Hi there!

Please reply to the debian-publicity@ mailing list [1], it is the
discussion list for anything related to the Events team (R-T and M-F-T
set accordingly), TIA.

[1]

This is the report of the Events BoF [2][3]. I am sorry for the delay,
but the latest days at DebConf11 were quite intense for me, between the
merchandise handling and the proposal for DebConf13 in Switzerland. And
the week after DebConf11 I took a pause and enjoyed RL

[2]
[3]

First of all, the BoF was divided into two parts: I explained again what
the Events team does and where. These were basically the same
information available on the wiki [4] and there were no big surprise
here, except a HUGE remark about (ab)using the email address [5] for
notifications…

[4]
[5]

Then, I moved to the DebConf11 ToDo list [6], which actually got more
attention and people started to interact.

[6]

Most of the people agreed about adding minor events (AKA simple talks)
to the web page [7]: Francesca is already working on it and this should
be fixed soon, also deprecating the “some talks” page [8] (IMHO not so
visible).

[7]
[8]

Speaking of talks, we really need a way to search in the event/talk
list, it is impossible that in 2011 we still oblige our users to go
through yearly subpages.

Just before the BoF Annette told me about the GriCal portal [9]: we
should find a way to work together with them to avoid duplication of
event submissions and sharing of the main events. Francesca, this could
be the F/LOSS “schedule/calendar” we were looking for, not forgetting
the French-speaking “Agenda du Libre” [10]…

[9]
[10]

Another agreement was that those pages, especially the ones related to
setup a booth, need a re-factoring: the best thing would probably be to
send a “Call for Help” on the debian-publicity@ mailing list [1] after
having someway planned how the new pages should be organized. Some work
can be done independently of those pages, like the merchandise stuff,
given that it has its own space on www.d.o [11] (but check #613832
[12]). We should probably move the information on a subpage, which is
also easier to maintain.

[11]
[12]

Before going into details about the booth novelties, let me explain the
two last points.

First, for the mailing list, the idea would be to still use the
already-established debian-events-$SOMETHING [13] mailing list for
coordination, with a “new” mailing list for announcement only (both
minor and major events). This should be a restricted-posting mailing
list (probably Events and Press membership only): its aim is to provide
email notifications whenever a new event is added to the website. A
parallel approach would be to duplicate the announcements on Planet
Debian, but these points must be coordinated with the Publicity team.

[13] $SOMETHING is variable, sometime we have one $LOCALE (-nl), one
$CONTINENT (-eu) and two $SUBCONTINENT (-na and -saff).

Second, the merchandise stuff, something that goes beyond the simple
webpage [11]. Beside its re-organization, we should find a better way
to show what is available *at least* from the Debian Trusted
Organizations [14]. The simplest way would be to have a sort of
“virtual” shop, also useful for booth organization. In an ideal world,
this would be the “complete” stock of all Debian merchandising from
Trusted Organizations, “managed” by the Events team (do not panic,
strong words chosen on purpose). Nothing has been done in this respect
apart from my wishful thinking and discussions with various people,
including the Debian Auditors [15]. Nevertheless, we agreed on using
the events.d.n address [16] for all our tests, as soon as Andreas will
free the DNS entry

[14]
[15]
[16]

Then, I moved to the main topic and also my primary goal for this
DebConf11: the Debian Events Box [17]. Taking the example from the
GNOME project [18], booth organizers will receive a parcel with all the
*minimal* material for the booth, i.e.:

- 1x demo PC, already configured to run BabelBox [19] and other stuff
- 1x 17″ LCD
- 1x keyboard/mouse
- 1x Wi-Fi AP with a 4-port hub, already configured
- 2+ power strips with worldwide adapter
- various network/VGA/USB cables
- 2 Kensington-compatible locks
- lockable cash box
- debian-flyers and other print advertising
- T-Shirts/labels for the booth staff

[17]
[18]
[19]

Mostly if not all the people who have already organized a booth agreed
on the box content, especially WRT the demo PC. Including a reaflet
rack as well as a rollup poster holder would be even better, but because
of dimension constraints it would be quite difficult, thus the need for
a second “complementary” box was brought to the attention (anyway needed
for further merchandise).

The point which warmed the discussion was about having “uniformed”
T-Shirts or labels for the booth staff. The intention is to try to
solve a common problem at various events: there is no way to identify
the booth organizers, especially when the booth is crowded and/or
various people not always “officially” listed are helping out.
Different people underlined the major problem with this approach:
categorization. Both parties explained their pros/cons, but no final
decision was taken, anyway and for sure this point will generate even
more discussions in the future,

In any case, something that must be said is that any material in the box
is *not* an obligation: the box is nothing more than a guideline, but
the organizers are free to use or not the material included. I, for
myself, would prefer to have *more* choice and to be obliged to say “no,
thanks” than dreaming of something missing…

We would like to have one box available in Europe for events starting
already in September: the demo PC is the biggest choice, given that it
must support hardware virtualization and having as much disk space as
possible (a full mirror for the specific architecture is welcome).
After having discussed with Axel Beckert about his EeeBox PC (also used
to test the Pelicase PL-1650 capacity) we were quite confident in this
product. This was until we discovered that none of the options
available mounts CPUs with hardware virtualization, i.e. one of the
latest Intel Atom E (the best) or Z line, but none of them with 64-bit
instructions [20]. This is the major showstopper ATM, given our need to
evaluate other options (hint: advice needed!).

[20]

The Debian Events Box [17] will be the main force behind the creation of
at least a debian-events-box package and even more from the same source,
the Debian Events Package [21]. While the former will contain all the
tools needed to administer the demo PC, the biggest plan is to include
all the event/marketing/merchandise material produced in the past. The
first candidates would be the debian-flyers [22] and the already-used
T-Shirts logos [23].

[21]
[22]
[23]

In the end, I consider both the DebCamp11 and the BoF as successful:
despite not having big results (unfortunately we were quite late to show
a functional Debian Events Box [17]…) we interacted with various
people, thus improving our visibility and grabbing experiences/ideas to
improve our work. The fact that some people were present at both the
Publicity [24] and Events [2] BoFs showed that our choice of being a
subgroup inside the Publicity Team was correct. It was privately
suggested to organize a “publicity” track for the next DebConfs, also
including other side events like the Wiki BoF [25] or the WWW [26] talk.

[24]
[25]
[26]

With such a lot of work ahead of us, especially about restructuring the
event pages and defining a detailed procedure for booth management, let
me state again that anyone interested in such topics should join the
effort. And, once again, please feel free to (ab)use the events@d.o
email address [5] for any notification, suggestion or comment

On behalf of the Events team.

Thx, bye,
Gismo / Luca

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Highlights
==========

There are various topics deserving an highlight this month, either
because I’ve been involved in them one way or another and you should
know about that, or because I’d like to point your attention to them.
Better get started…

RFH: debbugs
————

The first highlight for this update is a Request For Help around
debbugs, the software that powers our bug tracking service [1]. The BTS
is serving us well but, together with the current debbugs maintainers
[2], we believe it deserves some bit more people-power (that is the case
for many teams, but one at a time we can fix all of them ). As an
experiment, we’re therefore trying to have a debbugs mentoring sprint
[3] in the next few months. Don has kindly agreed to mentor newbies
through the code base and I’d like to thank him for that. The sprint can
also be a nice occasion to learn your way through debbugs code,
triage/squash some of its bugs, and—pet peeve of mine—improve
support for the backports bug work-flow [5]. If you are interested in
participating or help out with the organization, please follow-up to [3]
(ignoring my embarrassing typo, pretty please).

[1] http://bugs.debian.org
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Debbugs
[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-debbugs/2011/07/msg00000.html
[4] http://bugs.debian.org/bugs.debian.org
[5] http://lists.debian.org/debian-backports/2011/06/msg00027.html

Time-based freezes
——————

A few days ago the Release Team has sent (part 1 of) a report [6] from
their recent sprint [7]. Among the various news items, I’d like to
highlight a very important one: for this release cycle, we’re giving a
try to *time-based freezes*. I found that quite exciting; it means we
now know, 1 year in advance, that we will freeze Wheezy in June 2012
(well, it actually means we are *trying* to do that, it’s up to all of
us, collectively, to deliver). That gives time to all maintainers to
finalize their plans for Wheezy and also, for those who need it, to make
arrangements with upstreams in order to have a long term supportable
release ready for June 2012. I encourage all maintainers to go ahead
*now* and make such arrangements with upstreams, where possible and
useful.

[6] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2011/06/msg00003.html
[7] http://wiki.debian.org/Sprints/2011/Release

Python helpers
————–

Although it’s not really my job to do that, I think several people not
subscribed to -python will appreciate knowing that the Debian Python
community has recently converged on a single stack of helpers for
packaging Python stuff (see [8] for a nice fantasy tale ^W^W report
about that). That solves, at least part of, the long running issues
around Python governance in Debian. python-{central,support} “war” is no
more. I’d like to thank all the Debian Python people for taking this
important step.

[8] http://lists.debian.org/debian-python/2011/06/msg00136.html

IRC sessions
————

According to my memory, we have agreed in various discussions that
Debian will benefit from periodic training sessions (on IRC). I think
the same is true for periodic team meetings, as they are fun ways to get
work done together, and for any other gathering. That is why I salute
the recent new wave of IRC sessions organized by Francesca Ciceri [9]
(thanks!). I’ve been happy to help out a little bit with the setup and
to participate in the first “ask the DPL” session (logs are at [10]).
Another session has happened already and more are planned [9]. I
encourage all of you to participate to sessions, propose yourself as a
“speaker” on the wiki page, and peruse the #debian-meeting channel for
regular IRC meetings.

[9] http://wiki.debian.org/IRC/debian-meeting
[10] http://meetbot.debian.net/debian-meeting/2011/debian-meeting.2011-06-22-19.01.log.html

Interviews
==========

I’ve given a few interviews as of recently:

- an interview for the Muktware tech blog [11] (in English)
- an interview for the Comunità Digitali tech blog [12] (in Italian)
- an interview for an article about the whole “rolling” discussion (in
English, but still to appear)

[11] http://www.muktware.com/news/10/2011/1383
[12] http://comunitadigitali.blogosfere.it/2011/06/linux-intervista-a-stefano-zacchiroli-debian-project-leader-per-essere-parte-di-debian-ora-basta-mol.html

Sprints
=======

A couple of sprints have been approved by me and/or happened in June:

- a Release Team sprint (see [7] above)
- a DebianEdu sprint [8]

Remember: you can haz yut sprint too! Just follow the instructions [18].

[8] http://wiki.debian.org/Sprints/2011/DebianEduSprint
[18] http://wiki.debian.org/Sprints

Derivatives
===========

On the topic of derivatives, we got a status report [9] about the
completion of the first of DEX initiatives (done within the Ubuntu
chapter of DEX, and called “ancient-patches”). We’re now looking for
further DEX initiatives which, I remind you, are about closing a
technical gap—in terms of, for example, number of patches to be merged
or other metrics—that exists between Debian and one of its derivative
distribution. If you have in mind a technical area where Debian could
benefit from merging back work done in some of its derivatives, please
bring it up on the -derivatives mailing list.

If you are interested in the area of working with derivatives, I’ll be
co-hosting, together with other -derivatives people, a sort of “review”
talk [10] about that at DebConf, which you’re welcome to join.

[9] http://lists.debian.org/debian-derivatives/2011/06/msg00010.html
[10] https://penta.debconf.org/penta/submission/dc11/event/761

Miscellanea
===========

- after investigations done over the past few weeks, we’ve finally filed
the application to extend Debian (US) trademark to UK, EU, China, and
Japan (and payed the corresponding fee)

- I think we could greatly benefit from comparing governance mechanisms
we have in Debian with those of other projects. That is why, in the
context of the Debian/Society track I’m co-organizing with Daniel Kahn
Gillmor, we’ve called for an event submission about that [11]. If
you’re an expert on the topic and if you’re attending DebConf11 please
let us know, we might be able to find you at slot for presenting it
(no guarantees, though)

- there has been an interesting (and IMHO important) discussion about
hardware certification on -project (see [12] and follow-ups). An
interesting option of having a community-based framework for reporting
which hardware works and which doesn’t with Debian is in need of a
champion: speak up if you are up to the task!

Looking forward
===============

I’ll be traveling a bit on behalf of Debian over the summer (and I need
your input to represent you better).

- On July 12 I’ll be in Lisbon at a workshop [13] organized by Caixa
Magica [14], a derivative distribution that recently moved from an RPM
based system to a DEB based one. They are basing their distro on a
mixture of Debian and Ubuntu packages and they invited me to know more
about the interactions among Debian derivatives.

- The day before that, on July 11, I’ll deliver an invited speech about
Debian at the ACM workshop OSDOC’11 [15]

- At the end of August, I’ll participate and talk at the GNU Hackers
Meeting to be held in Paris [16]. The GNU hackers has invited me to
talk about Debian relationship with upstreams and also to discuss our
point of view on the Debian/GNU relationship. To that end, I’ve called
for input on -project [17] and already got very useful feedback
(thanks to anyone who replied up to now). But of course I could use
more feedback! If you are maintaining some GNU software in Debian
please check [17] and get back to me.

[11] http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2011/06/debian_society_track_at_debconf/
[12] http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2011/06/msg00001.html
[13] http://moss.dcti.iscte.pt/index.php?s_id=12
[14] http://www.caixamagica.pt/
[15] http://eurosigdoc.acm.org/osdoc2011/
[16] http://www.gnu.org/ghm/2011/paris/
[17] http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2011/06/msg00036.html

Thanks for bearing with me til the end of this report.
That’s all, folks.

PS as usual, the boring day-to-day activity log is available at