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Recently, the KDE Project has put a concerted effort into improving the community experience. In October, Lisa covered the relaunch of the KDE Forums, while new real world events such as Camp KDE and the upcoming joint Akademy/GUADEC Desktop Summit in Gran Canaria gives KDE fans a chance to meet in person.

The KDE team recently announced the KDE Brainstorm initiative. KDE Brainstorm, in practice, works much like Dell's IdeaStorm -- community members of all walks of life are invited to chip in their ideas for new and improved features and functions, with the wider community voting on (and fleshing out) these ideas. Ideas that generate enough interest are then reviewed further by developers, who work to make them happen.

This week, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit began accepting proposals for its upcoming event. The event, aimed at encouraging interaction between KDE's Akademy and GNOME's GUADEC developer conference attendees, gives prospective speakers the opportunity to bring their passion to a more diverse audience.

I have a confession to make. Sometimes, even when you've been trained in the intricacies of searching every database known to man, you can still outright miss really obvious things in a simple Google search. When I was fresh out of library school, I resurrected one of the library's catalog terminals, an old Bondi Blue iMac, with Yellow Dog Linux and KDE. I spent days locking down the KDE desktop, so that if the browser displaying the catalog was somehow shut down (or crashed) it would automatically restart. I spent a few more days making sure that most patrons couldn't access anything but the browser (never underestimate the general public, or the havoc that stray keystrokes, however innocent, can bring).

It wasn't that the KDE Kiosk tool didn't exist at the time. I simply missed it. Yes, I was a bad systems librarian for missing it, and then spending days (happily, but still...) locking down the desktop and reinventing the wheel.

With the release of KDE 4, Kiosk sadly fell into a state of limbo. Now, however, KDE developer Ian Geiser wants to bring it back to life on KDE 4.