SEP
25
2012

Anne Wilson

Anne Wilson

  Name: Anne Wilson
  Age: 72
  Location: Pennine, United Kingdom
  Project: User Support, KDE Webteam


Anne Wilson is a committed and venerable member of the KDE community. She talks about her journey from an ordinary user to a user supporter, and how her hobby drives the development of one small KDE application.

What do you do for a living?

I'm ancient :-), long since retired, and my time is shared between family spread over 4 generations, KDE and, to a lesser degree, machine embroidery.

What do you do for KDE?

Broadly classed as "user support" - I help on mailing lists and the forum, but most of my time goes on wiki maintenance. I help new translators get started with the excellent Translate Mediawiki extension, field questions from contributors on the wiki, and generally try to "be on hand" whenever support is needed.

How did you get started contributing to KDE?

I started using KDE in Mandrake 8 - I had seen it in Red Hat 5, but at that time I couldn't get my printer working so it had to wait. Like many users, I discovered the mailing lists and received willing help. Soon I found I knew the answers to some of the questions, and I started answering them. After a while I was answering questions on several mailing lists, including KDE ones. Ingo Klöcker encouraged me to become more and more involved. Finally, another Ingo, known to most as Neverendingo, encouraged me to become part of the web team.

How much time do you spend working on KDE?

Hard to say. I would think a minimum of 5 hours a day, if you count reading the lists, but often it's more.

What keeps you motivated?

The good relationships within the web team. Even though I can't help with the technical aspects, the rest of the team are appreciative of the work I do do.

What are some of your future goals for your involvement with KDE?

On the broad level - encouraging and helping the clean-up of TechBase - archiving the obsolete and improving translations.

On a personal level - a very young project, currently called "Liberty" - working with two developers. We hope to build by stages an application for viewing and manipulating machine embroidery files.

What are some of your hobbies and interests outside of KDE?

I don't have much time outside KDE :-) but I enjoy sewing and machine embroidery. I take courses to make me more proficient in both. The high points in this respect are some custom church vestments from last year.

KDE is the Community

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