Re: 5th anniversary of the KDE Community Forums - Dot story?

The KDE community is best known for making software, and by extension, the people who made said software (for example through the developer blogs on Planet KDE). Of course, a large community like KDE does not only involve people who write software: there are translators, bug reporters and triagers, documentation writers, and user support. In particular user support is important both for users  and for contributors alike, to ensure that problems are properly reported and to bridge the gap between developers and users.

The KDE Community Forums are one of the forms in which users can receive support: boasting more than 40,000 threads totalling over than 200,000 posts, with a large number of registered users, they are now one of the cornerstones of user support for KDE software Today they reached a significant milestone - five years since their foundation. 

How did it all begin? 

The KDE Community Forums were founded to answer the need for a proper communication channel for user support: not all users were familiar or practical with the then traditional means used, like mailing lists or IRC. Forums were starting to become more important in that regard, and in fact a few unofficial forums had even appeared around the net: however there were problems like spam, or lack of maintenance. These issues in the end prompted the creation of proper official forums. Staffed by a handful of community contributors, the forums began their journey to creating a proper place into the KDE community.

Turning points

For the developer community, forums were kind of an alien world, with a completely different workflow, and so acceptance took, quite reasonably, some time. Of course the forum staff didn't stay idle: they started some initiatives to promote contributions to KDE, the so-called "Klassrooms" where a handful of people ("students") would do simple tasks, coding or non coding, over the course of one or two weeks, including small patches and screencasts. Initiatives like the System Settings rewrite were prompted by such occasions, in fact.

As the Klassrooms were quite successful, the forum staff, inspired by an idea of Sayak "sayakb" Banerjee, worked on a system to handle feature requests so that they could be screened and discussed prior to the submission to KDE's bug tracker: the KDE Brainstorm. This provided a useful interaction ground between contributors, users and developers (with some actively engaged in the discussion).

Meanwhile, the forums staff was contacted by the Amarok team with the intention of joining their already-established forum into a new home. Through the efforts of both sides, topics and users were successfully migrated. This was just the first step: more and more community members came and asked for forums to be created in order to provide more convenient support for users. It was a sign that the forums had successfully become an important part of the KDE community.

Strengthening bonds in the community

It was then that the ties between developers and users became stronger thanks to the forums. This was clearly shown when the Krita forums opened, offering not only a place for discussion but also to showcase artwork made with the software. Nowadays it is still one of the most active areas of the KDE Community Forums and regularly visited by developers and artists. Boudewjin Rempt, a Krita developer, describes the experience:

"I was initially skeptical since I thought the mailing list was accessible enough for users. I was so wrong! From the moment the Krita forums opened, it started snowballing, especially when we got a gallery section. It's definitely the preferred way for many artists to reach out to each other and to the developers."

Even today more external forums are coming under the KDE Community Forums umbrella, the latest being user support for the acclaimed video editor KDEnlive. 

More and more developers are also taking advantage of this inftastructure: as Telepathy KDE and KF5 hacker Martin Klapetek says, 

"KDE Forums provide us with a great platform to give our users support and to discuss things with all the community. Before we had our forum, users were asking for help in our bug tracker, which is just not right. With conjuction to an IRC notifier bot and RSS access, we can monitor what's 
going on in the forums without keeping it constantly open in a browser.""

Non English speakers are also welcome in the KDE Community Forums, thanks to the establishment of several language-specific forums.

How was this possible?

This five-year endeavor was only possible thanks to the awesome staff which helps in the forums. The continuous exchange of ideas, proposals and opinions from the various staff member gave a tremendous push forward towards integration with the user and developer community, and to truly provide a home for KDE community members. This author is also part of the administration team, and he is proud of working daily with truly awesome people. 

Of course, this is just the beginning. Large changes are on the horizon for KDE software with the KDE Frameworks 5, and of course the forums will keep their steady pace, to show how great a FOSS community can be.

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