join the e.v.

content/posts/join-the-kde-ev/index.md

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+---
+title: "Join the KDE e.V."
+date: 2021-02-20T15:13:00+02:00
+draft: false
+categories: [kde]
+tags: [kde]
+url: /posts/join-the-kde-ev/
+author: "Christoph Cullmann"
+---
+
+The [KDE e.V.](https://ev.kde.org) is a registered non-profit organization that represents the [KDE Community](https://www.kde.org) in legal and financial matters.
+
+The KDE e.V. is for example responsible for paying the servers that run our [GitLab instance](https://invent.kde.org) and all our other web services.
+The e.V. takes care of sponsoring developer sprints and contributor travel costs, too.
+
+You did participate at some [Akademy](https://akademy.kde.org)?
+This wouldn't have been possible without the KDE e.V., both by sponsoring and helping to organize the event!
+
+If you are an active KDE contributor, consider to join the e.V. to be able to vote on its future direction.
+This includes very important things like the [KDE Free Qt Foundation](https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/).
+
+At the moment, already a lot of our KDE community members are [e.V. members](https://ev.kde.org/members/), too.
+
+But naturally, as people enter and leave our community, we need to outreach to new contributors to join the e.V..
+The e.V. shall stay a representation of the currently active KDE contributors/community and not some club of KDE oldies =)
+
+Just take a look at the [2002 e.V. meeting](https://ev.kde.org/reports/2002/) group photo below:
+
+<center><a href="/posts/join-the-kde-ev/images/2002_meeting.png" target="_blank"><img width=700 src="/posts/join-the-kde-ev/images/2002_meeting.png"></a></center>
+
+A few of this people are still active, some of them many of the current active KDE community members have never heard of.
+The group pictured above isn't that diverse either.
+It looks a bit like you take a group photo of some computer science course in a university in Germany of that time.
+And yes, I am on that photo, too (as usual, wrongly written as Cullman, like [my nice county](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cullman_County,_Alabama)).
+I actually fished that picture out of my private data storage .P
+
+Let's take a look at the Akademy 2020 group photo below (CC BY 4.0, created by the Akademy team):
+
+<center><a href="/posts/join-the-kde-ev/images/akademy2020_group_photo_1080.png" target="_blank"><img width=700 src="/posts/join-the-kde-ev/images/akademy2020_group_photo_1080.png"></a></center>
+
+This looks a lot more like the KDE community we all know and love.
+Therefore it would be fantastic if active people take care to join the e.V., too!
+
+If you want to join, just take a short look at [this guide](https://ev.kde.org/getinvolved/members.php).
+
+You will need some e.V. member that suggests you, I assume you will know someone from the [e.V. members list](https://ev.kde.org/members/) to ask to do so.