Question to candidates: what are your quantitative diversity goals and metrics?
Greetings candidates, QUESTION TO THE CANDIDATES: what are your quantitative diversity goals and metrics, and what are the rationales behind those goals and metrics? Some context: Both platforms cite imbalances in the areas of gender and geography as concerns contributing to each candidate's desire to serve as DPL. Andreas: "Currently, there is a notable over representation of male contributors originating from countries typically considered industrialized." Sruthi: "... more gender diverse people will feel comfortable joining our community. Geographic/ethnic diversity are also important areas which need attention." (I should note that Sruthi's platform dedicated considerably more space to the issue of diversity, but the particular statement I chose to quote seemed representative.) Some examples of the sort of thing I have in mind: - Debian should represent the geographic diversity of the whole world. The populations of China and India each represent approximately 17.5% of the world population, while the population of the next most populous nation, the United States, represents 4.2% of the world population [0]. In the last GR there were 1004 voting DDs. Based on those figures, a geographically representative population of DDs would include 175 DDs from China, 175 DDs from India, and 42 DDs from the United States (and so on down the line). Based on this composition, it seems likely that the Debian project has adequate representation of United States DDs, so the project should hold more events in and around India and China and focus outreach efforts in those particular geographic areas with a goal of gaining 5 new Indian and 5 new Chinese DDs each year. - Debian should represent the gender diversity of the whole world. The world population is split approximately 50/50 male and female (with a very slight bias towards more males) [1], with "transgender people and other gender minorities, who comprise an estimated 0.3–0.5% (25 million) of the global population" [2]. Using the above figure of 1004 DDs, a balanced Debian population could be 500 male DDs, 499 female DDs, and 5 DDs who identify as transgender or another gender minority. Based on this composition, it seems likely that Debian has adequate representation of transgender and gender minority DDs, so focusing efforts specifically on outreach to women would provide the greatest benefit towards achieving a balanced representation. Again, these are merely examples. I am interested in how you define diversity and what metrics and goals you derive from that definition. Regards, -Roberto [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_(United_Nations) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20220131080803/https://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/health-determinants/gender/gender-definitions/whoeurope-brief-transgender-health-in-the-context-of-icd-11 -- Roberto C. Sánchez
Re: Question to all candidates: what to do with the Debian money, shall we invest in hardware and cloud?
Hi! On 2024/03/27 12:25, Pierre-Elliott Bécue wrote: Would you be ok spending 100k USD on buying hardware for a new Debian cloud, for example? I've always volunteered to operate it for Debian, but it never went through, because I haven't spent time to find where to host it and so on, but highvoltage liked the idea. Do you like this idea? Do you think it'd be useful for Debian? > Please, let's take some time to think about the implications of spending a shitload of money to buy hardware that we wouldn't know where to host, and that would require a load of maintenance and time. If any discussion should arise on these matters, I'd rather them to occur not as a platform for a DPL candidate but after a reasonable discussion with the concerned parties, eg, DSA. I'm trying not to respond to too many mails here because I don't want to take away too much attention from the candidates, but I also don't think we have a problem of money heaping up anymore. Across the project, our financial needs are mostly met, and it helps having some reserve cash for a rainy day. Also on the DSA front, they have just filed a request two weeks ago for upgrades at UBC in the range of $110-$160k, so it's not like we're spending nothing on hardware either! Also, every single hardware request over the last 4 years (whether from DSA or from a DD) has been approved. I hope that's something that our new DPL will continue doing so for every reasonable request going forward as well! -Jonathan
Re: Question to all candidates: what to do with the Debian money, shall we invest in hardware and cloud?
Hi, Thomas Goirand wrote on 27/03/2024 at 00:24:30+0100: > Hi, > > As you know, there's a large amount of money sleeping in SPI account > for Debian. Do you have ideas on how to spend it? > > Would you be ok spending 100k USD on buying hardware for a new Debian > cloud, for example? I've always volunteered to operate it for Debian, > but it never went through, because I haven't spent time to find where > to host it and so on, but highvoltage liked the idea. Do you like this > idea? Do you think it'd be useful for Debian? Please, let's take some time to think about the implications of spending a shitload of money to buy hardware that we wouldn't know where to host, and that would require a load of maintenance and time. If any discussion should arise on these matters, I'd rather them to occur not as a platform for a DPL candidate but after a reasonable discussion with the concerned parties, eg, DSA. > Also, I found very annoying that we don't have enough buildd, or that > the reproducible build project doesn't have as much hardware as they > would like. Would it be ok to spend another 100k USD for this kind of > things? Same, with slightly less concern regarding hardware volume and maintenance. > For some packages of mine, the current shared runners are too slow to > even run time-based tests of openvswitch for example... What about the > Salsa CI? Couldn't we pay some cloud providers to have faster shared > runners? It wouldn't be hard to hook them. -- PEB signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: Question to all candidates: what to do with the Debian money, shall we invest in hardware and cloud?
Hi Thomas, Am Wed, Mar 27, 2024 at 12:24:30AM +0100 schrieb Thomas Goirand: > As you know, there's a large amount of money sleeping in SPI account for > Debian. Do you have ideas on how to spend it? While I admit that I'm not well informed about the status of the acount currently I'm perfectly open to interesting suggestsions. In general I think donators want to see their money spent for the progress of Debian and not for filling up some bank account. > Would you be ok spending 100k USD on buying hardware for a new Debian cloud, > for example? I've always volunteered to operate it for Debian, but it never > went through, because I haven't spent time to find where to host it and so > on, but highvoltage liked the idea. Do you like this idea? Do you think it'd > be useful for Debian? While I personally have no use case for this I'm perfectly open for spending money on this and love to discuss this either on debian-project or debian-private (if private discussion seems to be appropriate). However, I see an important requirement to consider this money well spent: We need a team who cares for the maintenance of this cloud. I do not think that we can simply add to the workload of DSA. And I want it to be a real team and not a 1-person team. > Also, I found very annoying that we don't have enough buildd, or that the > reproducible build project doesn't have as much hardware as they would like. > Would it be ok to spend another 100k USD for this kind of things? I'd happily spent money on infrastructure we really need which includes buildd and reproducible builds. I'm also fine with stregthening Debci and Salsa CI if needed. But also here the question is: Just permitting the usage of money is one thing. We also need people to do the actual grunt work of buying, installing and maintaining the hardware. If this is granted I'm perfectly fine with it. > For some packages of mine, the current shared runners are too slow to even > run time-based tests of openvswitch for example... What about the Salsa CI? As I mentioned above I'm happy to make Salsa CI more performant. > Couldn't we pay some cloud providers to have faster shared runners? It > wouldn't be hard to hook them. Paying some cloud providers to host shared runners for us might be one answer to my requirement that there are actual people who care and not only money thrown at some hardware. It needs to be well thought / discussed what services can be delegated to some cloud providers and what needs to be Debian hosted. For Salsa CI I do not see any constraints since its just building publicly accessible code. Kind regards Andreas. -- https://fam-tille.de
