Berlin, 6th October, 2010 – The Desktop Summit is a co-located event which features the yearly contributor conferences of the GNOME and KDE communities, GUADEC and Akademy. Next year the conference will take place from 6 to 12 August, 2011 in Berlin at the Humboldt University in Unter den Linden. The event will feature keynotes, talks, workshops and team building events. The Desktop Summit website is now online at desktopsummit.org.

The GNOME and KDE communities develop the majority of Free Software desktop technology. Increasingly, they cooperate on underlying infrastructure. By holding their annual developer flagship events in the same location, the two projects will further foster collaboration and discussion between their developer communities. Moreover, KDE and GNOME aim to work more closely with the rest of the desktop and mobile open source community. The summit presents a unique opportunity for main actors to work together and improve the free and open source desktop for all.

“We are proud to be able to welcome the participants of the Desktop Summit 2011 to the capital region next year,” says Almuth Nehring-Venus, Permanent Secretary for Economics, Technology and Women’s Issues from the Berlin Senate. “I hope that the joint conference of the two largest Free Desktop projects GNOME and KDE will provide an additional boost for our Open Source/Open Standard initiative within the framework of Berlin?s IT strategy and therefore also to further high-value jobs in our region.”

At the Desktop Summit 2011, KDE and GNOME expect well over a thousand core contributors, prominent open source technology leaders, representatives from government, education and corporate backgrounds, and open source desktop engineers, usability experts and designers. Local and international IT industry are invited to learn about and join in developing the latest innovative desktop technology. The TSB Innovation Agency Berlin GmbH and the Berlin Senate are supporting the event locally.

The registration for the Desktop Summit will open on 1 February 2011 and a call for papers will be issued. Talk submissions will be due on 15th of March and on 15 April the conference program will be announced. Saturday 6 August kicks off three days of joint keynotes, talks and social events followed by four days of collaborative workshops. The conference officially ends on Friday, 12 August with a closing.