<img src="http://people.canonical.com/~jriddell/akademy/aurelien.jpg" width="192" height="240" align="right" />
Top Kubuntu developer Aurelien Gateau has been honoured with an <a href="http://community.kde.org/KDE_Project_History/Contributor_Awards">Akademy Award</a>.  The Akademy Awards are given out each year at the annual KDE conference Akademy.  The jury is made up of the prize winners from the previous year.  Aurelien won the award for his work on <a href="http://gwenview.sourceforge.net/">Gwenview</a>, the image viewing application which ships with Kubuntu.  He has also been commended at Akademy for his work in bringing the <a href="http://www.notmart.org/misc/statusnotifieritem/index.html">KDE Status Notifer spec</a> to be heavily adopted by the Ubuntu project (who call it <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopExperienceTeam/ApplicationIndicators">Application Indicators</a>).  On receiving the award Aurelien said he was stunned and thanked his wife Gwen, who gave her name to the application.

Akademy is being held this week in Tampere in Finland.  Developers and contributors are discussing their plans to make the KDE Platform, Plasma workspaces and Applications rock even harder.  There is also a lot of talk about how to take best advantage of Meego as a future platform.  Akademy is kindly sponsored by Canonical.