Less than a month left until KDE Akademy 2018. As part of the local organization team, this is going to be a busy time, but having Akademy in such a great city as Vienna is gonna be awesome.
You will over the next weeks find many more “I’m going to Akademy” posts on Planet KDE detailing the Akademy plans of other people. So here in this post I don’t want to look forward, but back and tell you the story of the (in retrospect quite long) process of how a few people from Vienna decided to put in a bid to organize Akademy 2018.
The story starts 5 years ago, around this time, in the beautiful city of Bilbao at Akademy 2013. There I met Joseph from Vienna & Kevin from Graz, the first two Austrian KDE contributors I met. It was probably somewhen during that week, that Joseph & me talked about organizing an Akademy in Vienna. Joseph worked at TU Wien at that time and I was a student there, so we already had good connections to the university.
Later that year Joseph & me met at TU to further talk about a possible Akademy in Vienna, it was at that time clear that this would happen earliest 2015, also because the Call for Locations were sent out quite late (in autumn, after Akademy).
Not much happened until Akademy 2014, where we had the “KDE (in) Austria BoF”, about which I wrote a few years ago. There the plan was to have more KDE/Qt talks and a bigger KDE presence at the Linuxwochen Wien, thus organizing a sort of “Akademy AT”. Unfortunately we didn’t do this. And Joseph & me did also not really pursue our plan to organize Akademy in Vienna. But while those things never happened, since then the Austrian KDE community meets up more or less regularly.
The following years I always attended Akademy and also volunteered at QtCon 2016, already with the intent to get a bit of an insight into how Akademy is organized.
In April 2017, surprisingly early, the Call for Locations for Akademy 2018 was published, and I knew: Now or never 🙂 While still being a student and having contact to TU Wien, I already worked part-time as a freelancer and knew I can manage to dedicate time on the organization. And so discussions on the kde-at mailinglist followed and some first draft content for the proposal was gathered.
And it nearly was put on the pile of unfinished projects again, if weren’t for a students BBQ at TU Wien, where I met Lukas, who in 2017 was a GSoC student. I already knew him before from university, where he attended a course I organized and he was going to his first Akademy in Almeria. We talked about the idea to bring Akademy 2018 to Vienna and the later the evening and the more beer we had, the more sure we were: We are going to do this.
So when coming home from the BBQ it was already the 2nd of June (announcing interest should have been done until 1st of June), but I sat down and wrote a mail that Vienna would be interested in hosting Akademy.
Two intensive weeks of research, meetings with FSINF (TU Wien computer science students council) and proposal writing followed until the full proposal was sent half an hour before the deadline.
Afterwards a long waiting period followed (at that time I wasn’t yet a member of KDE eV, so I couldn’t even see the discussions on the members mailing list or other proposals).
Until Akademy 2017, where Lukas sent me near-real time updates about the status of our Akademy 2018 proposal. On Sunday he got the information that the Vienna proposal was selected and that it will be announced that day on the closing session. He even had to get up on stage, during his first Akademy and give a first spoiler for Akademy 2018.
So this is the story, of the long journey from idea to realization of an Akademy in Vienna. I hope you enjoyed it and look forward to seeing you all at Akademy 2018.
See you in Vienna!
