Following the success of last year's Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, the GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. Boards have announced that they have decided to once again co-locate their flagship conferences, Akademy and GUADEC, in 2011

The KDE and GNOME communities are looking for a host for the Desktop Summit 2011, the combined annual conference featuring KDE's Akademy and GNOME's GUADEC events. Following up on the successful Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, the second edition of the combined event in 2011 will be the premier place to learn about, discuss, and work on free software on the desktop.

As one of the foremost free and open source gatherings, the Desktop Summit was in the right setting in the City of Berlin. At the Summit, the City announced the winners of its open source competition “Berlin – Made to Create”, a program promoting Open Source and open standards ideas and solutions. At the same session, the GNOME and KDE communities also announced their outstanding contributors.

The boards of KDE e.V. and the GNOME Foundation have issued a call to co-host Akademy and GUADEC, the flagship conferences of the KDE and GNOME projects respectively, during the Summer of 2009.

As part of the Desktop Summit currently taking place in Berlin, the KDE development team has announced that work on the fifth generation of KDE is to commence. The new generation is not scheduled to include any fundamental changes of the type seen in KDE 4.0 and GNOME 3.0. Instead, it will be 'KDE Frameworks 5.0', which will likely be the foundation for a future KDE Plasma Desktop.

Michael Meeks, Bradley Kuhn and Mark Shuttleworth discussed copyright assignment agreements and copyright licensing agreements at the Desktop Summit in Berlin. GNOME Foundation executive director Karen Sandler moderated the short but revealing discussion. Be sure to also read the insightful comments to the article.

The Desktop Summit is a joint conference organized by the GNOME and KDE communities, the two dominant forces behind modern graphical software on free platforms. Over a thousand international participants are expected to attend. The main conference takes place from 6-8 August.

The GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. are excited to announce the keynotes for the first ever co-located Akademy and GUADEC, over 100 talks as well as BOFs, keynote sessions, lightning talks and many opportunities to meet other developers and begin collaborating between projects.

In July 2013, Akademy — the KDE community summit — will host the Qt Contributor Summit (QtCS) in Bilbao, Spain. QtCS is THE gathering of the Qt Project contributor community. It will take place July 15th and 16th in the middle of the KDE Akademy conference week (13-19 July). By co-hosting, KDE and the Qt Project will increase their existing collaboration even further.