. In fact the work even started before the sovereign tech agency even existed. uh we had people in the KD community like for example Milo Bur that did research work to really make the case at least academically for why government should take an interest in supporting open source software making the case that it is part of public digital infrastructure um that it is important for society that open source software and free software is taken care of and thereby influence policy makers and perhaps even cause um agencies like the sovereign tech agency to appear on the scene. Um as the organization KDEV we had to learn a lot of things um to be in a place where we could apply for a project of this size we had to learn how to write applications uh we had to learn how to run multi-year projects that are grant-based which we did for example with the blue angel projects and others um we had to grow the organization to a certain scale where would we would be able to do monitoring and oversight of a project like this because of Um, we also learned over the years that spending money when you get it is actually not that easy. You might remember all the years where we talked about we have to downspend the reserve and we have to find ways to do that. Um, so all of these lessons I think sort of culminated into making it happen now. I know for some this was maybe felt a bit slow. Um, when the SDA first appeared a lot of people were asking why don't you do this now? But uh for us it was very important to do it at a moment of time where we felt comfortable that it doesn't put us at any risk. Um that we can do this in a sustainable fashion. And um also of course we got a lot of help from the community in figuring out what we should actually uh do in this type of project. You heard Kevin and Nate talk yesterday about the great things that they're doing. And I think um now that we even saw this morning get um a goal elected that fits very well to the content of what is being done in the SDA project um that also feels um to us like um these synergies um where they're ready for the taking. Uh maybe one last point. Um sometimes we do see the concern that um the idea of sovereignty could also have a darker side, right? That it uh begs the question of sovereignty for who and does this pit us against each other in in the modern world. And I'm very happy that um this is not felt in the SDA project which from day one was an international collaboration and where some of the contractors involved are US-based, Europeanbased and it's really sovereignty for all of us and not for one specific group. All right. Thank you. Yeah. And also something we wanted to shed light on is that well for the longest time we were uh thinking about uh how can we convince more and more people to um be embracing what what we are creating and something we've seen this year is that a lot of people in the wider market has been uh taking notice and into consideration our products to the extent that like our software is um shipped by default on like more and more um hardware manufacturers which also means that um well first they're trusting our product and then it also is getting uh put in hands of people also several other distributions have been taking uh our software more into account in ways that we had not been seen historically. One of our pet peeves maybe was that we hadn't been uh communicating with these distributions so well and and we see that right now this has has changed uh quite a bit. This is in turn also uh being picked up by increasingly mainstream outlet media outlets that uh well put in good light the the kind of work we do and also like show our our task our the the things that we put forward um on the eyes on people that would have never like really considered approaching the free and open source community as we used to know it some time ago. uh things like gaming for example are are big parts of that and um we've also been considering and been thinking about a lot about how we explain KD and how we should be doing so we did a sprint a few months back with a few contributors and I think that this is something that we will be talking uh more about because maybe like free software and KD in general we it needs to change how we how we explain it obviously our values remain But what we tell people uh needs to be somewhat massaged and adapted to the need newer audiences and newer interests. Right. Oh, who's so the EV is not only the board but it's only is also its members. Um and since last academy we have eight new members. You can find the names on the slide. I will not say them all out. Um, one interesting thing is last year we only had three new members and there were five pending. Um, and we said uh as always we want the EV to be a reflection of the active community. So if you know active people that are not in EV, ask them to be in EV. Um, and I think it has slowed down a bit again. So most of the eight members on this uh slide were when I checked it uh basically at right after last year's academy and then a few more during the year. So it seems we have the cycle of oh we have new members then maybe a bit less again and then we say we need new members. So it would be nice maybe to have that a bit more steady. We also only not have active members but also supporting members. We now have a lot supporting members thanks to the fundraising campaigns. We now have over 1,300 supporting members in the EV, which is amazing. On top, we have other people that are supporting EV monetarily. We have over 200 supporters on GitHub from uh just under 200 last year and we have almost uh 900 or just over 800 recurring donors on donor box which are not supporting members but still regularly giving us money which is also amazing and it's a huge pro in almost all of these numbers. On the corporate supporting member side, we gained two new patterns and didn't lose any, which means we now have 13 in total. The two new ones are Rocky Linux and Framework Laptops. Um, additionally, we got two new supporters of KDE. We I did not put the names there because they're actually actually uh people that just wanted to give us money and did so through the company but didn't want their own name being uh publicized that way. And uh we heard the board, we heard uh our uh supporters and of course we also have staff and contractors who are doing a ton uh to support the work of the kitty community and DV. Um we have Petra who is the assistant to the board and make sure that we are not going crazy and that uh our books are in order. Um we have Farit who is making sure that our goals are going. Um we have Joseph uh who is just coming in uh who has supported the K eco project and is now uh driving work around digital serenity for us. Uh we have Nicole who is uh making sure that uh we are doing everything right with the um STA uh project and uh also that we are having an amazing celebration. Uh then we have uh Aneka and Paul to make sure uh we are talking to the rest of the world about all the amazing things you're all doing. um Dina helping us put up uh academy and other events, Thiago uh to make sure that we're documenting what we're building. Um and uh Kristen uh Nico and Richie on the development side for um Plasma software platform and accessibility. All amazing people. Um give them a hug when you see them. AND while we're talking about people, we are hiring uh now for a sislement position. So if you are interested in working for KDV um as a systemman, this is your chance. Or if you know someone, point them to our job ad and uh we will have some more to come uh soon. That's me. Um we alo at a few conferences since uh last academy um I mean academy and aso academy Spain um we organized with Gnome the Linux appsummit uh in Berlin this year and uh for the first time in a long while we had like a US-based event in the at 20 uh at FY called Camp and we as well like a few sprints. Uh we had the mega sprint here in the T class. Um this year we had the strategy messaging sprint in Berlin where we try to um do the communication like some grand communications. Uh we have the echo workshop in Berlin too. And we have a pin sprint. We have a pin sprint in Paris. Um that not a lot. We could organize more and um if you are up to it would be nice if for more committee members will try to organize sprints um around um the world. Yeah. And the list of sprints are in the wikis. And aside of organizing on conference and sprints, uh we also attended a lot of events uh across the year. Uh I won't list all of them because that's a lot of them. Uh but some highlights um are for example the cute computer summit uh lot of events related to public transport thanks to WA and a few others um and yes lot lot of like the Linux stack and um local Linux events open source events All right, the financial overview. I will keep this relatively brief because we have the financial working group report coming up in the next slot where I will go into somewhat greater detail. Um but in short um at 30 years um of KD community, the organization that is backing it KDV is currently in the best financial shape it has ever been. Um you saw already our donor numbers um they are up. In fact um the shift over the last years has been that proportionally um more of our income comes from individual donors than from corporate patrons. Um this really started exploding a few years ago and it has um remained very very strong. It keeps increasing. Um everything looks like um also in this year we will see another increase. uh meaning we will have um for several years in a row then achieved a surplus and uh also the size of our reserve is uh proportional to the sort of runway that we would need if things um were to get tougher. Um therefore I think we're overall um quite happy with how things are going. Um, thanks also for for example the fundraising working group for the amazing work that KD Promo is doing and of course to all of the donors and partners that um do show up to keep the organization kicking. Um the maybe one small negative um that we do observe is that um event sponsoring all across the free software community has gotten a lot tougher. Um keeping our events and by our I really mean the entire first community funded and um in the black is getting tougher. Um this could be the economic environment that we work in. It could be that we maybe need um to think about how we can promote our events differently, how we can really make the argument for why they are necessary, why they are, for example, the lifeblood of um a sovereign software stack because it's where the work happens, right? So maybe that's the next step. That's something to think about. But overall um things are very very good in the KD EV finances right now. Oh, I do have the next slide. Um, we also um produce an annual report about um the activities of the KDE community in general and um KDEV specifically. Um you can find many exciting stories in this report. Um you can also find um reports by the working groups and what they have achieved including for example the financial working group uh but also the others and um if you need one place to catch up with what's been going on in the past year than the annual report it's a great way to do that and that brings us to the KD goals uh as you have already heard this morning Um we have three outgoing goals. Uh the streamlined application development, we care about your input and KD needs you. And we have selected three new ones. Uh KD for enterprise deployments, better documentation and next generation styling for KDE. Um and I want to say thank you to all the past and new champions and fit for making it happen. Right. Um then now um something we always try to do at the end of this presentation is to uh give some ideas on what kind of things we have in mind and that we we would like to work for the next year and then before that uh go through the the the things we said last year that we would like to look into and and reflect on how it went and how it could have been done. um any better now. Well, first of all, Kitty goals. Lydia just was talking about this. We got new goals. Uh we had goals. So, from our perspective, it has all been um pretty good. Um it remains a little unclear for us as a KDV how to support it beyond what it is. We have we are helping already with uh allocating for it on the project. we and he's doing a a great job and helping a lot to to move the the program further. But actually maybe at the academy once again is a good moment to think about like what what could the KDV do to help the goals. Maybe we have uh great ideas, not mediocre ideas. We want great ideas. Tell us. And uh well, we'll see if we can make it happen. um something we were talking about last year and I'm sure we will continue talking about has been reacting to the financial landscape we came um or maybe I came to this board many years ago coming from like very big donations and actually like it started changing from like having the big companies or bigger companies anyway uh funding what we do to increasingly more um individual people, private people uh deciding to support our endeavors. We see that continuing. We actually are hoping that uh people will continue supporting uh KD task and like a lot of what we do actually is already based on on on that support. Uh corporate support slightly increased. We were talking about having uh two new patronons and we're very happy and grateful. We don't see that increasing a whole lot. Uh we were also talking about increasing like the price of our sponsorship uh for patrons because it has been stable for a while. We decided not to do it just yet, but we will uh still review that maybe when we're not celebrating a birthday or something. Um um some one of our bigger tasks as a KDV is like bringing KD from the virtual into the real world and as such like bringing everyone to academy and L. We continue doing like that. We are thinking of of still do it for the foreseeable future and we're happy about it. And yeah, our um special thing of this year was uh the 30th version birthday celebrating it well. We're celebrating already uh with the help of Nicole with all of the academy team especially for the um things that we are doing here at the academy. It's went pretty well. We've been working with the documentary team of the video you saw on the opening yesterday and I think that this is going pretty good as is we're also talking about uh putting an focus on infrastructure as well. Uh it's one also of the big tasks that we do as as the KDV. we have been increasing our uh spending on on well servers uh to support the the KD uh task and I think that this is starting to show it it's um well improvement we're also hiring for uh well human help in the CIS admin team and actually we are expecting that this is going to well help uh make all of these task um easier. Now we are also talking a lot about uh direct uh software delivery. Kind of what we were talking about here was bringing KD's products closer to the user. Um we have been talking for the longest time about improving the um organization of flat hub and well it's um well legal entity. Uh this is not really closed yet actually. I'm going to put that on the next year's uh presentation presentation slide. uh but we still been working on it and actually there is good progress this year already on that front. We will see how that goes. Also, KD Linux has been um well blooming uh slowly there and I and we see this part of this uh pointing here. Then um as as our role in society, we do see that KD uh is uh increasingly seen and present in the big communications in the public. Obviously, it could be better, it could be more, and we expect you to continue making that happen. But um it's definitely something that has has shown an improvement for this year and it's also well connected to this first point here. So what we're talking about for this next year um as we've been doing a little bit like Lydia was saying with this whole presentation we've like tried to made it a bit lighter. One of the things we did here uh as you will see is that like we removed academy and getting together because this is something that we do every year and it continues being one of our top topics. It's just like not something that we uh think it's super important that we remind in this in these slides. We want to be talking more about these more strategical and um semantic topics. Um now strategic messaging was uh something that we've we've had in our minds for for the last uh few years. We have been trying to narrow down into these things. Those of you who are part of the membership already saw the uh conclusions of our meeting. Um now we are uh a little bit in the state of uh taking these conclusions and putting them into action. I would say that uh a lot of the conclusions we had there are quite actionable already. So feel free to uh see what to make of it and if you don't see how to do it actually academy is a good moment to have the conversations uh set up above we tell other people to come see how we can make them happen and >> and there is an above that Anika is putting together about the strategic messaging as a whole please go and join. Thank um as an organization we have been growing quite a bit. Uh I was telling earlier that we had the biggest project in terms of of financial of our history. This not was not only a financial project but also a lot of development that is happening happening also with a big organization in well our little world. So it's something that instead of saying all right like we already won let's um do more of that and better and harder and faster what we're thinking is okay let's try to stabilize this in this project uh we're also taking another one um soonish that is going to be starting it's going to be announced as well uh but we think that with this two we can probably like stay uh see how it works with working with public agencies and such uh see that the result that we get from it is as good as we expected and go with it. Um we're also mentioning by name here flatub this year. We're talking to making sure that uh you can um at least do what flat is set set up to do. Um we think that it's going to happen this year. This is the year. So uh yeah we we are saying it. Um and as a last point we wanted to talk about the contribution landscape. We will have seen that uh well first we are happy with how we collaborate. We are happy with how we work but we also see that there are a lot of things that are changing in in the wall in but also how people are creating applications how people are developing and how people are reporting to us as a community. This is not entirely something that we think that the KDV should be um taken care of. It needs to be the KD community that comes to terms into what they want from it. uh but obviously as KDV we need to be aware and alive of all of that is happening and and be reactive to it. So if you see that there is a way that the KDP can help reach out to us. uh we will be doing our own due diligence on that topic and we will see what can be done if anything and so now uh you can feel free to talk to us many of you already do some of you you never do you also don't have to but you can you can find all of us uh through the hallways of of academy you can find all of us in the different uh chat rooms in matrix and beyond We will be having a buff on Thursday uh where you can join and like we don't really have an agenda prepared. You can come there and say why do you think this is a good idea or bad idea. Everything is more or less on the table as long as it's in a happy spirit and well presented as always. Um yeah that's what we wanted to talk about today. Um, thank you very much for listening and we'll go through the working group reports now. >> Uh, we have some time for questions. >> Oh, we do have some time for questions. So, if you have a question that is not fitting the bill for Thursday, you can do it now. Or if you're not going to be around on Thursday, >> we've got one question here. >> Yeah, real quick one. Um, I'm interested in the flatub stuff and why it's p it's uh stalled. Who would I talk to about that? We can talk about that if you want later. Sure. >> Okay. >> Thank you. >> Have we got more questions? We have 10 minutes. >> You've play explained it so well that there are no questions. >> Are you all awake? >> Is everyone still awake or is everyone asleep? >> Oh, Cornelius has a question. Okay, I'm coming. Thank you. Um, you talked about the sovereign tech agency. Um, uh, one one question I would have, the Glom Foundation also got money from the sovereign tech fund and they got in some some trouble with that. Uh, have you looked into what kind of things you might want to avoid to have a good and safe environment that KDE stays on top of that and doesn't make the same mistakes again? Uh, yes. So we did do background research on what exactly did take place um at the Gnome Foundation and um why it was so difficult for them and um I will not go into detail as to what the Gnome Foundation did exactly and what transpired there. Um but um I can say we managed to stay clear of this one. Uh we did do a lot of active research into um what kind of things about this type of project and specifically also the contract we were signing might put um the organization at risk. Um we spent time for example extensively with our tax advisor um sending long catalogs of questions for back and there were definitely some things um that we didn't know at the start that we discovered throughout the process um that we need to be mindful of. Um for example, maybe this is helpful also to other organizations that want to undertake this type of project. Um, one of the reasons why KDEV is also putting engineering resources directly into the project is that um, we cannot just be passing the money through the organization to subcontractors for example because that could put our taxree status at risk because in the eye of the state or society um the reason why we have or enjoy a tax-free status is that we provide value to the society and therefore we need to add some sort of value on top of what is being done. So we have to actively participate in the project. Um and that means also that we need to have a certain amount of scale and for example direct employees rather than subcontractors that participate in this type of project. Um so yes there are definitely um some things that you should know if you want u to uh do this type of thing as a fellow open source organization for example. And um if uh you are out there and you're contemplating doing this and you want to benefit from our experience then of course uh you can get in touch um with the KD community at any time and we will try to be helpful. One more question here. um you have created a new job position for the Zetman and I believe all job positions that have been created are great and helpful for KDE but what's actually the decision process for deciding oh we need to hire someone I can I can maybe answer this since I'm holding the mic and we're all lazy. Um so it comes up in many different ways. It's discussions at academy. It's discussions with the working groups. It's conversations that take place on the membership list. Um the CIS admin one for example has been talked about for three or four years at this point. And um one of the reasons um that um we need to help scale there is because we've put so much more infrastructure in place and we see this not change in the upcoming years uh with projects like KD Linux that um are particularly infrastructure intensive. Um the CIS admin hiring is not the only thing we're doing there. We've also gotten recently, for example, some new uh corporate um help with um the CI CD system and things like that. But it it takes being attentive to sort of the needs of the community and it also takes um you all being proactive and suggesting things. Um we have in the past at times um also run very explicit tell us what we should be hiring for campaigns. Um some of you might remember the make a living um initiative that we had um where the premise was um as experts in the communities matters um give us also your ideas of what types um of jobs would stand a chance to sort of be get other jobs as in what could we strategically fund from the KDEV side that would lift the tide for everyone and maybe generate other KD jobs elsewhere. Um that's also something that we still like as a premise. We still try to um also do that. The SDA is another example of that. We facilitate it happening by also participating in the project, but of course it also um pays um the bills for other KD contributors um that are working for our partners. So that's more or less how it works. >> We have four minutes left and no question. Have we got another question? Have you got something more to say? Oh, we have Thank you very much. >> Maybe we can change. I give this one there. Where was the question? >> I'm faster. >> I actually meant to ask Lydia in person, but now I can I found her finally after two days. Um, donating to KDE. In quite many countries, it's possible to tax deduct donations. And we've been in contact two years back about tax deductions in Austria. And I'm a bit curious about not just the Austrian state, but generally because I checked recently doing filing my taxes and I couldn't deduct donations yet. I'm curious about the progress there. >> Yeah. So, KDEV is a organization in incorporated in Germany as a non nonprofit and that's why we have our tax uh status. Um there are some um countries in the EU where you can still claim a donation to a German EV on your uh tax deduction, but that is something you have to figure out unfortunately with your tax advisor because we can't give you tax advice. Um and then there are cases where we would need to set up local organizations for that to be possible and we have tried to avoid the overhead of this because it is uh usually quite a bit um of work to do. But um if it is expected that uh it is worth the money coming in uh then we can always uh talk about this more >> for Austria and especially you can talk to to Harald who looked into this and talked about it with his tax advisor I think and it turns out it needs to be done I think through Austrian tax advisor for some reason. So, it's not even something we can do by ourselves. >> Sounds like there's a follow-up to the question. Maybe give him the microphone. >> I I think we can take it oneonone. I unfortunately know more than I want to know about the Austrian tax system. So, okay. Thank you. >> Well, we also know way too much about these things. So, if you can talk about it with your tax advisor, it's better for everyone. Okay, we have one and a half minutes left. Is there one more question? Preferably on this side of the room. >> Well, while people think about questions, like something that this is something that keeps happening and like there's always the possibility of setting up an organization in a different country. We did set up one in Spain long time ago. This is something that can be done and then you will have uh the ability to do to donate there without uh tax advising and then we can find ways to collaborate with these organizations and and make that happen. That's fine. But like it needs to be people in place who want to to do this this admittedly boring extra work. >> Okay, our time is almost up. I'd like to thank you our lovely board AND