Re: What changes do you want in Debian?
Raphael Hertzog dijo [Fri, Mar 19, 2021 at 10:13:54AM +0100]: > Dear Debian DPL candidates, Nobody is addressing me, but it's a long-held tradition that we all jump to whatever mailing list posts that in some way itches us ;-) > when I look back at my old platforms[1][2]3] I can already see a trend > where we move from "concrete changes that we want to see in Debian" to > "some vague idea of how we want to run the project" but this trend seems > to have continued and amplified to the point that this year none of the > platforms speak of any change that would affect something in how we build > our operating system or how we collaborate together or of how we > envision our role in the free software ecosystem! > (...) Given that both candidates, plus the previous DPL, already answered, and I feel they all felt the same I did when reading your question... Could you give examples of prior DPLs leading "concrete changes that we want in Debian"? Do you mean in a technical sphere? (i.e. like when Sam pushed for standarization in our Git workflows) Or do you mean on a social, organizational sphere (such as the Debian Diversity Statement, during Stefano's period, and the adoption of the CoC, during Lucas')? Or do you mean specific reform goals stated as DPL platforms (as Brian's campaign last year)? I am not asking "just because", but rather, maybe we all misunderstood your point. Does ellaborating in this way help it reach its point? Greeetings, signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: Should the project hire one or two persons to help the DPL?
On 16077 March 1977, Raphael Hertzog wrote: There are quite a few software projects that have hired staff to help smooth the internal working of organizations, I know at least of Django with its fellowship program: https://www.djangoproject.com/fundraising/#fellowship-program The current resources of Debian means that we can confidently hire at least one or two fellows that would work under the direction of the DPL and not be in troubles for many years. Leaving out the detail of Debian paying someone for work, this has one more thing that can backfire hard, as I just could witness in an (entirely unrelated) org: That those hired ones got more powerful than the actual leader. Simply by being there continuously, doing ground work, that the actual leader(s) over time didn't want to do. With time a big bunch of the work just got done, mostly leaving the radar of the leader then, and so they ended up controlling much, the leader being a figurehead in the end. There sure are ways to work against this, but for the first few leaders it was just comfortable, and then on and on the next ones got less interested in that particular work, and it all went down. And it appearently is quite hard to get back in control, even if you want to, if you have the whole admin setup working against you, as they want to keep what they have. -- bye, Joerg
Re: Should the project hire one or two persons to help the DPL?
Hi, thanks for your answer! On Fri, 19 Mar 2021, Sam Hartman wrote: > Um, no. > Money is power. > The DPL should help the project achieve its goals. > The DPL should not use the project's money to achieve their own > personal agenda. I would like to respond two things: 1/ The DPL would not use the money directly, it would use the time of one or two persons that that the project at large agreed to make available to the DPL. Hence my question of whether there would be DD willing to second a GR allowing the project to spend money to pay persons whose mission would be decided by the DPL. 2/ In my eyes, that's also why we run elections, so that the personal agenda of motivated persons can become the project's agenda to some degree. If the work of DPL is only to help others achieve their goal, then I don't see us being able to convince many more persons to candidate for the role. And the specific set ok skills required to be successful in such a role is very different from the set of skills that we usually have as project members. Cheers, -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Raphaël Hertzog ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋The Debian Handbook: https://debian-handbook.info/get/ ⠈⠳⣄ Debian Long Term Support: https://deb.li/LTS signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: What changes do you want in Debian?
Hi Raphaël On 2021/03/19 11:13, Raphael Hertzog wrote: > when I look back at my old platforms[1][2]3] I can already see a trend > where we move from "concrete changes that we want to see in Debian" to > "some vague idea of how we want to run the project" but this trend seems > to have continued and amplified to the point that this year none of the > platforms speak of any change that would affect something in how we build > our operating system or how we collaborate together or of how we > envision our role in the free software ecosystem! I'm kind of surprised to see you say that, since I didn't think that my platform was vague at all, and that it was quite focused on some very important issues within the project. > All the topics are around Debian (how we recruit, how we handle the > money) but I see no desire to lead Debian in any direction and I find this > particularly sad. The election time used to be a very active period where > we would confront our ideas for the future, but this has fallen short > as can be witnessed from the low-activity right now in debian-vote > and as can be seen by the small number of candidates. I also miss the more active discussion on -vote, and I value your questions here. For the 2019 vote we had 4 candidates and the discussion was especially lively and I think also useful. In terms of Debian, I think it's important to differentiate between the Debian project, and our products (just as you would differentiate between say, Canonical and Ubuntu). Sometimes conversation get muddied when we just refer to everything as Debian. Do I understand correctly that you'd also want to see more technical leadership from the DPL? Or do you mean that you'd like to see bigger project-wide changes being enacted by the DPL? > We're at the point where we congratulate ourselves because someone stepped > up to be DPL and we're happy that the process has not yet stopped working > entirely. > > With that said, there could be many questions to be asked but I will > concentrate on three: > > 1/ Why have you all given up on the idea to lead Debian? It seems >to me that you are happy with the DPL being a super-intendant >and nothing more. I think that's a rather presumptuous question. I also don't think that I've given up on the idea of leading Debian at all. My campaign for the last year was based on bringing stability and a sense of "business as usual" and normality to the Debian project. I believe that the project needed it. I read Sam's reply and agree with his reasoning regarding COVID-19, but I think the project needed this even if it wasn't for the pandemic. Overall, and personally speaking, I feel satisfied that we've managed to accomplish that over the last year. I know that might also sound somewhat self-congratulating, and it might even sound like it was a very passive accomplishment, but I can assure you that it was not. Behind the scenes I've dealt with many inter-personal issues that have either been boiling over for a while, or that was about to. In a few of these cases these issues have even been resolved. In others, resolution was just not possible and the best we could do was just to cool it down for a bit. Then there are some cases where I could just say "we'll deal with this later please be patient" and it's still on my todo list. I say we a lot here, because I don't take the credit for all that work myself. At some points DAM was very involved, in others the community team, in others a combination of people from both, sometimes input from previous DPLs, outside legal advisors, and other individual DDs. I'm not particularly good with time tracking but the amount of hours put in to dealing with inter-personal issues has been tremendous, and I think it was all worth it, and I think a stable project is *absolutely* critical in making fertile grounds for innovation. I think over the last year I've also gotten our members to be more comfortable with spending project money. I think we can improve that even further with some more policy. I also want to make people more comfortable with doing new things and taking risks, I know that you were a bit hesitant to post to -project about funding Debian projects in Debian with money from Freexian's LTS service, and surprised that there wasn't more opposition, but that's one of the rewards that stability brings, when there's a greater sense of stability, our members will feel more comfortable taking on some risk and try something new. In an alternate universe I'd be curious to see what would happen if that mail[1] arrived on -project a year earlier. [1] https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/20201110100505.ga988...@home.ouaza.com Regarding "It seems to me that you are happy with the DPL being a super-intendant and nothing more"... Well, I agree that the DPL shouldn't just be an administrator that takes out the trash and replaces the light bulbs for a year, but I want to circle back a bit to the difference between the
Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects
On 19/03/21 3:59 pm, Enrico Zini wrote: > On Thu, Mar 18, 2021 at 09:16:15PM +0200, Jonathan Carter wrote: > >> I don't think that lack of interest is the problem here, but I do think >> that Debian contributors tend to be already starved for time, and trying >> to get them to do more is like trying to tap water out of an empty well. >> For some, a financial incentive might work if they're not currently >> working full time, and especially if they need money, but the median >> Debian developer seem capable of sustaining themselves reasonably well. > Thinking at how we set our bar for membership in building a reputation > within the project, I imagine we implicitly select people who are able > to sustain themselves reasonably well without Debian's help. > > I'm not sure it's something I'd want to change. I see being an employer > as a radically different thing than being a volunteer-based project. > In practice, I see more than these two options. > > On the "employer" side, our ecosystem does include employers who pay > people to do Debian-related work. While Debian Developer's bills are > currently mostly outside of what Debian can or wants to worry about, the > Debian ecosystem does include the possibility of doing Debian work and > having bills paid. > > There is also a "contractor" side: without developing the infrastructure > to hire people ourselves, we are able to (and do) contract employers (or > self-employed people) to do things we need. > > I'm writing this to suggest that although we can't (and probably > shouldn't) take responsibility for Developers' bills, we could have some > limited level of control over the financial angle which we might decide > to use, to encourage our community to develop towards specific strategic > directions we might care about. > > For example, on the 'employer' side: > > - Are the possibilities of making a living with Debian work available >enough and advertised enough? No! > - While not hiring pepole directly, could Debian encourage Debian as a >professional career? Yes! > - Could (and do we want to) offer infrastructure for that? For example: > - a channel for employers active in Debian's ecosystem to post job > offers > - a channel for advertising Debian contributions that happen during > paid time of some employer > - a list of important that are currently not getting solved, and > that an employer might want to pick up, and get credit for Yes! > > And on the 'contractor' side: > > - Are the possibilities of contracting external work exploited enough? No! > - Are they clear enough? No! > - Do we need some procurement guidelines? Yes! > - Do we need procurement know-how and support? (I sometimes have >problems for which I could use external help, but I don't know how to >find and choose a professional that provides it). Yes! > > I'm not expecting you and Sruthi to answer these questions now: I think > that questions to prospective DPLs should be more about vision. > > To turn this all into an actual question: should Debian consider things > like that to be within its problem space? Yes, definitely. Debian should always remain a voluntary project, but there is nothing wrong in facilitating paid work. I believe this will in fact encourage diversity and we will be able to attract people who could not dedicate time just because of monetary constraints. > > If all goes well and you have a magic wand and everything, how do you > see the Debian ecosystem dealing with money problems a few years into > the future? If I have a magic wand, I will have a system of streamlined income and expenditure. Leaving behind a fixed deposit of amount necessary to run Debian for a 5 years, everything else would be spent on projects, hardware, events and activities benefiting the project as a whole. When it is safe to have in-person events, personally I would look forward to funding more and more local Debian events. While the expenditure is happening at one end, there will be attention on getting enough donation to keep these activities in the future years too. Phil's idea of allocating per head budget for DDs which can be pooled together to fund projects etc will definitely be explored. Another approach I would try is drafting out a "budget plan" allocating pre-approved amounts to various teams/projects which does not need further approval from DPL. The "budget plan" can be prepared based on the proposals received from the community. signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: How can we make Debian packaging more standardised?
On 19/03/21 11:35 pm, Louis-Philippe Véronneau wrote: > Dear DPL candidates, > > In becoming a DD, one of the main challenges I faced was the absence of > a standard way to package software in Debian. > > I've since seen first hand how having a very large number of ways to > package things in Debian confuse and ultimately discourage people that > would otherwise have been interested in joining the project. > > One of the reasons I like team-maintained packages is teams often have a > single packaging standard. Sadly, each team has their own way of doing > things and working in multiple teams means working with multiple > "standards". > > If you were elected as DPL, what would you do about this? Sam Hartman > tried to lead discussions on using git, but sadly it seems it didn't > yield anything tangible. For a person who started packaging font and then moved to node, ruby and finally golang, I can completely understand your point you are making. But as I mentioned in one of my replies earlier, I do not think DPL should be spearheading technical changes. The changes and discussions like this can be initiated by any one of us. If I become the DPL, I might not be leading the discussion, but will definitely support the discussion. > I understand change is never easy and often disrupts people, but I think > we should be striving for a more cohesive packaging ecosystem. > > Even if we don't ultimately enforce it, being able to point people an > officially recommended way to create packages in Debian would be a large > step forward. > > Cheers, > signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Should the project hire one or two persons to help the DPL?
You asked if DDs would support the DPL hiring people. So I answer as an DD. > "Raphael" == Raphael Hertzog writes: Raphael> * it means that the DPL can organize the administrative Raphael> work so that it ends up on the shoulders of paid staff, and Raphael> the DPL can take a more active role in leading I think spending money on accounting, legal, and other administrative functions sounds great. I don't have a problem paying people to do this or paying organizations to do this. We already pay TOs (to do work for Debian (our larger TO takes a percentage of donations); we already pay lawyers; some TOs pay accountants. I see no problem with Debian spending more money directly if it benefits us in this regard. There was discussion last year of a Debian foundation. I think there are lots of issue to work through there, but I think there is good that can come of that proposal. Raphael> * it means that the DPL can direct workforce in areas where Raphael> they believe work is needed (like good documentation for Raphael> beginners, like coordinating with a contractor to have a Raphael> good introductory video or better looking website, like Raphael> finding useful projects to submit for funding to Freexian Raphael> ;-)) Um, no. Money is power. The DPL should help the project achieve its goals. The DPL should not use the project's money to achieve their own personal agenda. Having the DPL unilaterally spend someone's time on documentation, videos, etc would really mess up our power balance. That said, some of those functions are distant enough from developing an OS, I'd support a delegated team asking for money to hire someone. As a specific example, if we had a team that wanted money to produce a introductory video I'd support that. In my mind the distance from the DPL would be key in making that appropriate. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: Having a "DPL committee"?
On 20/03/21 12:31 am, Pierre-Elliott Bécue wrote: > The idea was discussed two years ago. Sam chose a range of people to > help him with delegations. > > Being a DPL is a high-energy thing even when one doesn't try to "lead" > the project /per se/. > > Do you think the Project should consider the opportunity of trying to > establish more clearly a role of "DPL advisors" who would be identified > as helpers for the DPL and additional entry points for the > developers/external people should the need arise? > > Cheers! > I definitely think we should have a panel of "DPL advisors/helpers" to help out the DPL. There will definitely be a lot of administrative stuff that can be delegated to the helpers and DPL can concentrate on other important activities. If I become DPL, this would be one of the first things I would be working out. signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Having a "DPL committee"?
The idea was discussed two years ago. Sam chose a range of people to help him with delegations. Being a DPL is a high-energy thing even when one doesn't try to "lead" the project /per se/. Do you think the Project should consider the opportunity of trying to establish more clearly a role of "DPL advisors" who would be identified as helpers for the DPL and additional entry points for the developers/external people should the need arise? Cheers! -- Pierre-Elliott Bécue GPG: 9AE0 4D98 6400 E3B6 7528 F493 0D44 2664 1949 74E2 It's far easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects
On 19/03/21 1:14 am, Philip Hands wrote: > ... > Could it be that people are being protective of their motivation? I agree with this point. Not all want money as their motivation. > ... > I've been pondering how it might be possible to spend more of Debian's > money, and it occurred to me that we could allocate a budget to each DD > which they could spend on pretty-much anything (as long as, for Debian > funds, the expenditure is allowed under the relevant non-profit > restrictions that apply to the funds that we hold -- you could apply > your own criteria of course). > > That way you get to take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd, since > people in various areas of Debian are bound to know about things that > have been left undone for years or decades, that some targeted funding > would almost certainly sort out once and for all. > > You'd probably want to have some sort of oversight (e.g. some ex-DPLs) > just to ensure that the madder ideas get filtered out, but if you ask > people to only suggest ideas that they'd want to spend their own money > on if they had it to spare, that should ensure that most people don't > get too silly. > > Also, one could say that the people suggesting the project should not be > the beneficiary, and should write some sort of report indicating how > well it went before they would get any new budget allocated. People > that had thought of funding things that turned out to be successful > could then be given larger budgets to play with in future. > > Encouraging people to pool their budgets to fund bigger things would > hopefully result in them forming teams of mentors to oversee the work. > > Cheers, Phil. This sounds like a good plan to me. We should have serious discussion on this. signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Should the project hire one or two persons to help the DPL?
On 19/03/21 3:08 pm, Raphael Hertzog wrote: > Hello, > > as a followup to my former question that dressed a negative picture > of the DPL role in the last years, I'd like to make a proposal and > see what you all think of it. > > There are quite a few software projects that have hired staff to help > smooth the internal working of organizations, I know at least of Django > with its fellowship program: > https://www.djangoproject.com/fundraising/#fellowship-program > > The current resources of Debian means that we can confidently hire at least > one or two fellows that would work under the direction of the DPL > and not be in troubles for many years. > > IMO this would go a long way to fix the current problems of the DPL role: > > * it means that the DPL can organize the administrative work so that > it ends up on the shoulders of paid staff, and the DPL can take a more > active role in leading > > * it means that the DPL can direct workforce in areas where they believe > work is needed (like good documentation for beginners, like coordinating > with a contractor to have a good introductory video or better looking > website, like finding useful projects to submit for funding to Freexian > ;-)) > > * and due to the former point, I expect we would have more candidates in > the future > > I'm sure there are also downsides to hiring staff, but at some point, > if we want to make the DPL job enjoyable and interesting for most of us, > we need to do something about it. > > To the DPL candidates, if you are elected, will you consider this idea? I do not think this is a good idea. This again brings back to the rehashed argument whether Debian should pay some people and let others work as volunteers. Paying even a couple of people will discourage others. The complete volunteer nature of Debian is one of the important and attractive point that makes Debian different from other distros. I have a different suggestion. We can create a couple of delegated administrative roles who can help DPL function smoothly. (I think something similar was experimented with delegating a 2nd In-Command. I have just heard about it, do not know the history of how that worked out, was it successful etc.). If I am elected, I will definitely consider delegating a couple of people to assist me. > To the other DD, would you second a GR to allow the DPL to hire one > or two persons to help him lead the project? What kind of safeguards would > be needed? > > Cheesr, signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: What changes do you want in Debian?
On 19/03/21 2:43 pm, Raphael Hertzog wrote: > Dear Debian DPL candidates, > > when I look back at my old platforms[1][2]3] I can already see a trend > where we move from "concrete changes that we want to see in Debian" to > "some vague idea of how we want to run the project" but this trend seems > to have continued and amplified to the point that this year none of the > platforms speak of any change that would affect something in how we build > our operating system or how we collaborate together or of how we > envision our role in the free software ecosystem! > > All the topics are around Debian (how we recruit, how we handle the > money) but I see no desire to lead Debian in any direction and I find this > particularly sad. The election time used to be a very active period where > we would confront our ideas for the future, but this has fallen short > as can be witnessed from the low-activity right now in debian-vote > and as can be seen by the small number of candidates. > > We're at the point where we congratulate ourselves because someone stepped > up to be DPL and we're happy that the process has not yet stopped working > entirely. > > With that said, there could be many questions to be asked but I will > concentrate on three: > > 1/ Why have you all given up on the idea to lead Debian? It seems >to me that you are happy with the DPL being a super-intendant >and nothing more. Even when the name of the position says Leader, I believe DPL should not be a leader in the literal sense. DPL definitely takes decisions and takes stands on behalf of Debian, but still DPL should always be a reflection of the Debian community as a whole. I see position of DPL more as a face of Debian rather than a person who brings about revolution. > > 2/ What changes would you like to see happen in Debian? Say >your top 3 (or 5 if you are motivated) things that you would change if >you could do them with some magic. I will list out some key changes I would do if I got magic powers ;) * Make Debian diverse. * No flame wars: Constructive discussions does not need to escalate to flame wars. The amount of time and energy wasted in these flame wars can do wonders for the project. * Make more people passionate about Debian and start contributing. You might observe that all my changes are social/community changes and none are technical. That is because I believe DPL should be the person dealing with the social/community aspects of Debian and technical aspects should be taken care by Debian as a whole. > 3/ There seems to be some consensus that we should be better at embracing >changes. But what can we do to be better at this? More discussions. I know we already did and do a lot of discussions. But when I mean discussions, I mean discussions that lead to conclusion. Each and every person will have some or the other suggestion for change. My approach would be to divide things into different areas and collect proposals for process improvement from the community. We can discuss and reach conclusions. I know I will not be able to address every aspect with this approach. So I would enlist help from a few interested people to work with me. > > Cheers, > > [1] https://www.debian.org/vote/2002/platforms/raphael > [2] https://www.debian.org/vote/2007/platforms/hertzog > [3] https://www.debian.org/vote/2008/platforms/hertzog signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
How can we make Debian packaging more standardised?
Dear DPL candidates, In becoming a DD, one of the main challenges I faced was the absence of a standard way to package software in Debian. I've since seen first hand how having a very large number of ways to package things in Debian confuse and ultimately discourage people that would otherwise have been interested in joining the project. One of the reasons I like team-maintained packages is teams often have a single packaging standard. Sadly, each team has their own way of doing things and working in multiple teams means working with multiple "standards". If you were elected as DPL, what would you do about this? Sam Hartman tried to lead discussions on using git, but sadly it seems it didn't yield anything tangible. I understand change is never easy and often disrupts people, but I think we should be striving for a more cohesive packaging ecosystem. Even if we don't ultimately enforce it, being able to point people an officially recommended way to create packages in Debian would be a large step forward. Cheers, -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Louis-Philippe Véronneau ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋ po...@debian.org / veronneau.org ⠈⠳⣄ OpenPGP_signature Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects
On 18/03/21 11:16 pm, Raphael Hertzog wrote: > Dear DPL candidates, > > when I was younger, I dreamed to be paid to do Debian work. But that was > not possible, and that's the reason why I started my own company Freexian > 16 years ago. Through those years I always kept this goal in mind (it's > part of my personal mission statement for Freexian). Some of my Debian work is sponsored by Gitlab and I am happy that I can dedicate my whole time to Debian without having to worry about earning a living. So I can understand your thought process. > Now thanks to the success of the Debian LTS sponsorship and of the > numerous companies that understand the importance of giving back to > Debian, Freexian is in the position to pay some people to do useful Debian > work. We formalized this with a mechanism to propose projects to be > funded: > https://salsa.debian.org/freexian-team/project-funding/ > > I announced this on debian-project[1] and on Planet Debian[2] a while ago. > But at this point, we have only funded a single project[3], leaving us > with more than 25 KEUR available for further projects. This sounds like a good idea from which both our community and Debian as a project can benefit. > > I did not expect this lack of interest... if I were not running Freexian, > I would have proposed projects out of the long list of distro-tracker > wishlist bugs... I enjoy working on this project and I wish I had more > time for it. > > 1/ How do you explain this lack of interest? > > I have read recently from other Debian members that they have a feeling > that Debian is stagnating, and I share that feeling to some degree. If we > had plans and motivated people, surely some of those would have stepped up > to implement them in exchange of some remuneration. Do you share that > feeling too? I am not sure this is lack of interest. As mentioned by some of the replies already, not all who contribute to Debian are looking for monetary benefit. But yes, there are people who would be happy to receive some monetary compensation to balance out their work. A bit more publicity might help here. As Jonathan mentioned, mentioning in miniDCs etc would help reach out to wider audience, mostly new comers (who might need the monetary benefit the most). > 2/ I really want this initiative to be successful so I'm now looking into > ways to make it work. I'm considering paying someone to identify useful > projects. That person could talk to various teams, make proposals based on > their own experience, and even run a poll among Debian developers. The > idea is that we want to find high-impact projects that can help Debian get > out of this "stagnation". > > What do you think of this idea? > > I'm considering past DPLs for this role as they have a broad knowledge of > the project and usually also some vision for the future. But I'm open to > anyone than can convince me they would do a good job for this. :-) This is a good initiative that I also believe should succeed. One person working on identifying high impact projects sounds good, but being said that, I do not think we can find a perfect way to work out things during this election discussion. We can either have further discussions on this topic (may be at -devel or -project) or you can go ahead with the experiment and see where it goes. > 3/ While the DPL can't spend Debian's money to pay people, the funds > available in Freexian's reserve have been clearly earmarked in this > direction by the LTS sponsors. > > Do you think the DPL should be able to propose projects that would be > funded through this initiative, so that DPLs can have a bit more impact in > areas where they want to improve the current situation? I do not think this will be a good idea. DPL suggesting projects or people to be paid will not go well. While I strongly believe that there should be options for people to earn living by contributing to Debian, Debian and DPL should not be involved directly with those activities. > Sorry for the hard questions and thanks for the time you spend for > Debian. :-) > > The election is always a period where we look back a bit and think of > bigger changes, so even if those questions are meant for the prospective > DPL, I welcome feedback from everybody really. > > Cheers, > > [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2020/11/msg2.html > [2] > https://raphaelhertzog.com/2020/12/14/funding-debian-development-projects-with-freexian-first-project-received/ > [3] https://salsa.debian.org/freexian-team/project-funding/-/issues/4 signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects
Adam, I think a more respectful way of including trans members of our community would be to count them as the gender they identify with (assuming you know). You'll still end up with a category for nonbinary of course.
Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects
On 2021-03-19 08 h 02, Raphael Hertzog wrote: >> I've been telling a few people last month that I would really liked to >> have an Enterprise Edition Online MiniDebConf, unfortunately I don't >> have any time/energy to instigate that currently. > Something for a Debian fellow that we could hire ;-) > I for one would be less motivated to help with videoteam tasks if I knew someone was paid to organise a miniconf. We've had quite a few online events in the last 6 months and it's also OK to take a break :) Maybe next year, when we can have in-person events, there will be less online events and people will have more time to organise such a miniconf? In any case, I don't feel like us failing to organise this miniconf is problematic in any way. -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Louis-Philippe Véronneau ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋ po...@debian.org / veronneau.org ⠈⠳⣄ OpenPGP_signature Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Leading Debian
> "Raphael" == Raphael Hertzog writes: Raphael> With that said, there could be many questions to be asked Raphael> but I will concentrate on three: Raphael> 1/ Why have you all given up on the idea to lead Debian? It Raphael> seems to me that you are happy with the DPL being a Raphael> super-intendant and nothing more. Pandemic, man! I have a certain amount of experience trying to lead Debian, and it's not the year for it. First, leading Debian responsibly is hard. The DPL's job is not to advocate for a specific technical direction. At most, the DPL can pick some areas where change is needed, find out (or confirm) relevant stakeholder consensus, and move in that direction. My first term, I was trying to illustrate process as well as accomplish change. And so, I worked on building project consensus. As we saw, that was very high energy. A DPL could lead in smaller ways--working on finding/confirming consensus in smaller groups. Even that's going to be relatively high energy, and if consensus proves hard to find may easily spill into a project-wide discussion. I don't think now is the time when we want to spend that kind of energy. I don't think I'm the only one who is still healing from the pandemic. Yes, I'm going through a lot of change, but it's all personal. Finding safety and community again. What I expect from the communities I'm already part of is as much stability and support as I can get. I don't want extra change. The world's throwing that at me just fine on its own. to the extent there's changeit is going to come in small ways like figuring out how to have community in an online world. (the mini debconfs and stuff like that). But I'd also like to quibble with one thing. Improving recruiting is leading Debian. I think it is one of the most important things we can be working on now. It puts us in a position to be able to sweep up and welcome people jostled around by all the change in the world as they come within our sphere of influence. In my mind hearing that part of Jonathan's keynote last year was really exciting. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects
On Fri, Mar 19, 2021 at 01:42:37PM +0100, Ulrike Uhlig wrote: > But the Flosspols study of 2005 had already made the point that > this might be a problem for diversity: there are 10 times more women working > in proprietary software (~20%) than in free software (~2%) Data for Debian: 0.9% Methodology: I've taken the author of the last changelog entry of all packages in Stretch. Overwhelmed by the number of people to check, I've limited that to "key packages" only (by the old definition, which included popcon). I've then tried to guess the gender to every person, by, in order: * knowing the person * is the first name gender-specific? (I'm familiar with western and slavic names) * ldap * 60 seconds of duckduckgo search This assigned each name to one of categories: ! invalid (eg. team in changed-by) ? unknown x trans f ladies m gentelmen The figure above is # of most recent changed-by (ie, number of packages, not people); f/(m+f). Alas, I no longer have the raw data. Or more exactly, it's on a broken N900 that _might_ be recoverable. Backup your phones, folks! I believe counting Changed-by: is far more accurate than looking at Maintainer: and/or Uploaders:, even though it overestimates NMUers. But hey, unlike Bullseye Stretch didn't have h01ger raid all over it. :þ [I intentionally didn't include any analysis of possible causes; if you do, please respond on !d-vote unless it's relevant to the election.] Meow! -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ It's time to migrate your Imaginary Protocol from version 4i to 6i. ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ ⠈⠳⣄
Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects
Hello, as said in private some time ago to Raphaël, I find Freexian's initiative great, and I wish there were more options to get paid to do Debian work. On 19.03.21 11:29, Enrico Zini wrote: On Thu, Mar 18, 2021 at 09:16:15PM +0200, Jonathan Carter wrote: I don't think that lack of interest is the problem here, but I do think that Debian contributors tend to be already starved for time, and trying to get them to do more is like trying to tap water out of an empty well. For some, a financial incentive might work if they're not currently working full time, and especially if they need money, but the median Debian developer seem capable of sustaining themselves reasonably well. Thinking at how we set our bar for membership in building a reputation within the project, I imagine we implicitly select people who are able to sustain themselves reasonably well without Debian's help. … yes, and these people are generally men living in the Global North. Most of them do have full time jobs, others are students, and their free time is spent on Debian. For many of these people, working on Debian is not about having to earn money, it's about the joy of creating something as great as Debian. But the Flosspols study of 2005 had already made the point that this might be a problem for diversity: there are 10 times more women working in proprietary software (~20%) than in free software (~2%), because most of them have less free time or need to sustain themselves financially with their work. This is also true for people from less economically secure backgrounds, specifically the Global South. I'm not sure it's something I'd want to change. I see being an employer as a radically different thing than being a volunteer-based project. I'd be interested in looking a bit closer at the volunteer system: are we excluding people by doing that? How could that be changed? I think Enrico is asking the right questions below already. I would add: (How) could the Freexian model be extended? Which other organizations could do this work, identify useful projects and invite people to work that are not necessarily part of the group of usual suspects? In practice, I see more than these two options. On the "employer" side, our ecosystem does include employers who pay people to do Debian-related work. While Debian Developer's bills are currently mostly outside of what Debian can or wants to worry about, the Debian ecosystem does include the possibility of doing Debian work and having bills paid. There is also a "contractor" side: without developing the infrastructure to hire people ourselves, we are able to (and do) contract employers (or self-employed people) to do things we need. I'm writing this to suggest that although we can't (and probably shouldn't) take responsibility for Developers' bills, we could have some limited level of control over the financial angle which we might decide to use, to encourage our community to develop towards specific strategic directions we might care about. For example, on the 'employer' side: - Are the possibilities of making a living with Debian work available enough and advertised enough? - While not hiring pepole directly, could Debian encourage Debian as a professional career? - Could (and do we want to) offer infrastructure for that? For example: - a channel for employers active in Debian's ecosystem to post job offers - a channel for advertising Debian contributions that happen during paid time of some employer - a list of important that are currently not getting solved, and that an employer might want to pick up, and get credit for And on the 'contractor' side: - Are the possibilities of contracting external work exploited enough? - Are they clear enough? - Do we need some procurement guidelines? - Do we need procurement know-how and support? (I sometimes have problems for which I could use external help, but I don't know how to find and choose a professional that provides it). I'm not expecting you and Sruthi to answer these questions now: I think that questions to prospective DPLs should be more about vision. To turn this all into an actual question: should Debian consider things like that to be within its problem space? If all goes well and you have a magic wand and everything, how do you see the Debian ecosystem dealing with money problems a few years into the future? ^ that, and adding: do you think that we could improve on diversity and sustainability by having more possibilities to get paid to do Debian work? take care, Ulrike
Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects
On 19.03.21 11:29, Enrico Zini wrote: >> I don't think that lack of interest is the problem here, but I do think >> that Debian contributors tend to be already starved for time, and trying >> to get them to do more is like trying to tap water out of an empty well. >> For some, a financial incentive might work if they're not currently >> working full time, and especially if they need money, but the median >> Debian developer seem capable of sustaining themselves reasonably well. > > Thinking at how we set our bar for membership in building a reputation > within the project, I imagine we implicitly select people who are able > to sustain themselves reasonably well without Debian's help. That might be the case, but generally speaking, that self-sustainment is achieved by devoting one's time to some other cause, like $DAYJOB, hence the lack of time for Debian. I have the suspicion that quite a few Project members have somewhat flexible jobs (freelancers, or project work, or part-time work), and I believe that a financial incentive might enable them to dedicate more of their time to Debian, than to other projects. I also think that it's important to make a distinction of what gets paid and what doesn't. A frequent counter-argument I hear to getting paid for Debian work is that it would be unfair to those not getting paid. I disagree with this. Not all tasks are equal, and I many Debian chores come to mind that nobody wants to do, but still have to be done, and we're grateful to that one person doing it once very four weeks. I think financially motivating it someone to do that chore once a week, or even more often, would be worthwhile.
Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects
Hi, On Thu, 18 Mar 2021, Jonathan Carter wrote: > > 1/ How do you explain this lack of interest? > > I don't think that lack of interest is the problem here, but I do think > that Debian contributors tend to be already starved for time, and trying > to get them to do more is like trying to tap water out of an empty well. > For some, a financial incentive might work if they're not currently > working full time, and especially if they need money, but the median > Debian developer seem capable of sustaining themselves reasonably well. I share that analysis to some degree. But this means that we are not good at attracting young persons who are not in this situation... And actually this is somewhat confirmed when you look at the persons who are paid LTS contributors: only one of them is very young (and is the one who accepts to work the most on it), most of them only accept to work for 10 to 30 hours per month on LTS, as they have other professionnal activities that they enjoy. They do LTS work as a way to continue to contribute to Debian during work hours because they are attached to the project and believe in the importance of LTS for the success of Debian. And also because it can be somewhat intellectually challenging to work on very diverse packages. However, this doesn't explain it all either: the funding offer has been built so that you don't have to allocate too much time, you don't have to implement the project yourself, you can just describe the project, let someone else do the work and review it. BTW, the first project funded followed this approach as the security team members are all very busy. The second conclusion that we could draw from this is that we're definitely not in the same situation than in the past and that paying people to work on Debian is likely to be much less problematic because many of the current members would not be jealous, they are in a professional situations that they are satisfied with. It would be interesting to poll all Debian developers to have their direct opinions instead of doing wild-guesses here. > I've been telling a few people last month that I would really liked to > have an Enterprise Edition Online MiniDebConf, unfortunately I don't > have any time/energy to instigate that currently. Something for a Debian fellow that we could hire ;-) > It could cover aspects that already make Debian good for business, and > cover areas where it could improve. I used to be on an Ubuntu mailing > list called ubuntu-enterprise, it mostly contained feature requests from > people who wanted more features for enterprise and large deployment use, > but even those were really interesting. Also, I think even just some of > our usual sponsors would already be interested in speaking at such an > event, but I digress... Found the project you mention: https://launchpad.net/~enterprise-ubuntu FWIW I am considering changing the "Debian LTS" sponsorship into some broader "Debian for enterprise" sponsorship that would cover LTS but also other projects that would make Debian more enterprise-friendly. > > 2/ I really want this initiative to be successful so I'm now looking into > > ways to make it work. I'm considering paying someone to identify useful > > projects. That person could talk to various teams, make proposals based on > > their own experience, and even run a poll among Debian developers. The > > idea is that we want to find high-impact projects that can help Debian get > > out of this "stagnation". > > > > What do you think of this idea? > > Sounds great! Any advice on how to find the right person? Or on who the right person could be? Wouldn't that person be doing useful leadership work that the DPL should be doing really? > problems in the team and this is how they're going to do it". Sometimes > it's better to allow things to happen than to make them happen. I'm > hoping that if we are able to have sprints/meetings again in person, > that many of our teams will take advantage of it and spend some time and > project money to get together and work on projects. If you invite and > let Debian teams know that they could apply for some funding from > Freexian to get someone to spend more time on some problem, then that's > probably going to scale a bit better since they might already have a > better idea on how to integrate this kind of work into their team. It would certainly make sense to get people of each team together and discuss on their priorities and how they could leverage the Freexian funding. Cheers, -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Raphaël Hertzog ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋The Debian Handbook: https://debian-handbook.info/get/ ⠈⠳⣄ Debian Long Term Support: https://deb.li/LTS
Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects
On Thu, Mar 18, 2021 at 09:16:15PM +0200, Jonathan Carter wrote: > I don't think that lack of interest is the problem here, but I do think > that Debian contributors tend to be already starved for time, and trying > to get them to do more is like trying to tap water out of an empty well. > For some, a financial incentive might work if they're not currently > working full time, and especially if they need money, but the median > Debian developer seem capable of sustaining themselves reasonably well. Thinking at how we set our bar for membership in building a reputation within the project, I imagine we implicitly select people who are able to sustain themselves reasonably well without Debian's help. I'm not sure it's something I'd want to change. I see being an employer as a radically different thing than being a volunteer-based project. In practice, I see more than these two options. On the "employer" side, our ecosystem does include employers who pay people to do Debian-related work. While Debian Developer's bills are currently mostly outside of what Debian can or wants to worry about, the Debian ecosystem does include the possibility of doing Debian work and having bills paid. There is also a "contractor" side: without developing the infrastructure to hire people ourselves, we are able to (and do) contract employers (or self-employed people) to do things we need. I'm writing this to suggest that although we can't (and probably shouldn't) take responsibility for Developers' bills, we could have some limited level of control over the financial angle which we might decide to use, to encourage our community to develop towards specific strategic directions we might care about. For example, on the 'employer' side: - Are the possibilities of making a living with Debian work available enough and advertised enough? - While not hiring pepole directly, could Debian encourage Debian as a professional career? - Could (and do we want to) offer infrastructure for that? For example: - a channel for employers active in Debian's ecosystem to post job offers - a channel for advertising Debian contributions that happen during paid time of some employer - a list of important that are currently not getting solved, and that an employer might want to pick up, and get credit for And on the 'contractor' side: - Are the possibilities of contracting external work exploited enough? - Are they clear enough? - Do we need some procurement guidelines? - Do we need procurement know-how and support? (I sometimes have problems for which I could use external help, but I don't know how to find and choose a professional that provides it). I'm not expecting you and Sruthi to answer these questions now: I think that questions to prospective DPLs should be more about vision. To turn this all into an actual question: should Debian consider things like that to be within its problem space? If all goes well and you have a magic wand and everything, how do you see the Debian ecosystem dealing with money problems a few years into the future? Enrico -- GPG key: 4096R/634F4BD1E7AD5568 2009-05-08 Enrico Zini signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Should the project hire one or two persons to help the DPL?
Hello, as a followup to my former question that dressed a negative picture of the DPL role in the last years, I'd like to make a proposal and see what you all think of it. There are quite a few software projects that have hired staff to help smooth the internal working of organizations, I know at least of Django with its fellowship program: https://www.djangoproject.com/fundraising/#fellowship-program The current resources of Debian means that we can confidently hire at least one or two fellows that would work under the direction of the DPL and not be in troubles for many years. IMO this would go a long way to fix the current problems of the DPL role: * it means that the DPL can organize the administrative work so that it ends up on the shoulders of paid staff, and the DPL can take a more active role in leading * it means that the DPL can direct workforce in areas where they believe work is needed (like good documentation for beginners, like coordinating with a contractor to have a good introductory video or better looking website, like finding useful projects to submit for funding to Freexian ;-)) * and due to the former point, I expect we would have more candidates in the future I'm sure there are also downsides to hiring staff, but at some point, if we want to make the DPL job enjoyable and interesting for most of us, we need to do something about it. To the DPL candidates, if you are elected, will you consider this idea? To the other DD, would you second a GR to allow the DPL to hire one or two persons to help him lead the project? What kind of safeguards would be needed? Cheesr, -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Raphaël Hertzog ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋The Debian Handbook: https://debian-handbook.info/get/ ⠈⠳⣄ Debian Long Term Support: https://deb.li/LTS signature.asc Description: PGP signature
What changes do you want in Debian?
Dear Debian DPL candidates, when I look back at my old platforms[1][2]3] I can already see a trend where we move from "concrete changes that we want to see in Debian" to "some vague idea of how we want to run the project" but this trend seems to have continued and amplified to the point that this year none of the platforms speak of any change that would affect something in how we build our operating system or how we collaborate together or of how we envision our role in the free software ecosystem! All the topics are around Debian (how we recruit, how we handle the money) but I see no desire to lead Debian in any direction and I find this particularly sad. The election time used to be a very active period where we would confront our ideas for the future, but this has fallen short as can be witnessed from the low-activity right now in debian-vote and as can be seen by the small number of candidates. We're at the point where we congratulate ourselves because someone stepped up to be DPL and we're happy that the process has not yet stopped working entirely. With that said, there could be many questions to be asked but I will concentrate on three: 1/ Why have you all given up on the idea to lead Debian? It seems to me that you are happy with the DPL being a super-intendant and nothing more. 2/ What changes would you like to see happen in Debian? Say your top 3 (or 5 if you are motivated) things that you would change if you could do them with some magic. 3/ There seems to be some consensus that we should be better at embracing changes. But what can we do to be better at this? Cheers, [1] https://www.debian.org/vote/2002/platforms/raphael [2] https://www.debian.org/vote/2007/platforms/hertzog [3] https://www.debian.org/vote/2008/platforms/hertzog -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Raphaël Hertzog ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋The Debian Handbook: https://debian-handbook.info/get/ ⠈⠳⣄ Debian Long Term Support: https://deb.li/LTS signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: How to leverage money to accomplish high impact Debian projects
On 2021/03/18 23:33, Philip Hands wrote: > There were enough people keen on that happening that if we'd each had an > earmarked e.g. 1k budget to allocate, we could have just agreed it > amongst ourselves, and done it, without a lot of back and forth on the > lists trying to establish whether there really was something like a > project-wide consensus about it, and perhaps even not needing to ask > permission from the DPL[1]. Ah, I see what you meant now, yes that sounds interesting! -Jonathan
