The KDE e.V. is a registered non-profit organization that represents the KDE Community in legal and financial matters.
The KDE e.V. is for example responsible for paying the servers that run our GitLab instance 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? 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.
At the moment, already a lot of our KDE community members are e.V. 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 group photo below:
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). 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):
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.
You will need some e.V. member that suggests you, I assume you will know someone from the e.V. members list to ask to do so.