This week has brought me to Istanbul, to attend Senlik, which is a Turkish Linux conference organized by LKD, the Turkish Linux users group. I’ve been invited to this conference by some developers of Pardus Linux, which is a KDE-focused Turkish Linux distribution. KDE is actually very strongly represented at this conference, thanks to the work of the gals and guys from Pardus, who are also wonderful hosts to me and Kim, who accompanies me to enjoy the city for a bit.
The conference is hosted at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, which is not purely technical but focuses on design and user interaction. I think that makes a great location for a Free Software conference, as the UI part (artwork and usability) are often seen as stepchilds in Free Software projects. I’m trying hard to make sure that people know that we’re embracing designers as first class citizens in our community just like we embrace coders, documentation writers, translators, promo people and community management folks. The grand scheme is I think that KDE is moving from being a Free Software project to becoming a Free Culture project. After all, ‘only code’ is not enough to conquer the world and make Free Software the default on most people’s machines.
As someone just pointed out to me, I (or rather the organizers of this conference ;)) have picked the perfect time to visit Istanbul. Temperatures are at a mild 20 degrees C during the day, the sun is rather warm and nice, but it’s not too hot like it becomes during the summer here in southern Europe. I really enjoy the Turkish culture of coffee in interesting tastes (had a green nut coffee last night, which was really tasty, mild coffee) and Nargile, the traditional water pipe which also comes in interesting flavours, such as apple or the mint / lemon mix I tried last night. The nargile causes a bit of a “light” feeling in the head, I figure it’s mostly caused by an increased amount of Oxygen reaching your brain. The pipe’s smoke seems rather harmless being filtered by the water. Food here in Turkey is just awesome. It’s very easy to find both snacks and also more fancy food. There’s relatively little in the way of fast food, but many different options in Turkish food. Vegetarian food options are just as numerous and good as non-veggie food (which is what I enjoy being a meat lover).
One thing that really strikes me is the number of women around here. It’s really refreshing to see that a Free Software conference can attract women just in the same way. Unfortunately, that is not the case across the board yet. It’s something we definitely need to work on. (Although I think that KDE doesn’t do a bad job right now, with core contributors such as Celeste, Lydia, Alexandra (yeah, all you Alexandras! ;), Chani, …). Overall, the number of women involved in Free Software is still embarrassingly low (around 3% overall :(), so there’s still a long way to go … make Free Softare communities a more attractive place for female contributors, make them feel welcome and taken seriously.
On Wednesday, I’ll spend the day at the Pardus office here in Istanbul, where we planned a workshop for the team. I’ll be using this opportunity to learn more about Pardus Linux which has been continuously impressing me with its amazing level of integration between desktop and underlying operating system. The upcoming version of Pardus, dubbed 2009 will be released this summer, and I can only recommend to check it out. Pardus builds on Python, and most of its infrastructural bits (package management, network management, …) but also the UI are implemented in Python. We’ll be looking at how we can improve the flow of code upstream, and what issues the Pardus developers are facing when interacting with KDE, both code-wise and community-wise. There’s definitely a lot of interest to work closer together with KDE as an upstream community, and often it’s just a matter of encouraging people to apply for an SVN account and start committing. That doesn’t go without it being explained in the first place, though often the reaction I see is “Ow, it’s *that* low barrier …” Some of the Pardus developers will come to Akademy this year, make sure you check out their stuff!
The coming days, I’ll be a bit silent, as I’m taking the opportunity of being here with Kim to also relax a couple of days as well, something we didn’t get to a lot lately. And there’s this long list of different things I still have to try while being here (turkish bath, Iskender kebap only being two of the items lined up.