KDE is about the community, rather than the product. It is not all about the code: there are many other ways in which people can be part of KDE, and a very simple way is to connect with other people.

In an effort to bridge the gap between users and developers, the KDE Community Forums have launched a new initiative to coordinate feature requests. A new "Brainstorm" section has been created in the KDE Community Forums: users are encouraged to post requests there.

The KDE community is pleased to announce UserBase. UserBase is the new end-user wiki for KDE and complements TechBase, the wiki aimed at developers. It will contain tips and tricks, links to where to get more help, as well as an application catalogue giving an overview of the different kinds of programs that KDE offers.

KDE's latest community website KDE-Files.org has gone online. The site is a central exchange platform for all sorts of documents and document templates. Users can collaborate, discuss, vote and share documents. Some examples of files you could share are your jogging result spreadsheets, OpenOffice.org presentation templates or Kexi DVD Databases. In the future users will be able to use the KHotNewStuff system to access KDE-Files.org directly from the applications.

The HASE (Human Aspects of Software Engineering) group at the University of Maryland Baltimore County is conducting two online surveys for KDE users. They expect to obtain results that will lead to useful discussions about the overall usability of KDE. The results of this research will be shared with the KDE community. The surveys take about 15 minutes to complete.

Many aspects of KDE performance depend on the underlying system or the user's configuration. The KDE Performance Tips document, which lists some of the performance related issues together with instructions how to avoid or fix the problems, has been updated with new tips. If you would like to add new tips to this page, update the ones already listed, or discuss them, please use the kde-optimize@kde.org mailing list. Note that this list is for working on optimizing KDE -- not for complaining.

Celebrating one month of KDE 3.3 out in the wild, userinstinct put together a usability review with user testing. "Based on feedback from our test group, the default settings for a number of KDE parameters differ from what is usually expected and desired by users. Providing better defaults would reduce the time users spend looking for configuration settings and would provide a better "out-of-the-box" experience."

A few days ago, we've opened a new section on our Polish K Desktop Environment website called "KDE Users Database". This is not only for Polish users, it's international. After some time it'll be good rate of KDE users number all over the world. Every registered user can save generated certificates and put them on his desktop or website. So, let's register! Please note, that this is not an official KDE users counter - but, maybe in future - it might change.

Finding you need to send top-secret email communication with KMail, but you don't know where to start? An article in Linux Journal (part of Marcel Gagné's "Cooking with Linux" series) shows you how to use the Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG) in conjunction with KGpg to secure your email. Learn how to generate and import keys, sign and encrypt email, and otherwise keep your private communication away from prying eyes.

I gave my presentation "KDE 3.2: A User's Perspective" to my local Linux User Group last Tuesday night as previously announced. The talk was well received, and left some people (even KDE users) overwhelmed with new information. It just goes to show that I wasn't the only one who knew KDE was a great environment, but hadn't even scratched the surface yet! My presentation 'slides', a collection of over 3MB of screenshots of KDE in action, are now online for your viewing pleasure (mirrored here). Enjoy!

Lukas Masek (aka luciash d' being) has announced the successful completion of the move of the KDE Wiki to the KDE Dot News server. With the move, KDE Wiki gains not only more computing resources, but also a new domain name in the form of wiki.kdenews.org. Many thanks to luci and of course to our sponsor Pierre-Emmanuel Muller of LeVillage.