Akademy group photo time series

Akademy is the oldest yearly meeting of KDE programmers. This year I attended for the tenth time.

Dublin in 2006 was my first Akademy. I will never forget it. It was my first time meeting the people from whom I learned so much.

I was there to give a presentation on Strigi, a desktop search tool I had been writing. Since then Strigi has been superseded by Baloo, another search tool with a silly name, but Strigi lives on, in spirit, in the Akademy group photo.

One of the challenges for a new Akademy attendee is to become familiar with the faces that go with the names that you know from mails and commit messages. I was struggling to catch everyone I wanted to talk to since I did not know what they looked like.

Luckily there was the group photo, which was taken and published early on. It showed the people and their names were listed below the photo. That was still hard to match up, so I used KImageMapEditor to create a <map> to link the faces to names and added a bit of JavaScript to make it searchable. As a joke I claimed that it was Strigi doing the searching.

Ever since then the Akademy group photo has had a search box.

Now I’ve created a webpage that celebrates this. It uses the <map> information to make a time series for all Akademy attendees. Six people have appeared on all Akademy group photos since 2006.

Please enjoy the Akademy attendee time series.

If you find any error or would like to contribute tagged html for the Akademies before 2006. you can contribute them to the git repo. Traditionally, the <map> is created with kimagemapeditor.