For some time I have followed the progress of Projeto Tamar. It is one of the most active conservationist efforts in Brazil, sponsored by large companies and with a number of volunteers and supporters. It is dedicated to saving the sea turtle, once considered endangered. Read about it at their site. Some of the results can be seen in this amazing graph , which shows the number of small turtles protected on the sands and released in the wild annually by the project.
Does this have anything to do with KDE, you might ask?
Sure it does! We also have our “endangered species” list. Applications that for one reason or another become unmaintained, and face extinction from our official KDE ecosystem. KDE games had several of those, and in the past year we manage to save lots of them for KDE4, the most recent one being KNetwalk, rescued by Fela Winkelmolen in our last monthly meeting, when hope was almost lost.
But back to the turtles. Last week Annma mentioned in her blog: “It seems KTurtle is currently unmaintained, following a good KDE 4 port and rewrite, thus will not be debugged and polished. It probably will have to be put on hold until 4.1, a new developer being interested in it.”
Oh no. Something has to be done about this, right? After all, it is my chance to save at least one turtle! And a cute one, as you can see:

Fortunately, Cies Breijs did an amazing job not only with the original KTurtle but also with the initial KDE4 port. It seems like it could be rescued with some love in the next couple of weeks, and having almost completed my stuff for KDEGames in 4.0, I decided to take a dive in the code and help this little animal.
Some fixes have already been committed, the examples are now working, translation framework is fixed, and work has started in documentation and general polish. Hopefully I will be able to finish the quality check for 4.0, and KTurtle will continue to swim happily during the KDE 4.x life-cycle! If you want to help, find me at the kde-edu or kde-games mailing lists or IRC channels.
And if you want to help the real turtles, consider also adopting one!