Where will KDE be in five years? To answer this question, we plan to bring together visionaries, strategists, planners, out-of-the-box-thinkers, realists, dreamers, doers, creators, leaders, coders from the KDE community and everybody else who is interested in discussing the future of KDE and picturing what it will be.

As a first step, we plan to hold a meeting under the name 'K16' to gather a first round of community people to come up with an idea where KDE will be in five years, in 2016. The goal is to formulate a common direction for the community, creating a shared vision that will drive the long-term development of KDE software.

The meeting will take place in early 2011 over an extended weekend. We'll provide a creative and productive atmosphere by having a heterogenous group of participants, inviting external moderators, having computer-free time, applying brainstorming and other creative techniques, and a location without distractions.

Join us

If you want to attend the meeting or provide input, please submit a one-page pitch of your idea where KDE will be in five years. The format and content is up to your imagination, be it a strategic text, a picture of KDE's Wikipedia article in 2016, a comic strip, or something completely different. The only condition is that it can be printed on a sheet of paper and pinned to a whiteboard. Please submit your K16 pitches to [email protected] no later than 31 December 2010. Please also state whether you would like to attend the meeting and when you are able to do so.

The K16 organization team (consisting of Sebastian Kügler, Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Riccardo Iaconelli, Stefan Werden, Jos Poortvliet, Artur Souza and Frank Karlitschek) will select up to 15 participants for the meeting based on the pitches, and invite them to the meeting. KDE e.V. will support the meeting by covering costs for travel and accommodation.

All results of the meeting will be published, and follow-up actions will be planned with the community.

We are looking forward to all your ideas. Don't wait, send your one-page pitch now to [email protected]. Share your vision of where KDE will be in 2016.

EDIT: the K16 team would like to add the following elaboration to the request for K16 pitches:

We would like to explain that we have some requirements for a 'vision' to be actually called a vision.

First of all, just stating what extra work is needed, especially when it comes to polishing what is there (no matter how important that is) is not enough. Yes, we all have many pet peeves and there are many areas where improvements are needed. But we asked for a 5 year vision.

Second, you need ideas on how to accomplish the plans within a Free Software community like KDE - and this is important. We are mostly volunteers, working on what we like or consider important. Whatever vision you present, it has to show how to get there and how to get people involved with it.

So in short, a vision should be ambitious - yet have some realism. Our long-term goals - create something so compelling it can overtake windows - should be the focus, not incremental improvements because that won't be enough in 5 years.