Today we are launching the Social Desktop Contest. As you know the idea of the Social Desktop is to connect online webservices with desktop applications. We give away great prices to developers who help making this vision reality.
The Open Collaboration Services API got a lot of new features in the past few month and is now stable. The first features will ship with KDE 4.3 but this is only the beginning. Now that the infrastructure is in place we think that it is a good time to open up the development to more developers.
Have you already played with the thought to develop an application for the Social Desktop? Are you interested in programming a really nice and easy REST API? You’ve already heard from the Open Collaboration Services API and wanted to hook in this topic? Now it’s your chance to do this and to win really nice prizes for your creation! We and the openDesktop.org community are searching for the best and most creative contest submission around the Social Desktop/OCS API!
The goal of the Social Desktop Contest is to foster community development and innovations around the OCS API. Prize winners will be selected by the community an a jury. Entrants are encouraged to submit entries that encourage community participation. Everyone can participate, teams are allowed (but than they have to share their prize, too). Every contribution must be licenced under an open source licence and must be build around the OCS API. Otherwise the entry won’t get accepted! Every contest contribution has to be uploaded to openDesktop.org (upload category: Social Desktop contest) so that the community can vote for the best content.
The contest will run till 25th August 2009. The winner will picked by the community and a jury. As the Social Desktop is a cross platform idea it is great that we have people from different project in the jury.
Jury members are:
Aaron Seigo – KDE
Luis Villa – GNOME
Alexandro Colorado – OpenOffice.org
Frank Karlitschek – openDesktop.org
The following prizes can be gained: The winner will receive a brand new Dell Inspiron Mini 10v Netbook (running Linux of course). The owner of the entry with the second highest rating gains a new external HDD with 1TB for backup and storing data. The third and the fourth one get an Amazon.com Gift Coupon for $50.00 and $30.00.
We are looking forward for your contribution! Sound interesting? Check out the official contest site www.socialdesktop.org/contest/ to obtain more and detailed information! You could also already find some ideas there.
In other news we launched the version 2.0 of our knowledge base system on openDesktop.org today.
The questions and answers are now in the main navigation and better accessible. You can search for answered or not answered questions. We have introduced different categories and a full text search. Questions and answers can be related to specific applications or independent. We simplified the answer workflow. Now every registered user can click on the add answer button and answer a question. You can also upload 2 pictures for every question and 2 more pictures for the answer. The idea is to build a user generated FAQ and knowledge base to help new and unexperienced users.
http://www.openDesktop.org/knowledgebase
All the data is accessible via the OCS REST API. Marco Martin already wrote a nice dataengine and a plasmoid to access this knowledge base directly from the Desktop. The dataengine will be part of KDE 4.3 Let´s what we can do with this infrastructure and ideas in the future. 🙂
Our new event database is now also accessible via the Open Collaboration Services API and has its own RSS feed. But RSS is so oldschool. 🙂 I think integration into the Desktop or Akonadi is the future. Does somebody volunteer to help? 🙂
http://www.openDesktop.org/events/
We hope that you like the features. What do you think?
But now I have to switch from development into presentation mode. Like Sebas I give 4 talks in the next 3 weeks. Hope to see you at Linuxtag or at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit.
Cheers
Frank