Projects/Social-Desktop

This page is a collection area for thought, brainstorming and project planing for the Social Desktop Integration into KDE

Milestones

• develop and ship a first set of plasmoids for KDE 4.3
• develop a complete and deep integration into KDE for 4.4
• world domination.

Communication Channels

• Mailinglist: [email protected]
• Wiki: http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Social-Desktop
• API: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/open-collaboration-services
• Initial presentation: http://www.open-collaboration-services.org/socialdesktop.pdf

Ideas

News

We should have a communication channel for KDE related informations directly to our users. So we can post announcements directly to the Desktop of our users.

For example a small plasmoid which reads a special RSS feed from the kde.org webserver. In the future this feed could be personalized. So the KDE user can specify which kind of information he wants to see and which language he speaks and in which region on the world he lives. This could be useful for our PR people and helpful to convert users into contributors and KDE ambassadors.

Perhaps we can use some news from the dot. But this feed is only for end users and not for developers, so we have to focus on information which is useful for users.

It should be easy to build a plasmoid and a rss feed for this. Should be doable for KDE 4.3. This plasmoid should be on the desktop by default.

People

Place a plasmoid on the desktop where users can find other KDE users in the same city or region. You can contact users, ask questions, become friends and do screensharing. This is a nice tool for community building. We don´t want to show the billion of teens from facebook on our desktop. This is about building and pushing the KDE and free desktop community.

A first server side implementation on openDesktop.org is done. The API specification is here: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/open-collaboration-services

All we need is a plasmoid to use this api. Cornelius did a proof of concept already you can find the code here: http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/base/attica/

Activities

People love to see what is going on in their KDE friends network.

For example. - A friend of mine posted a new blog entry - A friend of mine uploaded a new application or wallpaper on KDE-Look.org - A friend of mine is going to the Linux User Group meeting tomorrow. - There is an update for an application I am fan of. - A friend of mine committed a new feature in the KDE SVN - Someone was on my profile page and offered me a KDE related job. - A friend of mine is now a fan of “Amarok”

A first server side implementation on openDesktop.org is done. The API specification is here: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/open-collaboration-services

Events

It would be great if KDE people could see if there are interesting upcoming kde or free software events in their region.

It would be nice to have a central events database where everybody who wants to organize a kde or free software event can publish the event and other poeople in the same region get notifications.

This would require a serverside implementation and a plasmoid to show the events. Or do we want to have korganizer integration here?

No Serverside implementation exists at the moment.

Knowledge base

If a user is starting KDE for the first time he has questions. At the moment all the support for KDE users is handled by forums and mailinglist. So users have to start up a browser go to google and search for answers for his questions or problems. This is great for experienced users but not very good for beginners. Forums are not the best systems to store a knowledge base or FAQs. We are developing a Desktop, right? I think we can do better. Why not integrate a knowledge base system directly into the desktop.

Great would be a plasmoid where users can directly query an online knowledge base system. For example a searchline, most popular questions from today and alltime. And a direct link to the person who asked the question and provided the answer. You can ask how you configure some specific option in KDE for example. You will get an answer or get the option to post this as an open question into the system.

A first server side implementation on openDesktop.org is done. The API specification is here: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/open-collaboration-services

Ideas taken from UX group and user feedback

Social desktop provides technology which can address needs expressed by the KDE user community. Starting points for user needs are:

• statistics on active pages on userbase
• usability and user experience project at KDE

From the active pages, we see that (ignoring the discussions) the applications KMail, Akonadi, and KOrganizer are popular landing pages (KMail with 70k hits, KOrganizer with 25k hits, Akonadi probably popular because of a recent bug with it). So KMail and KOrganizer are key KDE applications. From the downloads on kde-apps.org we see that KPlayer, KDM Theme Manager, Mount Iso, KoolDock, KCometen3, Amarok, KXDocker, Yakuyake, KBFX Silk. They are: 4 KDE improvement, 1 video, 1 sound, 1 KDE service menu, 1 screensaver, 1 system tool, 1 other. Given that the basic KDE installation has already all the productivity tools a typical user needs, the downloads are not really representative. But they show, that good looks and system tinkering are more important than productivity/application tools.

From a UX perspective, with an ironic smile on, lets say that a nice plasma gui alone does not do the trick, catching the user's emotions and needs does. The UX reports mention one report interesting from the end-user perspective, quassel. After seele did the report, the quassel developers blogged that the report pointed out things they were aware of, but didn't fokus on. From NEPOMUK UX report Deliverable D11.1 published September 2006 at usability at scribd we know some cases they need.

Contact

mailinglist: [email protected] Frank Karlitschek [email protected]