Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian
Gunnar Wolf gw...@gwolf.org writes: Gergely Nagy dijo [Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 01:32:32PM +0100]: Debian is also not impressively different, so to say. We have a distinct culture, we have great technical solutions, but those are hardly enough to impress someone who just casually looks. We need to reach out and show them that there is much more under the hood than they may imagine, that we can, and we do provide something unique. And we need to impress them. That's a very, very hard thing to do, and something that we'll need lots of help to accomplish, and not necessarily from technical folk. (Which is why one of my primary aims is to reach and and recruit non-technical contributors to Debian.) How would you suggest impressing them? A new, shiny user interface is not what it takes, or at least, not all it takes. We have packaged *great* user interfaces for a very long time. Even other Linux distributions, aimed at the desktop, have given a lot of extra shine and polish to their UIs, someof them (i.e. our derivative Ubuntu) developing completely new frameworks, targetted IMO to touch-devices, which are all the rage now. And I still cannot say it impresses or dazzles newcomers. It's not the UIs I would focus on - everyone is doing that, and it's never going to be really impressing, in my opinion. Impressing anyone with technical gizmos is hard, and most often, only possible when they were interested anyway. We're not going to reach too many people that way. How we can reach a lot more - see the end of my previous mail. The stories we can tell, the achievements we can show, our entire culture is something that noone else can show. These are *very* impressive things, we should be proud of them, and we should use them as part of our recruitment too. -- |8] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87hajt7tgy@galadriel.madhouse-project.org
Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian
Gergely Nagy dijo [Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 01:32:32PM +0100]: I see people around me teach their children to use and control computers, to build things with them, even before they learn to write. They have their toys, they build stuff, sometimes they unknowingly write programs - before the age of eight. I find that astounding (I used to be so proud at writing my first program before I could write - now it isn't all that rare, and that's a good thing, that people have the opportunity to do that). The thing is, Debian is often not available on the devices younger people start off with - and even if it is, not by default. Someone who just began to experiment, to play, will not install a whole new world onto his/her device. That's advanced stuff. Well, Debian is *almost never* available by default on the devices they start off with, and has never been. We have always been of appeal to the technically minded (and less so to the very-freedom-minded) public. Of course, we have tried to go beyond our natural limits, but -outside of some local governments providing Debian-based solutions for a wide spectrum of their society, which cannot of course be downplayed- have been unable to. Debian is also not impressively different, so to say. We have a distinct culture, we have great technical solutions, but those are hardly enough to impress someone who just casually looks. We need to reach out and show them that there is much more under the hood than they may imagine, that we can, and we do provide something unique. And we need to impress them. That's a very, very hard thing to do, and something that we'll need lots of help to accomplish, and not necessarily from technical folk. (Which is why one of my primary aims is to reach and and recruit non-technical contributors to Debian.) How would you suggest impressing them? A new, shiny user interface is not what it takes, or at least, not all it takes. We have packaged *great* user interfaces for a very long time. Even other Linux distributions, aimed at the desktop, have given a lot of extra shine and polish to their UIs, someof them (i.e. our derivative Ubuntu) developing completely new frameworks, targetted IMO to touch-devices, which are all the rage now. And I still cannot say it impresses or dazzles newcomers. Share the knowledge, share the culture, the stories. I've attended a couple of code retreats recently (they seem to be quite popular, and for a good reason), and found that they're a great forum not only to meet others, learn and teach, but to spread the word too, to evangelise, so to say. Much like DebConf, but for the not yet initiated. What I think would help, are more local events - not always strictly Debian related, as you'll only reach a tiny fraction of people with that. But things where the attendance can be impressed, to bring them closer to our culture, to our ideas. Once interested is sparked, we can proceed further, but it is a gradual process: we won't win anyone for the project overnight. We need to impress the young. We won't be able to do that with technical feats alone (though those do help, and are required, and we have much to improve there too, at least in the being readily available for all kinds of fun devices department). Most of the younger people I talked about Debian with in recent years were in their early 20s, and what they seemed most impressed about is not our technical feats, not our quality, not anything like that. But the culture. Right, I liked very much the insight in this part: What makes Debian unique, besides the software (which can be integrated into myriads of other distributions) is the culture. My recent free software-related talks have also gone more towards the free culture and flat organization aspects than to towards technical feats. And, although it's been a long time since I feel I got a new Debian addict, I think that's what we should promote if we want to give a sense of uniqueness. The way our community works, and why it attracts the kind of people it does. And why we continue working together. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130319185335.gf7...@gwolf.org
Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian
On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 04:28:03PM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote [edited]: On 16/03/13 at 15:31 +0100, Serafeim Zanikolas wrote: have you considered assignments for the preparation of patches for wishlist bugs in native and pseudo-packages (eg. infra-related sw projects)? Have others thought about that/tried to organize such university projects? There's this (master's, I think) module, ran by an academic who's a FreeBSD member, with goals amongst others: Appreciate and understand maintenance activities Be able to change existing systems http://www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/ismr/intro/indexw.htm http://www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/ismr/index.htm You can see in their hall of fame examples of successful contributions. YMMV, but due to the way student projects are organized in France, the following problems are often blockers: - Tasks are not long enough. Typically, what you need is something that would take an experienced DD about 40 hours (for part-time projects with groups of 2 to 4 students). Many of tasks are much smaller than that, and you can't just aggregate several tasks, because then, the project loses interest in terms of project management. Assignments don't necessarily have to have a patch as the sole deliverable. Smaller ones could very well be about producing a design or triaging bugs (reproducing, documenting approaches that didn't work, and so on). - I don't know the software, and there's no one willing to act as backup-mentor on the Debian side, in case I cannot answer the students' question. - The project is not motivating enough for the students (it does not result in exposing the students to sufficiently-interesting technologies, for example). If I understand correctly, in the aforementioned course, they don't point students to specific projects or issues to work on. So it's up to the students to find something they find do-able and interesting enough to work on. - The amount of learning required to be able to do the project, compared to the amount of work to do, is too high. I don't see that as a problem if documenting what one's learned is part of the deliverable you grade. - (for infrastructure) setting up a development instance is not documented, impossible, or extremely difficult. Indeed that's an issue for infra projects -- and a point of improvement for us. Anyhow, I think that whatever we'd do to make such academic assignments easier would be useful to potential contributors in general. A couple of other ideas to encourage work on wishlist bugs of infra native packages: - tag them as wontfix, needs-discussion or patch-welcome - for patch-welcome bugs, tag them also in terms of order of magnitude of time required to fix (eg. hours, days, weeks; yes, it depends on a bunch of factors, but it'd be better than nothing) With this info in place combined with debtags data (eg. implemented-in::*), one could develop a web page where newcomes can ask I know language X and have a spare weekend to code. what should I do? (this would be similar to wnpp-by-tags.debian.net but for native Debian projects instead). -- Every great idea is worthless without someone to do the work. --Neil Williams -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130317135412.GC6878@mobee
Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian
Hi, On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 03:47:57PM +0100, Gergely Nagy wrote: Serafeim Zanikolas s...@debian.org writes: If you refer to university students in some software-related discipline: have you considered assignments for the preparation of patches for wishlist bugs in native and pseudo-packages (eg. infra-related sw projects)? That doesn't really help, in my opinion. It will be a 'forced' contribution, one which will not continue past the assignment. that depends. If the course is compulsory, it would be a forced contribution, but if you offer such kind of work as one option for an assignment with a significant duration (a master's thesis has already been mentioned), things change. In that case, the time frame would be at least equivalent to a GSOC project, and voluntary committment can be assumed as well. OTOH, we're then quite late in the game - we should find methods of engaging people earlier. Kind regards, --Toni++ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130317143417.ga31...@spruce.wiehl.oeko.net
Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian
On 17/03/13 at 14:54 +0100, Serafeim Zanikolas wrote: On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 04:28:03PM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote [edited]: On 16/03/13 at 15:31 +0100, Serafeim Zanikolas wrote: have you considered assignments for the preparation of patches for wishlist bugs in native and pseudo-packages (eg. infra-related sw projects)? Have others thought about that/tried to organize such university projects? There's this (master's, I think) module, ran by an academic who's a FreeBSD member, with goals amongst others: Appreciate and understand maintenance activities Be able to change existing systems http://www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/ismr/intro/indexw.htm http://www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/ismr/index.htm You can see in their hall of fame examples of successful contributions. We are talking about two different things. Your example is a course on Open Source Software Engineering. The project's goal there is have students discover the inner workings of a Free Software project. Typically this is achieved by having the students fix a few bugs, so that they have to understand all the project's structure and procedure. In that case, all the students following the course work on [possibly different] Free Software projects. I was thinking more of typical programming projects, where the goal is improve the students' C/Java/whatever skills, as well as their project management skills. In that case, most of the students following the course would develop yet another game from scratch, but the groups you mentor would work on Debian. My list of blockers apply to the second kind of projects. For example, bug triaging or fixing does not work here, because you need students to develop something sufficiently big so that coordination between students becomes necessary. Lucas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130317142147.ga17...@xanadu.blop.info
Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian
Hi Toni, You quoted my mail by taking only one sentence of each of my paragraphs, so my answers look much less subtle in your email than they were in my email. ;) On 15/03/13 at 22:46 +0100, Toni Mueller wrote: Hi Lucas, On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 03:43:16PM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: First, I don't think that age matters that much. imho, age does matter. See Bulbullle's notice why he doesn't run. I've seen people leaving other projects by eg. way of heart attack or traffic accident, too. Younger people tend to have less of the health problems, as well as more spare time. You write about attracting people to free software. I'm not sure that we have a problem here. I think we have. In my opinion, many users don't realise the value of free as in free speech, and only see the value of free as in free beer. Although I have tried to campaign in that direction, I have utterly failed to explain this issue to many people (esp. business people). The number of free software users increases. Free ... mostly by way of accident, eg. by getting Ubuntu after their umpteenth computer breakdown due to a virus attack. Yes, I addressed that in my platform: But we should also aim at reinforcing the visibility and the impact of Debian itself, because the extremely important values we fight for as a project are often neglected by our derivatives. So we need to get more free software users to use Debian, more Debian users to contribute, more contributors to become regular contributors, etc. But I think I addressed that in my answer to Timo in https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2013/03/msg00014.html Your roadmap feels quite natural, but it's not yet a plan because the devil is in the detail: *How* do we get more people to use/... Debian? Simply saying we need help may easily make us look like beggars, yielding the opposite effect. we need help is about getting people to *contribute* to Debian. To get more people to *use* Debian, we need to reach out to people not using Debian yet (obviously). One way to do that is to get involved in local movements/events where it's possible to talk about Debian to people who, while not really familiar with Free Software, are quite likely to be interested. Usually, participation in such events leads to articles in the local press, more participation to such events, etc. How can we contribute to that on the project level? By encouraging the debian events initiative (http://www.debian.org/events/), so that setting up a booth will be much easier. Also, by being more open to non-DD representing Debian at such events. Imho, a large part of the answer is in getting the cool back into Debian. In my discussion with other developers, I get the impression that Debian is viewed a huge bureaucratic monster, and you almost have to have a Ph.D. before you can reasonably expect to contribute. Which would preclude the participation of younger developers, if it were true, but I am convinced that it deters talent. Imho, we have to change that, somehow. I fully agree (and I addressed that in my platform). At the next level of education, it would be great if people could establish Debian related projects as parts of coursework in high school or academia. One thing I have done and that could be generalized is to ask students I managed to provide a Debian package for software they use or develop during a project. But asking students to contribute to Debian during university projects is quite difficult (I have thought about it numerous times, but never found a good-enough idea). it would be interesting to share feedback on that, to identify and suppress potential blockers. Lucas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130316102105.gb14...@xanadu.blop.info
Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian
Hi! Instead of answering Timo's question directly, I'll answer to Gunnar instead, in the hopes that I can answer both of them in a satisfactory manner. Gunnar Wolf gw...@gwolf.org writes: Timo Juhani Lindfors dijo [Sun, Mar 10, 2013 at 05:34:58PM +0200]: Hi, I'd like to have each DPL candidate briefly discuss the challenges of getting new people to Debian. Riding on Timo Juhani's question (and not yet having read the two answers that it has already): There was an interesting discussion (sadly, in a private forum I cannot quote here, but the fact of having had the discussion does not disclose private information, yada yada...) that had as one of its interesting points the current age distribution, based on the entered data in Debian's LDAP entries. It shows the project as a whole is aging, and not only in the sense that Moray describes in his platform, but in the sense that we developers are getting older — When I joined the project I remember being happy and proud to be slightly under the (perceived) average age (among DebConf attendees). Today, I am 36 years old, and my age is... I don't remember whether the mode or the average. At the same time, now that I have started teaching at a university, we have a once very active LUG (complete with a meeting laboratory and all!), and it has gone almost deserted. My friends at the Faculty told me we need a way to attract younger people into Free Software development - It's not as easy to do it as it was ~10 years ago. There is another additional fact that makes this all the more worrysome: we have far more technically apt young people now, than we had ten years ago. I see people around me teach their children to use and control computers, to build things with them, even before they learn to write. They have their toys, they build stuff, sometimes they unknowingly write programs - before the age of eight. I find that astounding (I used to be so proud at writing my first program before I could write - now it isn't all that rare, and that's a good thing, that people have the opportunity to do that). The thing is, Debian is often not available on the devices younger people start off with - and even if it is, not by default. Someone who just began to experiment, to play, will not install a whole new world onto his/her device. That's advanced stuff. Debian is also not impressively different, so to say. We have a distinct culture, we have great technical solutions, but those are hardly enough to impress someone who just casually looks. We need to reach out and show them that there is much more under the hood than they may imagine, that we can, and we do provide something unique. And we need to impress them. That's a very, very hard thing to do, and something that we'll need lots of help to accomplish, and not necessarily from technical folk. (Which is why one of my primary aims is to reach and and recruit non-technical contributors to Debian.) So, do you think this demographic shift towards older developers is harmful to the project, or that it is just a fact and we should not worry? Harmful? No, not necessarily. We should be aware of it, nevertheless. How would you intend to attract more young, interested, talented people? This is briefly mentioned in my platform, but, see below too. What do you think we, DDs spread all over the world, mostly working on a professional setting (and not anymore mostly students enjoying heaps of free time) should do to bring in more, younger contributors? Share the knowledge, share the culture, the stories. I've attended a couple of code retreats recently (they seem to be quite popular, and for a good reason), and found that they're a great forum not only to meet others, learn and teach, but to spread the word too, to evangelise, so to say. Much like DebConf, but for the not yet initiated. What I think would help, are more local events - not always strictly Debian related, as you'll only reach a tiny fraction of people with that. But things where the attendance can be impressed, to bring them closer to our culture, to our ideas. Once interested is sparked, we can proceed further, but it is a gradual process: we won't win anyone for the project overnight. We need to impress the young. We won't be able to do that with technical feats alone (though those do help, and are required, and we have much to improve there too, at least in the being readily available for all kinds of fun devices department). Most of the younger people I talked about Debian with in recent years were in their early 20s, and what they seemed most impressed about is not our technical feats, not our quality, not anything like that. But the culture. -- |8] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87r4jfed9b@galadriel.madhouse-project.org
Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian
On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 11:21:05AM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote [edited]: But asking students to contribute to Debian during university projects is quite difficult (I have thought about it numerous times, but never found a good-enough idea). it would be interesting to share feedback on that, to identify and suppress potential blockers. If you refer to university students in some software-related discipline: have you considered assignments for the preparation of patches for wishlist bugs in native and pseudo-packages (eg. infra-related sw projects)? More generally, I think that our needs for native development are not nearly as well advertised as are those for packaging-related work (WNPP). -- Every great idea is worthless without someone to do the work. --Neil Williams -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130316143112.GB6878@mobee
Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian
Serafeim Zanikolas s...@debian.org writes: On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 11:21:05AM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote [edited]: But asking students to contribute to Debian during university projects is quite difficult (I have thought about it numerous times, but never found a good-enough idea). it would be interesting to share feedback on that, to identify and suppress potential blockers. If you refer to university students in some software-related discipline: have you considered assignments for the preparation of patches for wishlist bugs in native and pseudo-packages (eg. infra-related sw projects)? That doesn't really help, in my opinion. It will be a 'forced' contribution, one which will not continue past the assignment. That's not really what we should aim for. Unless you make it interesting and worthwhile for them to continue contributing, they will not do anything more than strictly required, simply because that's not what they find satisfactory. Prove them that it's worth it, that having significant contributions to Debian (or any other bigger free software project for that matter) on their resume is a good thing, and you're much closer to the goal. Simply telling people to do this and that, because you have the power to tell them will have the exact opposite effect. Instead, we must find a way to make these tasks not only visible and known, but interesting and worthwhile to pursue too. (Which also means we need people on the Debian side too, to help and mentor the students - without that, it's an exercise of futility.) More generally, I think that our needs for native development are not nearly as well advertised as are those for packaging-related work (WNPP). ...and this highlights another issue I have with our infrastructure: wnpp can be quite an intimidating mess, with over a thousand packages in ITP and RFP state. That's a lot. I get scared just by looking at the number, and I'd like to think I'm not the only one. -- |8] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87mwu3e6zm@galadriel.madhouse-project.org
Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian
On 16/03/13 at 15:31 +0100, Serafeim Zanikolas wrote: On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 11:21:05AM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote [edited]: But asking students to contribute to Debian during university projects is quite difficult (I have thought about it numerous times, but never found a good-enough idea). it would be interesting to share feedback on that, to identify and suppress potential blockers. If you refer to university students in some software-related discipline: (yes) have you considered assignments for the preparation of patches for wishlist bugs in native and pseudo-packages (eg. infra-related sw projects)? YMMV, but due to the way student projects are organized in France, the following problems are often blockers: - Tasks are not long enough. Typically, what you need is something that would take an experienced DD about 40 hours (for part-time projects with groups of 2 to 4 students). Many of tasks are much smaller than that, and you can't just aggregate several tasks, because then, the project loses interest in terms of project management. - I don't know the software, and there's no one willing to act as backup-mentor on the Debian side, in case I cannot answer the students' question. - (for infrastructure) setting up a development instance is not documented, impossible, or extremely difficult. - The amount of learning required to be able to do the project, compared to the amount of work to do, is too high. - The project is not motivating enough for the students (it does not result in exposing the students to sufficiently-interesting technologies, for example). Have others thought about that/tried to organize such university projects? Lucas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130316152803.ga24...@xanadu.blop.info
Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian
On 2013-03-16 17:47, Gergely Nagy wrote: ...and this highlights another issue I have with our infrastructure: wnpp can be quite an intimidating mess, with over a thousand packages in ITP and RFP state. That's a lot. I get scared just by looking at the number, and I'd like to think I'm not the only one. Yes. I think the RFP list is one area that could do with volunteer curators. If a few interesting/important/easy packages were highlighted, we could avoid as many people spending hours looking through the list, then giving up without finding anything, or giving up due to inability to decide. Though, as a related matter, I would like people who have an ITP bug, or who look seriously at at RFP requests, to post more updates and comments to the bug reports -- even when the comment is about a lack of progress. For example, if you look at an RFP bug then decide it's uninteresting/worthless/difficult, or have a doubt about the licensing status, please send a short message to the BTS to help save time later for others who look through the list. -- Moray -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/81246112369827cfea3d2586db402...@www.morayallan.com
Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian
Hi Lucas, On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 03:43:16PM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: First, I don't think that age matters that much. imho, age does matter. See Bulbullle's notice why he doesn't run. I've seen people leaving other projects by eg. way of heart attack or traffic accident, too. Younger people tend to have less of the health problems, as well as more spare time. You write about attracting people to free software. I'm not sure that we have a problem here. I think we have. In my opinion, many users don't realise the value of free as in free speech, and only see the value of free as in free beer. Although I have tried to campaign in that direction, I have utterly failed to explain this issue to many people (esp. business people). The number of free software users increases. Free ... mostly by way of accident, eg. by getting Ubuntu after their umpteenth computer breakdown due to a virus attack. So we need to get more free software users to use Debian, more Debian users to contribute, more contributors to become regular contributors, etc. But I think I addressed that in my answer to Timo in https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2013/03/msg00014.html Your roadmap feels quite natural, but it's not yet a plan because the devil is in the detail: *How* do we get more people to use/... Debian? Simply saying we need help may easily make us look like beggars, yielding the opposite effect. Imho, a large part of the answer is in getting the cool back into Debian. In my discussion with other developers, I get the impression that Debian is viewed a huge bureaucratic monster, and you almost have to have a Ph.D. before you can reasonably expect to contribute. Which would preclude the participation of younger developers, if it were true, but I am convinced that it deters talent. Imho, we have to change that, somehow. OT (maybe redirect to -project?): I would also like to see Debian to be more inviting to special interest groups. For a while, it may have been web server administrators, who can pull Debian out of the box and are quickly up and running with a stable server platform. But eg. accountants are not yet catered for in a similar way (let's quarrel about the reasons for that elsewhere), and similar arguments go for other large potential user groups - eg. I've been told that significant problems exist for Asian users. The two projects I would like to commend for their efforts in that direction (probably because I have overlooked similar efforts elsewhere) are DebianEdu and DebianMed. At the next level of education, it would be great if people could establish Debian related projects as parts of coursework in high school or academia. All the other statements about threats through the sprawl of cloud computing and locked down devices apply, too, but they have already been covered. Kind regards, --Toni++ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130315214600.ga4...@spruce.wiehl.oeko.net
Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian
On Sun, Mar 10, 2013 at 10:32:10PM -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote: There was an interesting discussion (sadly, in a private forum I cannot quote here, but the fact of having had the discussion does not disclose private information, yada yada...) You mean the discussion (re)started publicly at: https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2013/01/msg00091.html ? :-) -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club » signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian
On 2013-03-11 07:32, Gunnar Wolf wrote: Riding on Timo Juhani's question (and not yet having read the two answers that it has already): There was an interesting discussion (sadly, in a private forum I cannot quote here, but the fact of having I believe you're referring to the discussion I summarised in http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2013/01/msg00091.html So, do you think this demographic shift towards older developers is harmful to the project, or that it is just a fact and we should not worry? I don't that that having older developers is harmful in itself, but I think that we should try to take contributions from all groups, including younger people. We should equally be looking to recruit, for example, more older retired people, where we would certainly benefit from their experience. How would you intend to attract more young, interested, talented people? In the -project thread and my platform I've mentioned a few ideas. I think that all of the points in my reply to Timo (fun, clearer paths in, more active recruitment, better use of local networks, where possible) could be applied to recruiting younger people. I am aware like you of some LUGs and university computing societies that have faded away, but also of other ones that have grown up in recent years. The activities/interests of typical new student computing groups may be different compared to a few years ago, for example more based around phones and business plans, but I don't think we should assume that no students (for example) would be interested in Debian-related local meetings, if we decided to explicitly reach out to them. We might also want to look at what Google or Microsoft do to connect to students, and discuss whether similar approaches would be useful for us -- hint: recruitment to position titles that students can put on their CV, and free pizza. Students who get as far as real contributions *can* already put that on their CV, and have a reasonable chance of getting e.g. sponsorship to attend DebConf, but we don't advertise things in that way; and we might also want to offer some kind of local ambassador role for students more like those non-free software organisations, or something different but with a similarly low threshold compared to becoming say a DM or DD. -- Moray -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/f6e1c1c6a8f4306e9722b43815e14...@www.morayallan.com
Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian
Hi, On 10/03/13 at 22:32 -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote: Timo Juhani Lindfors dijo [Sun, Mar 10, 2013 at 05:34:58PM +0200]: Hi, I'd like to have each DPL candidate briefly discuss the challenges of getting new people to Debian. Hi, Riding on Timo Juhani's question (and not yet having read the two answers that it has already): There was an interesting discussion (sadly, in a private forum I cannot quote here, but the fact of having had the discussion does not disclose private information, yada yada...) that had as one of its interesting points the current age distribution, based on the entered data in Debian's LDAP entries. It shows the project as a whole is aging, and not only in the sense that Moray describes in his platform, but in the sense that we developers are getting older — When I joined the project I remember being happy and proud to be slightly under the (perceived) average age (among DebConf attendees). Today, I am 36 years old, and my age is... I don't remember whether the mode or the average. At the same time, now that I have started teaching at a university, we have a once very active LUG (complete with a meeting laboratory and all!), and it has gone almost deserted. My friends at the Faculty told me we need a way to attract younger people into Free Software development - It's not as easy to do it as it was ~10 years ago. So, do you think this demographic shift towards older developers is harmful to the project, or that it is just a fact and we should not worry? How would you intend to attract more young, interested, talented people? What do you think we, DDs spread all over the world, mostly working on a professional setting (and not anymore mostly students enjoying heaps of free time) should do to bring in more, younger contributors? First, I don't think that age matters that much. What's important is to have an amount of manpower that suits our needs. It's true that younger DDs are often able to spend more time on Debian. But on the other hand, you could say that older DDs are often more experienced DDs. Regarding attractivity, there are two things: - attracting people to free software - attracting people to Debian You write about attracting people to free software. I'm not sure that we have a problem here. The number of free software users increases. Free Software in general probably has the same problem as Debian, that is, not being good at saying we need help! or you can help!. So we need to get more free software users to use Debian, more Debian users to contribute, more contributors to become regular contributors, etc. But I think I addressed that in my answer to Timo in https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2013/03/msg00014.html Lucas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130311144316.ga9...@xanadu.blop.info
to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian
Hi, I'd like to have each DPL candidate briefly discuss the challenges of getting new people to Debian. -Timo -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/84sj439skd@sauna.l.org
Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian
On 2013-03-10 18:34, Timo Juhani Lindfors wrote: I'd like to have each DPL candidate briefly discuss the challenges of getting new people to Debian. I certainly don't think I have all the answers myself, but this is an area I am very keen to see more discussion of, so I must apologise in advance for giving another long answer. Summary Four things that I think might help: - Fun - Clearer paths in - More active recruitment - Better use of local networks, where possible. Challenges On the one hand, we are an exceptionally open project to new people -- they just need to turn up and start doing work. Any of a web browser, a mail client or an IRC client is enough to start making useful contributions to Debian. Adding a new package to the distribution requires some technical learning, but we don't require any formal processes, and if the package is widely useful it will be easy to find someone to sponsor it. On the other hand, it can be difficult for people to find somewhere good to start. Often they will be pointed at lists of bugs that everyone else already gave up on fixing, or at lists of packages that other people weren't motivated to continue maintaining. Our just start working approach can leave many people more confused or intimidated than if we forced them to go through a mysterious and complex process and make it through technical interviews before they could touch anything! And many potential contributors just never get round to starting, or get pulled in by other projects first. Suggested responses - Fun. In my platform I make some suggestions about how we might improve general project transparency, communication and openness, which I think would have a particularly beneficial effect for new contributors. I also think that encouraging people to take roles they find fun, and to rotate away into other roles before they stop having fun, would not only make things more fun for those people by avoiding a burn-out phase, but would indirectly make things more fun for others, including for new members by making it more likely that those they interact with still share their level of enthusiasm, and perhaps even remember how it is to be new and make mistakes! - Clearer paths in. This is especially important for people who don't have any personal contact with existing contributors. We do have some good information for people getting started, and good suggestions of areas to help on, but we could do with volunteers to curate this information in a single, advertised place on an ongoing basis. Potential new contributors could also do with some neutral people to ask about tasks, and to get suggestions from in response to explaining their current skills and experience. I would like to point to http://www.debian.org/women/mentoring as a great initiative that sets an example for this kind of approach can work. - More active recruitment. One problem with just start working is that people often put off starting until tomorrow. If we want new contributors, we should more actively reach out to them. This could be as simple as replying to someone who submits a patch to a bug and encouraging them to get more deeply involved. One idea I would like to try is asking for volunteers to take interns for a set period. I don't suggest that people go into this assuming that the intern will help them get a lot more work done, although in some cases that will certainly happen. Even where the intern is merely shadowing the volunteer's work and watching how it is done, they will finish with a much better understanding of how Debian works, and be in a much better position to assess how they can make best make a contribution to the project. (As a side note, existing contributors might also want to participate in such a scheme to learn about different areas of the project.) - Better use of local networks. It's much easier for us to recruit new volunteers where there is some existing personal contact, though we will never be able to reach all possible contributors this way, and it creates the risk of only recruiting contributors who are like our existing ones. At the moment local connections are a good source of Debian contributors in a few locations where there is a critical mass and local Debian activities. I would like us to encourage more local meetings of Debian contributors, whether for drinks or technical activities, and to compile a list of regional contacts -- people often ask for local contacts for Debian in a region already, and we don't have a good way to answer them. Even if there is only an occasional new face at a regular local meeting, it can let us gain contributors who otherwise would never have arrived. [1] -- Moray [1] In case anyone reading wants practical ideas for how to hold this kind of meeting, I can recommend http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Women%27s_Caucus/Resources/Welcoming_meetings -- To
Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian
On 10/03/13 at 17:34 +0200, Timo Juhani Lindfors wrote: Hi, I'd like to have each DPL candidate briefly discuss the challenges of getting new people to Debian. people is not very specific (users? contributors? DDs?), but maybe it's intentionally vague. Actually, I think that it is a process with several steps, and that we often neglect some of the steps. Let's list them: Step 0: Get people to use Debian Step 1: Get people to make their first contribution to Debian Step 2: Get people to make regular contributions to Debian and add value to the project (possibly become DM, depending on the kind of contribution) Step 3: Get people to go through the NM process and become DD. There are different possible improvements for the different steps. For example: Step 0: === To get new users, you get to provide interesting products. If all the cool kids are using $OTHER_DISTRO, well, we lose. That's one of the reasons why it's so important to increase innovation in Debian. We need to make Debian look like a very cool project. Step 1: === In the past, we often failed to say we need help!. Debian works very well from a user perspective, so it's not always very easy to realize that we need help. It's also hard to find possible things to do. Often bugs are hard to fix (beyond what can be expected for a first contribution). A long time ago, I proposed to tag easy bugs where the maintainer would be willing to provide mentoring with a gift tag (see http://wiki.debian.org/qa.debian.org/GiftTag). However, this quite failed (looking at the number of tagged bugs). I'm not quite sure if this failure was caused by a lack of publicity, a lack of interest by potential contributors, or something else. Finally, it's incredibly difficult to contribute to Debian. One need to read and understand a lot of things. And sometimes it's not even documented. I wrote a packaging tutorial that aims at reducing the barrier to entry (see platform for pointers). That's why I think it's important to simplify our development procedures, advertise good practices more clearly, improve our documentation, etc. Step 2: === Once someone made its first contribution to Debian, it's important to encourage him/her. Looking for reviews or sponsorship (using -mentors@ or inside teams) is often very hard, for example. At this step, inside teams, it's also very important to welcome the contributions and make it clear that the work is good and appreciated. Again inside teams, it's also a step where it's important to help guide the new contributor to other possible contributions, so that it can slowly /grow/ to being a key member of a team. Step 3: === The NM process has gone through several evolutions and works well currently. I don't see anything to change there. General remark: === I often see people complaining of the lack of manpower. It's important to see that starting to contribute to Debian is a very long and difficult process. It often takes at least two or three years from the first contribution to playing a key role in a team. Lucas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130310223902.gb23...@xanadu.blop.info
Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian
Timo Juhani Lindfors dijo [Sun, Mar 10, 2013 at 05:34:58PM +0200]: Hi, I'd like to have each DPL candidate briefly discuss the challenges of getting new people to Debian. Hi, Riding on Timo Juhani's question (and not yet having read the two answers that it has already): There was an interesting discussion (sadly, in a private forum I cannot quote here, but the fact of having had the discussion does not disclose private information, yada yada...) that had as one of its interesting points the current age distribution, based on the entered data in Debian's LDAP entries. It shows the project as a whole is aging, and not only in the sense that Moray describes in his platform, but in the sense that we developers are getting older — When I joined the project I remember being happy and proud to be slightly under the (perceived) average age (among DebConf attendees). Today, I am 36 years old, and my age is... I don't remember whether the mode or the average. At the same time, now that I have started teaching at a university, we have a once very active LUG (complete with a meeting laboratory and all!), and it has gone almost deserted. My friends at the Faculty told me we need a way to attract younger people into Free Software development - It's not as easy to do it as it was ~10 years ago. So, do you think this demographic shift towards older developers is harmful to the project, or that it is just a fact and we should not worry? How would you intend to attract more young, interested, talented people? What do you think we, DDs spread all over the world, mostly working on a professional setting (and not anymore mostly students enjoying heaps of free time) should do to bring in more, younger contributors? signature.asc Description: Digital signature
