Getting ready for Akademy 2025

Saturday, 16 August 2025  |  Volker Krause

We are just three weeks away from KDE’s annual Akademy conference, time to get going with the preparations.

I'm going to Akademy 2025!

Emergency and weather warnings

I’ll have a talk on Saturday, 18:15 in room 1, about our work on building infrastructure for integrating emergency and weather warnings (abstract).

The server part of this is progressing steadily with performance and scalability issues being addressed, and thanks to contributions from Breezy Weather we recently managed to finally fill the largest remaining coverage gap, China.

World map with many small color-coded areas indicating active alerts.
Map view with active emergency and weather alerts.

KDE’s client side code is keeping up with API changes and data issues we discover, but lacks any “real” UI integration so far. I hope that we can have a discussion at Akademy on how that can and should look like.

Map of the affected area as well as some structured information about a heat alert.
Details about a single alert.

Cell Broadcast

Last year we had a single chance for cell broadcast testing for Plasma Mobile. That’s better than nothing but not really efficient for development. If everything works out we might have a few more tries this year. That’s thanks to dedicated test equipment, so nothing to worry about :)

Travel

Not starting an Akademy day with discussions over breakfast already, not ending the day with some late night hacking in the hotel lobby, and really boring travel will make this a bit of a different Akademy experience for me this time.

Nevertheless, that “stay at home” event has exposed a few issues with Itinerary’s transfer handling, so at least the traditional Akademy-related Itinerary bug fixing remains.

Of course all Akademy (sub-)events are directly importable into Itinerary again by pasting their corresponding website URLs, as you are used to by now. If you still haven’t booked your train, note the Deutsche Bahn Akademy attendee discount. It’s the first time we have this, so I’d be interested in feedback from those of you who ended up using this, to see if it’s worth setting this up for future events as well.

And more

Akademy is not just about by personal rabbit holes of course, there’s broader KDE topics I’d be interested in discussing as well, such as:

  • Current limitations with the declarative QML type registration and tooling, such as gadget singletons and the i18n functions.
  • Improving our own application distribution, including (automated) quality control and lifecycle management, as well as producing proper release binaries rather than using semi-random builds from the stable branch, and having those ready at the time of the release announcement.
  • KDE’s role in collaborations with other organizations, in lobbying work and in hosting common infrastructure, and how broad do we want the KDE “umbrella” to be in this.

See you at Akademy!

Fingers crossed nobody gets lost due to an Itinerary bug on the way (and no, not realizing that FRA != HHN is not Itinerary’s fault), and very much looking forward to seeing many of you in Berlin!