 I created a risky document on Gobi, you can fetch it and fill it with everything you want. There is also this IRT channel for people watching this video if you want to participate. Maybe we can do a quick round table if there are too many others. It's supposed to be an open discussion, so I won't say much. I would like us to collect your impressions on the public team in general, if you have some ideas. I was just focusing on the brand and the marketing of it, where you show the newsletter It all looks very not boring, but it doesn't look very appealing. Nothing seems consistent in the way of branding. I was thinking if you make that a bit more upmarket, people will focus on that and it will become more one than all over. We would need some people to show us how to do it. Absolutely, how to do it. I think it's more coming up with a visual idea and concept and just giving it more of a branding and more of a unity. It's probably the correct way. Tell me a little bit about designing the team for DEVCOM 16 for me. Both of us are very new to Debian at large. What we've learned so far is there's this beautiful thing about Debian that everybody can contribute and change things. Now we're talking about the visual identity, this role, to make it their own. But at the same time, we strongly feel there also needs to be a brand that's wider than just this role. It's the whole layout and everything. And we're stuck on how to get it both ways. Because the idea is that we can understand why it would just be sort of wiped back on with the copy and whatever because it relates to the coding role. It relates to the developers and their respect. But it doesn't stand out very well. I think if you had a newsletter then stood out a little bit more. I'm talking to the world. If it stood out a little bit more, then I think you'd get more people interested in it because it doesn't look boring, for lack of a better word. It doesn't look appealing. That's just my little grip from a designer eye. But when I see a brand, then I think we need to get this going. We need to get a proper identity going. It's great for marketing. You could purchase sponsors and things like that. That's my two cents. So I just wanted to point out, there was a trademark, birds of feather, two trademarks, birds of feathers yesterday. And we were talking about the notion that the swirl is being trademarked. So because it would be a trademark, you wouldn't be able to modify the swirl. So there's a lot of existing... One derivation of that logo is the swirl with the mint logo embedded in the center of the swirl. And there are some other derivatives that have been created like that. And what happens in trademark law, and I'm not on all your... So I'll just preface all following comments with that. But what happens in trademark law whenever you have derivation of a logo that you trademark, is that it loses its distinctive indication of source, which is a requirement for being a trademark. And so if you allow people to modify that mark, then you run the risk of losing that. And that's really needed here though, I think. This is just a Debian newsletter, so it just needs to... At the moment in the newsletter I sent out, there is no Debian logo at all. But it is an official Debian thing, so there's no legal problem about having it. The reason at the moment is just the historical thing that Debian developer type people are allergic to HTML email at all. So they're just sending a plain text format email with no... As we say it, no markup, no branding, anything. And maybe that's something that should be at least an option, possibly. Yeah, it's not an email or anything. Back to the trademark thing. I was just trying to identify that as a risk that we need to stay away from applications of the logo. But also many trademark policies allow composition of the original logo, so we have another problem. Provided they don't... I think this is off topic here, a bit off topic, I'm sorry. Before we end, when you're following what's going on in Debian, what is your preferred way of knowing what's going on? Do you read the planet, do you follow Twitter, do you read the Debian project news? I read things on Twitter because it shows up in my newsfeed. I don't read emails usually, because I get so many different things. And it's really common for people to not read newsletters or less. Did somebody here really use the new Debian for the news? Well, I read it, but together with Planet. For a long time I did read it carefully every time. I think in recent periods there's been quite often duplication between the newsletter content and previous announcements on Debian development apps. So people who already have a project, by the time you get the newsletter, it tends to be other things that are often this kind of familiar, which is a bit non-ideal. But still, there's a lot of people who don't read the other messages. So I think there will be an audience for the newsletter. I'm an email reader, but when I read the email, I don't get the subject line. If the subject line doesn't get my attention right away, I don't read it. And so rather than have a large newsletter with lots and lots of things in it and a subject line that says Debian newsletter, it might be better to have more newsletters with the subject line telling more of what's inside. I'd like to get on saying much in subject line. Besides, keywords may be for major, interesting topics within the latter. Yes, that's what I'm saying. Another new DPL, something like really kind of major points. Between 240 characters. So it's a subject line. There we go. Put the number. You sent me an email with 140 characters in the subject, I'm not going to read it. Maybe you have the first couple of letters of maddup. Maddie star. I have a question. When we talk about specifically how people consume information, it seems to me that there's two different groups of people that we're talking about. There's Debian reach for Debian people. That is, how do we communicate internally? And then there's Debian reach out to people who are not currently part of the Debian project that might like to join or use Debian or something. And that seems to me like it has a different flavor to it. Like you're not going to reach the second couple of people at all with a newsletter. On the other hand, you might be more able to like actually use HTML mail for something that you're reaching out to the general public with without getting tons of like nasty grams from CDs. When we talk about publicity, which of those are we more talking about? That's what the team handles is. Everything from internal communication to external people who aren't involved in Debian are necessarily involved in... It's usable to send both HTML and text. Yeah, but you might also want different newslets all together for different audiences. When we're announcing that we do already have this, that we do have different types of announcements that go to different groups of people. And there's a kind of spectrum of greyness rather than just in-or-out people because even people who are project members actually, some of them, don't necessarily read all other possible sources of Debian information. So there are communication news there. But as you come out, there are people who make occasional... Maybe they are in the Debian community, but that means that they occasionally get a package from testing and occasionally make bug reports or whatever. And then there are people who are just very occasional... I mean, using Debian the whole time or occasionally using Debian and so on, who have different needs. But what I mean is just... It's going to be interesting to them, it's clearly different depending on which part they're in. Sure, sure. But I thought just the question is how to present... How to make that newsletter appealing to the audience, right? For Debian audience, let's put it... It's text, right? For general audience, it better be flashing indeed. So there should be somewhat nice background and maybe layout. And you could send in the same email, the same email with HTML and text together. And Debianites will just read the text version and the others, they all get flash HTML, right? So that's how it works, I believe, in many domains and examples. What could be the flashy layout and background? That's another question. I feel like if you're trying to... People outside of the insiders of Debian, it's not just the flashness on the right side, but you need an entire marketing strategy, which includes social media, which includes Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, and choose a few. And the wording, the way the language is just the acronyms that we use. Your entire language is probably towards the benefits to the end user as opposed to the technical powers of what you do. It's an entirely different term. What is happening now with Debian Twitter? Debian officially doesn't have Twitter. That's right. But do is Debian reserved for Debian on the right side. But it's there, at least we have it, right? So who has access to... Will you listen to all the tweets which are directed at you? And then will you ship with them? At the moment, we have a... We have either a policy nor... Well, we do have somewhat of a workflow, but it's not working really well. So there's no policy. There's a policy. It is, if you want access and you want to help out, then we will gladly give you access and help out. And if you see something that's where you'll be tweeting, then go and repeat it. And when there's original content, then so far, on the publicity channel, there's been propositions and acknowledgments by another person. So the deal has been... I want to write these 140 characters, and then if somebody says, yeah, that's okay, then that's enough. And then it goes out in Identical and it goes out on Twitter whenever people have access to it. And obviously, this sucks a lot, because we don't have a way to schedule tweets, or any form of social media, really. I mean, it's identical, or it doesn't matter. We don't have a way of really just publishing the same information to multiple networks. We don't have a way to draft online things. I mean, Hootsuite or all these other things would be possibilities for us, except of course they only work on Twitter, and since we don't officially have a Twitter account, it's of no use to us. So what a lot of us really would like to have, I think, is some sort of management system whereby we can add messages and then they sort of get propagated to all the networks. It's just I'm not much into social media, it's just a message system. They say, try sort of directly. It's just the question of choosing one. I don't think we've found any so far. There is that one that's larger than them? Yeah, there is. The constraint is us to find something that's free, and so on. The problem with that one was that it was bi-directional. It was bi-directional and it didn't do any of that stuff like hashtags and it's ad here and it's another thing there and whatever. So it's not ideal, but I think it could be done, and I think Laura is interested in working on it, but it's just not really apparent. I think everyone agrees in principle that we should have the same media messages pushed out to different social networks and that we should have the ability to plan some tweets and the good ones in advance and update things if there's something urgent, but otherwise you can have some stack ready to go out in different ways. This does tie in and I don't want to jump, maybe you have this later on, but it does tie in to the bigger picture. At the moment, by the time that we have drafted, acknowledged and finally posted a piece of information on Twitter, it's like we're like 14 hours later. So like the world knew about that we instable release 14 hours before we posted, we finally ended up posting it too. And that, in my opinion, a problem in the sense that we are not regarded as the marketing team. Because again, this history should have been sitting ready and with... It should have been A, sitting ready and B, we need to get the information first. Just doing the tweets, now we have computers. We just need to find the computer when we do that. We need to make sure that the information collects with us and that we are the ones that control, if possible, control the representation to the outside world so that, no, not somebody from the release team tweets that we now have a stable, I mean, let them, it's somewhat to be coordinated, but we should know what happens in advance. It always comes as a surprise when we do that. So I don't really know how to solve that, but I would say that if we, the more organized and the more present we as a team become, the more we're going to be in the minds of people and they're going to hopefully come to us and speak with us before doing so. But not if we don't react. So, it's a hard problem. It's a hard thing to solve. We'll volunteer. We're already volunteering for this kind of... Doing it right now. As I said, I think I'm not entirely sure that it makes another sense to now collect volunteers for the social networks and volunteers for the project news and volunteers. I mean, I think the project news are already working very well. You guys managed to revive them after a long, long time and it's going. A lot of work for some people. I'm very aware of that. But also these things should be coordinated. It's not just a mantra coming, a silo of people who do social media and a silo of people who do the project news or whatever. For something like release, clearly it should be all these messages written in coordination together from press release to the tweets. Essentially what we should have. I'm sorry. It is kind of happening, but again, it's not. I mean, in terms of when people are saying collecting volunteers on again, you want everyone to be part of a team with people doing a particular job than that, not building a big team who are going to come up with a great plan of social media, but ignore everything else. One thing that we floated an idea that we floated a couple of times now was sort of any news, anything relevant comes in and gets a record, like a filing kit or a ticket on RT or whatever it is. Okay, some solution. The point was that this is how it just becomes an entity with some sort of workflow attached to it and we have translation infrastructure so you could actually abuse that to translate from EN announcement to EN tweet and sort of keep it all in there which is all optional and so then you have this thing sitting there in the queue and it's like this is a news item worthy of publishing and it's tagged, project news, Twitter and so on, and so then when the person that this Twitter comes on, they can just simply say what are the news items and maybe they already translated or I do that myself then I think it's going to be rather trivial to just simply say okay tweet all of it because that's a Python script with five lines so that's one possible way of going about it. It is a lot of manual work but we're doing more manual work in the long run. The other thing that's a problem in the way things are currently working in terms of making the publicity output more relevant is that very few things that are being announced are actually because it's suddenly happened like we're not announcing there was suddenly an earthquake if things we could have known were in advance and had everything written but at the moment obviously the culture in Debian is that each individual team pushes out their own announcement when they're ready and it's extremely rare to coordinate that in advance to gather an announcement that could then be put out to external audience at the same time for example we're not following anything in Debian at all that matters but the people who are halfway in between or which includes lots of journalists they want the external announcement in a way but they also read Debian development and by the time we've got something ready they've already seen the development post with some confused idea of what's going on I don't know if it's realistic to ask teams to hold things back or maybe ask to inform them before they've done their own announcement maybe you gather what you need and then sync it and then post it all at one time so you have a sort of certain time that you're going to do those posts and you say okay this time those posts are going to go out then you can start putting in your staff and then sync it back there just as a that's a good work for the question of the practical or social thing of getting volunteers in particular other Debian teams to make the effort to cooperate with that so I do this at work it's my little context but it's really not that hard and things that we do is we have schedules people hold things in on schedules one of the really common things we do is that teams do manage their own stuff is we just retweet things other people say and we give each other heads up so if you have a team that's officially making some sort of announcements we have other teams that are making announcements the communication pattern here isn't that hard especially if one person is willing to say like hey I'm going to be the person who remembers to tell isn't that too much pre-team what do you mean like isn't that if someone is going to be having to tell them each time do you assign one person to do that I don't think you need to assign someone I think you just need to do the discussion yeah exactly and that's I don't think it's onerous to ask somebody to post a link to someone on IRC I do that all the time and it doesn't even have to be the same person for the team every time we don't need to ask the release team to designate a publicity person just hey guys when Jesse is going to untree just give us a heads up this happens very often and it's going to be so burdensome we're not like arch we don't do a release in 15 seconds we should be able to coordinate this it's pretty well coordinated but Jesse I think but even for the smaller things like we don't how many announcements do we have that are interesting enough to be noteworthy to the general public in a given year 5, 10, 20 but these are also not actually informative and useful information but not as very interesting in terms of reading content seeing the list of packages that have been updated and the point release is not really something you're going to say I better read than any matter a point release major releases conferences events mini dev cons dev cons related stuff job postings anything we got through like the Debian signing like the Debian agreement coming to some new thing with some company or like getting a sponsorship these are all the right things there's not that many of them I would worry more about the burden we were asking teams if we were doing hundreds of fees and then I'd say okay we really need to figure out some more formal process of communication from somebody outside of Debian I was really interested in the Debian idea I do think it needs to be translated in a way that like why would the person on the street be interested in it so what makes an arm so fascinating I'm really into open hardware because of what I think it could do it could have your own beer brewing station at home or something and like put it into context or something that people who really don't care about so actually it could understand or about computers in general I guess would take about an hour's work maybe not the day but day but maybe twice a week and I would say if I know then I'm not going to mess up too many other problems here for that we'd probably need a couple of test runs to see if I mess it up do you have any place on your site or your Wiki where people can contribute case studies like she was talking about how did I use Debian to do something and because in the commercial world this is how you sell services to case studies so for example if you have case studies from banks when a bank comes along and looks for a solution they see that other people have used that and therefore they would be willing to use it too we have a section on the website listing the different companies or institutions using Debian I don't remember exactly but is it still maintained? yes but case studies are a little bit lower in depth than that they say how they used it and how it saved them money or how it improved them that type of thing that's just that they used it but it's easy enough to do you could contact us we have computers and try to contact them to do some small interviews and that's a good idea but also the more open to the community like she was talking about the interesting ones like the beer brewing station and things like that the the Raspberry Pi people are very good at doing this and that attracts a lot of people coming to their site just to see what people are doing the strange things which also creates news articles because reduced people are interested in that too this is very powerful not only on the web but also if you think about a booth at an exhibition for example for the street map project we did a lot of demos like just have any kind of map a public transport map a printed map or we had a live demo of every edit happening in the world on a big screen something like that to see what they can use and this is really powerful interesting case is when Debian is a case study whenever there is a publication which analyzes different distributions uses Debian as representative let's say community in open source there was this European report on open source benefits few years back by Bosch it's really interesting read because Debian was chosen to be the kind of project to analyze and there were quite a few of those so if I want to find that report can I just do a web search for the report on open source and Bosch but that's been few years back then that lady of the book which was given away this morning anonymous for her first book I believe was also a study of open source and it was largely around Debian I forgot her name right, I believe her first one she is an anthropologist pretty much those were Debian representative open source project that I can publish with a text form as a backup I don't like if we can that's cool because then we can also do it as an anonymous that's also stuff that you would like apart from being archived on the email list it ought to be archived somewhere on the website as a friendly section as well at the moment it's basically just a list of links for organisations which is not very exactly this would be nice a little article a picture article with a permalink which is available for use for email it's like the reason why my intention is not to be entirely altruistic but the problem I want to learn more about they've been trying to source sponsors in South Africa that use Debian and this is a great way to build that for this thing and also this content for the Defconn 16 web site so I did a section about the Debian project news we need more volunteers for that difficult to keep up with the schedule and so if we take too long to prepare an issue then the news are not news anymore so we need more people to help us to publish this much faster so if you are interested in I can show you anytime what is our workflow and how to contribute to this it's quite easy it's very nice when there are several people working on this at about the same time you can coordinate on IS it can be fun we have events ideas event box that's pretty much just a summary of what came out of this morning question of mine so we compiled if you go to that Wiki page we compiled ideas for possible materials which will accompany an event box which might not be the physical event box which we distribute but it's convenient package maybe even Devin package which comes with materials oh I want to present Devin at this event there is nobody here with those materials but I can print them out either at local publishers or whatever local resources you have or maybe even other from online but you have at least all the materials and ideas how to establish let's say exhibit books because it's also not trivial and for the first time there might be good ideas how to set it up and attract attention to your book so if you have any ideas especially cool ideas that's a Wiki page for you to contribute to and from there we'll probably go with reviving some version control system repository probably with materials for that occasion because we have CVS we still have CVS for trifolds some were probably artwork flips as well well we have it online of course but we don't have anything central where you just clone these and you have all the materials you need it's almost like a marketing material pretty much yeah so you've got your sticker, you've got your presentations you've maybe got your slides and the templates things like that and virtual box and live CD and all these kind of things so you can buy it or you can download it or something like that and then use it at whatever function you add that's right which then goes back to the branding and marketing idea again and giving it an identity and a base which would go back to his question of the trademark where then you would have to go okay well then we have to re-look at everything and then see what are we going to do what identity are we all going to agree on and then trademark that and use it for all the marketing so that's well I didn't even have the scroll that's the major thing if we want to theme them all up that's another kind of for every release we have a new theme maybe we would be able to a multiple, well we have a winner you should see right? hey winner there is a agreement on swatch I'm not sure if it's going to be very good but I was telling you that I'm saying like if you're going to do what he's suggesting where you have a box where if he's got a function happening wherever and he wants to represent Debian and bring that into it how can he get that stuff and how can it be accessible and I think from there you've got to go okay well what are you looking at if that is going to be universal and people wanting to download it or get it sent to them as a package I would like to take a moment and we are very sorry for asking you a direct question in the news with the news this is to detail very well when you recall what was happening in Debian what are you following for getting information about Debian being lived I can only speak for myself but I probably get the majority of information from the planned feed that's just me I know that our other two old-time writers I think maybe would ship more towards the mailing lists but I'm not 100% as well I personally I think I follow the twitter account but I don't ever look at it for signal familiar reasons most from other people not from the Debian account I don't know that answer is going to be kind of peculiar to the sorts of stuff that we cover though which tends to be focused on what individual developers are working on so I don't know if that's what's going on but it's my reply it is, is there anything that you would like to know about what's going on in Debian that's not easy to get at apart from inside secrets that we're generally in if we were going to invest in some more publicity effort I think I've got a quick answer to that I might be able to get some stewing to I don't think Debian is a project that's hard to get information of there are projects like that you might think about ways of measuring how effective your your publicity is if you put in different URLs with different streams and feeds and then people read that come back and click on that and then give them privacy and so on I try to do that with a Debian blog but we have an optimized blog so I cannot really get out of this task of what's going on I only can do more, let's do the first and given that I don't have IP information of where people is coming from we don't really have any way we don't have any accurate way of doing that we don't really matter because of privacy well I would just say that if you put out to one group a URL according to one page and all you're doing is counting how many times that page is accessed with that URL that's a pretty non-invasive type of thing you're not capturing anybody's name just saying I sent out this piece of information with this URL how effective was it in bringing back people to visit this page I would love doing something like that just know on the Debian blog or the tweets I would love doing that with the Debian website because I am sure some they have never accessed nobody is visiting them probably require somebody doing that finding the best no intrinsic way for them there are a lot of positions we have 5 minutes left if we have 5 minutes do you want to wrap up and just sort of summarize what we've learned what we take from this and whether we're better off now than we were 45 minutes before maybe also if people are not people who are here probably have some interest and not often are yet involved so maybe what they should do if they want to carry on the involvement after this discussion what to say maybe there are people on IRCs I have a question just a general question with regards to the decision of the Debian and the current wish to increase its the types of users who are the types of users that you're interested in are they technical people are they people who currently use Windows and are looking to switch the liners and then we want to be the line of explosion choice of what kind of users or new users are we looking to get that's the problem I wonder more because again exactly with Debian especially it's hard to give a stab for what I want so obviously you want to keep the existing Debian community happy so these are the Debian contributors whose hardline geeks and then my next catchment what I would like to reach with this Debian a week is people are curious about making things or even about buying kits even if I don't want to have my friends yet that could be anybody from cheese someone who wants to do an auto purchase so they might not have an interest in computers in general but they do know that computers can make and help them do stuff so I'm not particularly interested in people who convert their stock computers to Linux I don't see how that actually has value because I don't think they know how to and I think from there you need to if that's what you want to do and I may be wrong then I think you need to get to corporates for somebody who can roll those things out because people who buy a computer when I buy a computer I just expect it to open and I've searched it on for a mainstream I don't care how it does that which is bad but as an entry level that's where you want to get interested and I'll never become interested and then you've got the CD or the USB drive and you stick it in you try and install and you've got no wireless connection or your touch screen doesn't work you've got a new laptop and you've got no touch screen support so how do you get to so I guess that sort of user will have some other way of finding if I don't have somebody who needs to help me I go into the internet with some other device and search how do I but I would imagine new users would go on tech savvy they would maybe have a design switch to Linux and they would kind of like what is the first Linux this drill I should use and a lot of the sites they will they will find or recommend you do something else I need to you can take a look ok so all people interested in should join the Ion's channel or send a new message to the JNPGC team in Linux and make new things together to read from the JNPGC