In January, one month before travelling to Brussels for FOSDEM 2020 (do you remember when the conferences were taking place in the non-virtual world?), I was following a conversation on Mastodon. The discussion was about free software companion apps that could be used on the PinePhone in FOSDEM. Calindori, the calendar of Plasma Mobile was mentioned as a tool that could do the job.

The Kongress icon, thanks to Mathis Brüchert

The next day I found myself copying and modifying some Calindori code, adding new things and putting into the app the FOSDEM conference data. So, Kongress was born; a companion application for congresses - virtual or not.

With regard to the functionalities that it offers, Kongress includes:

• Checking the conference schedule
• Tagging talks as favorites
• Management of multiple conferences

Conferences supported by Kongress

From a technical point of view, the user interface of Kongress is based on Kirigami and follows the KDE Human Interface Guidelines while the back-end system uses KCalendarCore. For Kongress to be able to be used in a conference, the schedule should have been released in the ical format.

Personally, I used it in FOSDEM 2020 and it fitted my needs. Since the annual conference of the KDE community, Akademy 2020, has also been added to Kongress, I am going to use it in Akademy 2020 as well. I would be happy if Akademy attendees found it helpful and provided also their feedback.

Akademy 2020 schedule

Kongress can be found in the unstable edition of KDE Neon - so PinePhone users running KDE Neon can download it directly from the Neon repositories. It’s also available in the flaptpak nightlies kdeapps repository for ARM as well as x84_64 platforms. Finally, Android users can get it from the F-Droid repository of KDE. Nevertheless, since I usually do not spend my volunteer time on working on Android, that version may need some love; patches welcome.

See you at Akademy 2020!