In the middle of cold January, the team behind DigiKam met in Genoa, the sunny old port city in northern Italy. DigiKam is the award-winning KDE photo management application. Participants started gathering in the evening on Thursday 12 January, getting together over dinner to form new friendships and to find out how people's lives were going. The next day, real work started.

The 10^th KDE PIM Meeting in Osnabrück finished on 12 February. Starting with pizza Friday afternoon running until Sunday around 17:00, the meeting attracted more than 20 hackers working on the various parts of KDE PIM. There was talk, code, beer, a group picture and even an anti-ACTA demonstration. Read on for a report on the meeting.

Thinking of starting a free and open source project? Looking for inspiration on an existing project? Lydia Pintscher has pulled together useful wisdom from free and open community leaders in a new book—Open Advice.

Akademy—the annual world summit of the KDE Community—will take place from 30 June to 6 July in Tallinn, Estonia. This 10th edition of the KDE community conference will celebrate 15 years of KDE!

Registration for the conference is now open, and the Call for Papers has been published.

KDE España has started planning Akademy-es 2012—the most important KDE-related event in Spain. The conference is an opportunity for Spanish KDE users and developers to meet, share experiences, catch up on KDE news, and plan for the future. Akademy-es includes a range of presentations, workshops, hacking sessions, informal get-togethers and an assembly of KDE España members. KDE members and supporters will be coming from other countries to enjoy famous Spanish hospitality and meet up with KDE friends.

Developers, testers, bug chasers and many more people are putting in a major effort on KDE's next major release. It will soon be time to appreciate the result, sit back and relax! The occasion calls for commemoration of KDE’s recent accomplishments.

A wiki page for the 4.8 parties has been created. If you want, please organize a party. But first add your name to the list and start getting the word out.

The KDE community is proud to announce that next year's Akademy will be held in Tallinn, Estonia from the 30th of June to the 6th of July. Akademy is the annual world conference held by the KDE community to celebrate the Free Software desktop and work towards the future of KDE.

Akademy 2011 in Berlin ended a few months ago. It was part of the Desktop Summit, which was a great success. Next year's Akademy awaits us in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia.

The third Quarterly Report of KDE e.V. for 2011 has been published. It gives an overview of all the activities KDE e.V. supported in the last 3 months. This includes the Desktop Summit in Berlin and various sprints, and also the e.V.'s annual general assembly and an interview with Lydia Pintscher about why KDE rocks at mentoring.

Read the full report today.

KDE is honored to be chosen again this year to be part of Google Code-In. Pre-university students aged between 13 and 17 are offered a great chance to contribute to KDE by choosing from a large pool of tasks, depending on their skills—code, translation, videography, user interfaces, research and more. Spread the word about the contest to any students and parents you know.

The results of the Desktop Summit 2011 survey have been published at the Summit website. The overall feedback was positive, and there were suggestions for improving future Desktop Summits.

Desktop Summit 2011 Berlin promoted collaboration between open desktop projects with attendance dominated by the GNOME and KDE communities. There were several requests to make a stronger appeal for people from other desktop projects to attend.