 Hi everyone, I guess it's three, so I guess I should say something. So hi, I'm not going to be projecting anything. The, thank you all for coming, golly. I didn't expect so many people. So please have a seat. In my, so my thinking of this event was that we have 45 minutes or so where people, where I want people who want something new to work on in the project to talk just a little bit about themselves and what they are interested in in the project and I'll explain that in a second. So there will be the like, I'll call them mentees introductions. And my thinking is that once the people who want something new to work on have spoken, other people who have projects that those people could work on should just go talk to them and yeah, say hi and talk about some aspect of your project that they would find interesting. So to do sort of a rehearsal of this, if I was one of the mentees and I said, hi, my name is Ashish. One thing I know about Debian is that it's an all free software operating system. One thing I like about Debian is that I've heard there's so many ways to contribute. One thing I want to learn more about is I want to have more experience running web services. And if that was what the mentee had said, then I with my mentor hat on as a different person might have been taking a, Ashish, that person. Wow, good luck, good. That person, I should talk to them about working on mentors.debian.net since I want help from somebody maintaining that web service. And so then I would go talk to them after the intro has happened. Is that like clear? Which this does mean that the mentors, the people who have tasks to offer people should really be taking notes? Because if you're not, then you're going to forget by the end of this which person it was who seemed like they could help you. So hopefully you all believe that. Okay, great. Yeah, can I get a quick show of hands? A lot of things. A lot of stuff. Okay, great, wow, yeah, that definitely works. Okay, yeah, yeah, okay, so with that distinction in mind where there's people who want new things to work on and there's people who have tasks to offer, or people, or yeah, I guess tasks to offer. I'll call those mentees and mentors. Can I get a show of hands for who here is a mentee who wants something new to work on in the project? But raise your hand for longer, good, okay. And can I have all the mentee people switch to one side of the room? Which one has the most, I guess? Sorry? Yeah, that's true. But then there'll be more, okay, right, so it puts hands. Yeah, there's more face here. So all the mentee people please come to this side. And I know I'm disrupting you. Thank you for participating in my game. Yeah, so I'll wait for you all to move. Yeah, yeah, this is the bop by Finding Minions. And my vision of success for this bop will be people on this side of the room will find something interesting to work on and then go work on it. And so like, if half an hour into this talk, everyone has left the room, that could be a success. It's not just that you hated it. So great, and then is it true that everyone here, except for the people who are still moving, then raise your hand if you're somebody who has a task to offer to other people? Okay, so you all should go to that side. I don't know how you didn't figure that out before. But I'm glad that we've had this talk. I'm also shocked at the relative balance of these two groups. This is amazing. While people are moving, how many people here are first time attendees? First time attendees to debconf? Okay, cool, yeah, great. A lot of people. That's lovely. And I also wasn't able to attend the intro sessions over the weekend. So if any of this repeats with that, you should let me know, I guess, or complain or something. Great, okay. Yeah, so the way I'm imagining structuring this is that people here will say, I should write this on the chalkboard because I'm not going to project. Is there chalk? Okay, great, thanks. Yeah, maybe we won't need it, we'll see. But you'll state your name and then I want to keep this brief as useful. So one thing you know about Debian, one thing you like about Debian, and one thing that you want to learn more about, and the thing you want to learn more about doesn't have to be a thing you want to learn more about. It could be, another valid answer to this is, one thing I know about the Debian project is that it has a lot of pearl code. One thing I like about Debian is that we're switching to system D. And then one thing I want to learn more about is how to give good, how to communicate well to lots of people at once. And so then obviously some system D maintainer will be like, great, we're going to give a talk about system D to some local Linux user group. And so the kinds of things that you might end up doing, I hope, I hope for this is your advice for you all, the kinds of things that you recommend people do should be related to all three of the questions, what they know about Debian, what they like about it, and what they want to learn more about in general in their lives or specifically within Debian. Wow, I'm shocked, this is great. Sorry? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm working on it. I guess this is illegible because of that board. Yeah, and I should also say this is modeled after an activity that my friend Sean Lip did at an Open Hatch event about two years ago. So if he ever watches this video, thanks to Sean. So yeah, and maybe I'll like pause after the first, I'll pause after people in blocks of four in case the ravenous task offers want to absorb you. Yeah, okay, so why don't you start and tell us your name, one thing you know about Debian, one thing you like about Debian, one thing you want to learn more about or improve at. Oh, wow, I guess, okay, sure. One, two, okay, that works. I'm Tomasz Buchert, I'm Debian developer. I know something about Debian now. You have to say one thing you actually know, you're specific. Staff, I don't know. Yes, one thing. Okay, I have my, I have Stellarium, for example, as a package. Okay, what is that, that's the second thing? Ah, sorry, yeah, one thing you'd like about Debian. No, I mean the second, not the first. One thing you know about Debian, one thing. No, that's the first. Name, one thing. No, it's first, it says first. No, that's zero. Okay, the one thing. Okay, let me try this directly. What is your name? Tomasz Buchert. And what is one thing you know about Debian? It's awesome. Great, what is one specific thing you like about Debian? That is the best operating system. And what is one thing you want to get better at, either in general in your life or specifically within Debian? I guess I would like to improve the performance of the infrastructure. However, I didn't work on this yet. Yes. Cool, great, next person. Hello, I'm Mike Turo, I am not a Debian developer. I just had the opportunity to come here with some DDs, and I'm interested in getting more involved in Debian. Wait, what's one thing you know about Debian? Oh, great, what's one thing I know about Debian? It's got a lot of packages. What's one thing you like about Debian? That I can get the source whenever I want, because it makes my job way easier. And what's one thing you want to learn more about or improve in yourself or in your Debian related activities? I guess I want to learn more how Debian works, really. Cool. And remind me your name, I forgot to write that down. Mike Jurell. Mike Jurell, thanks. Hi, yeah, what's your name? Is it on? Okay. I'm Tomas Rebak, I'm Debian maintainer. I know that Debian has many, many architectures. I like about Debian that we have many policies and most of the stuff is described, so I can go to documentation. I would like to improve a little bit coordination of my packaging with other packages which are using my packages or which my packages are using. Out of curiosity, what packages are those? Particularly by Kuda, by OpenCL. So they both coordinate with Python, with NVIDIA drivers, and other drivers with OpenCL providers. So releasing it's getting a little bit more complicated, especially as now there are changes in architectures. Cool, thanks. Thanks. Hi, my name is Dominik, I'm from Poland, and I've been using Debian for, I don't know, since 1999, I guess. But I'm just a user. What's one thing you know about Debian? Do I have to answer a lot of questions? Yes. I have experiment work, I have to do it. I know that it's free and open, and yeah, I like the idea, I like the community and everything. Yeah, and what's one thing you want to get better at? I want to learn about package maintaining and stuff, you know, like packaging. Cool. Yeah, at first, to see how it works. So anything. Great. I promised I would pause after the first four people, in case the ravenous task offers found anyone that they wanted to latch on to. So, if I'm lucky, the four of you will disappear from the room quickly, and if not, then we'll figure you out with the end of everyone else. Anyone want to go grab anyone? Sure, yeah, but... I would need a week for that, of course. Okay. So, actually, my name is Andy Bart. For those who had been to this room a bit earlier before lunch, we have a very large spectrum in the policy, for the policy package, which really means there are some more difficult tasks, there are some tasks that are just necessary to implement the policy documentation we already have. That means we have mostly patches, which are approved, but somehow need to be fiddled into the Git tree. So, that is a lot of... a lot of what we do with documentation, with making sure things are really as they should. An appropriate English understanding or language skills are helpful, but as you can hear, I'm not a native speaker, so it's not urgently required to be a native speaker, but of course, yeah, about that. So, if there's someone of you who'd like to pick up one of these tasks, that would be great. Dominic, do you want to go disappear with... You must be a native speaker in some language. Pardon? Dominic? You must be a native speaker in some language, is what he said. For the policy, it's not necessary. I have a question, do you want to just go hang out with him not really if it's about translating now? It's not about translating. I'm speaking about the Debian Policy Package. It's a document which says, if you do a Debian package, what does your package need to follow? So, we have something like 30, 40 bug reports saying this should be changing the policy, which are approved, but just not implemented. So, we have patches which need to be applied, sometimes rejected, sometimes other needs to be added. People need to be asked. So, it's really some, let's say, the basic piece of Debian infrastructure, but there's a text file, which is a basic thing. So, if you have been in session before about this new maintainer process, all of this policy which is asked, that comes from the policy package. So, I'm speaking about polishing that one. Yeah, I might have a good dust. Yeah, so... I think someone else has just raised hands. You do can just disappear into a hack lab if you want. That would be a success for me. Yeah, you can stay till it's fine. Okay, so then I'll keep iterating over the group. So, yeah, tell me your name. Kate Stewart. Hi, Kate. Hi. The one thing I know about Debian, it's the upstream for Ubuntu, where I've been active for a while. What do I like about Debian, is the actual social structures associated with it and the meritocracy aspect of it. And what do I want to learn more about, is the packaging and the policies and doing some packaging for some projects I care about. Cool. I have a question. What projects do you care about? Phosology got abandoned in 2012. Which program? Phosology. Oh, Phosology. And I'd like to see if we can get it in and... Cool. So, looking for mentoring that way, too. Great. Okay. I'm David Yangio. I like about Debian that it worked pretty nice before SystemD also. And... One thing you know about Debian, one thing you like about Debian, we are swap the order. Yes. And then one thing you want to learn more about. I know that it's probably the most free operating system around. And I want to learn packaging. Cool. And is there anything in particular that motivates you to learn packaging? Not yet. Okay. Great. Set up, please. Oh. If you want. I guess he says so. My name is Dieter Andriensis. I'm fairly new to this. I know that Debian is a leading distribution. I like about it that it's... Well, fully community-driven. And so many people contribute to make it work. What I want to learn... I've been using Debian for quite a few years now. And I'm more interested in how it all comes together. How does a package get into the... to a stage where it gets installed. There's one thing I saw already. There's this website contributors.db.org. Which website? Contributors.db.org. Oh, cool. That's organized all the... I gather all the information about all contributions over all the teams. So that's something I might be interested in. Cool. But I'm open to more than that. Great. Hello. I'm Guido. Trotter. The other way. There. Oh, that camera. Okay. Hello. I don't think she's interested. To be honest, no. So one thing you know about Debian? Yes. I know how Debian is great in infrastructures and as servers and for virtualization and things like that. I like how it's a great community that also evolves technologically very much over time. And I want to improve and learn on the new sites like system.d containers and things that I haven't had a chance to touch or that I have had a chance to touch a bit and maybe I can contribute to. Cool. Thanks. Thank you. By the way, if you all are taking notes or you really should be. Okay. Hi. My name's Kyle. I know about Debian that it's one of the older distros out there. I also like how it's open both the code and the people. It's really a great community. And I'd like to learn about packaging more multimedia software packages, maintaining them. Yeah. What do you think? Great. Can I ask what you mean by multimedia packages? Like some examples or something? So things like Voktamix, DV switch, more the video switching. Great. Great. Or the editing, that kind of thing. Cool. Thanks. Okay. I'm Sitelo. And the one thing I know about Debian is that it can run on many architectures. And personally, I use it a lot on maybe the architecture, which I think is cool. And the one thing I like about Debian is among others, the stability, general stability of the system. And then what I would like to learn, I would also like to learn some packaging and maybe developing as well. And say again. To become a developer. Cool. In the distant future. Great. Yeah. If you have one interaction. Can you ask like in what microphone? I can repeat it if you want. Or here's a mic. Would you like to package? Yeah. Because I'm sure a lot of us here do have specialties. I do have a... I'd like to... The scratch on each approach works well. So if you guys have anything that you don't like in Debian, I think it's the best way to get started. So maybe you don't like some kind of packaging that is already done, or you think there is software missing. This is where I would usually start if I was a new contributor at least. Tell me, are there any specific areas you like packaging or you're interested in packaging? We're just learning about it as a... I guess what motivates you to learn about it? Is it just the coolness of Debian or is it that there's some software you really want in Debian? It's hard to say there's any software that maybe I don't like or I miss in Debian because it does have quite a lot of software and I've already mentioned that it's quite stable for my needs. I can't even think what needs to be improved. That's how good it is. Okay, great, great. So, yeah, I probably... I've used one package that I had to compile for one of the machines I use it on and it looked like it was becoming an offline package, but I think the developer is here at Debian. That was... Oh, no, no, no, maybe not. That was OBD GPS logger. So maybe something similar to that. Cool. Yeah, you can grab the mic. My name is Andrew and I'm a developer and I came here because basically since I gave up if I've done last year, I don't have any specific bit of Debian to work on or just maintain a bunch of packages. You have to follow the program. Yep. Thanks. Things I like about Debian, things in the noble Debian. Okay, things in the noble Debian that I'm part of it. Great. What I love about Debian is how some people already mentioned the social structure around it. So basically the people. What's the last thing you... One thing you want to learn more about or improve in yourself or... Yeah, so as I mentioned in the beginning, I'd like to not only maintain some packages mostly I use but participate somehow in the development of Debian itself, not only... I mean, I'd like to join some team, but you know, because lots of things happen in Debian sort of in background, like people work in teams already and you don't often know what exactly is going on. So it's not easy to join those teams, basically. Even if maybe I've got some experience and knowledge sufficient to work on some things but I just... It's not that visible enough. Cool. Thanks. Hello, my name is Kirtna. So one thing I know about Debian is that it's very robust and that's very good to use. One thing I like about Debian is the community because everybody is great, very supportive and one thing I'd like to learn, I think it's not one thing because there's a lot for me to learn. I'm very new and I'd like to contribute and build a package one day that hopefully strengthens Debian. Cool. Hi, I'm Nico. Something I know about Debian. Who? That one is tough. Well, that it's extremely committed to being actual free software and triggers much beyond what other people do to enforce that. Something I like about Debian is that I can basically run it anywhere and expect it not to break, unlike many other distros. And something I would like to help improve is well, I would like to help make Stretch as secure and as safe as possible out of the box for users. That's it. Cool. So I'm Chirayu from India. One thing I know about Debian is the vast abundance of packages that are available and that all of them are free software and that is also a thing I like. Another thing which I like is that I can hop on to IRC, Debian Descenters anytime and always find some help there. Some of the things I want to learn are packaging. I'm already working on a few packages but I'm just getting started so there's a lot of things I don't know. So I'd like to learn more about packaging in general. Cool. Thanks. I'm Jeref. A thing I know about Debian is that TAR lives in Slashbin whereas in some other distributions it lives in SlashUserbin. I know where SED lives because I've had to fix this. What I like about Debian is pretty much everything. Things I want to improve. Wait a minute. I will not accept that answer. You have to be more specific about what you like about Debian. One thing, you could say everything except this question. Something specific. It's a good default for pretty much everything I do. Cool. What I'm working on a lot at the moment is containers and clusters of containers and persistence and all sorts of stuff that uses tools that have only existed for a year or two. And I'm working on improving a lot of that stuff and I'd like to do some of that work in Debian. Cool. Hello. I'm Misut. One thing I know about Debian is that it has great community which I like and it's considered about freedom and diversity. One thing I want to improve and learn I would like to... I haven't decided where to start which sub-project to start with. I decide on a sub-project to go deep intervals. And is there something that you want to learn? I know that you want to learn which sub-project is good for you and Debian but also is there something you want to learn more about in general, in computing or in your life or some skill you want to be applying or something like that? And do you mean my team, security team maybe I can have or... Oh yeah. So like what kind of teams might... Yeah, what kind of skills or sub-teams might be interesting? You mentioned security maybe? I don't know. Cool. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. Cool. So according to my plan I was going to do these intros and then hope that you all would just like mingle and talk with each other because I don't think passing the mic around is sustainable because we can have lots of one-to-one conversations. We can't have very many one-to-many conversations. But yeah, so before we transition I'll take any questions. Everybody apart does not help mingling. Yeah, I know. So you'll have to get up and talk. That's like when the transition happens you will abandon your computer, at least on this side, just move over to that side and stand around people and listen and talk to them. Yeah? Wouldn't those guys have to say a few words about what they have to offer? Yeah, possibly, but they can tell you one-on-one. I don't know, sure. Who on this side wants to say at most ten words about the thing, the thing you are interested in helping with or like a task you're interested in offering or an aspect of Debian that they should talk with you about? I mean, a few words is great. I currently maintain the printing stack in Debian. Oh, and what's your name? Sorry, Didier Rabou, Odex in Debian. I also have to answer these three silly questions. These three questions? No, you don't have to. Sorry. They're good questions. I maintain the printing stack in Debian which has the nice feature nowadays to be mostly up-to-date. There's a lot of packaging work, but it's something on the midterm that I would like to hand over to someone else because I've soon had enough of that. But I want to make a good transition and I will keep maintaining it if no one takes it. And the other words I want to say about maintaining packages, a lot of you want to maintain packages and unfortunately Debian already has quite a lot and finding a good new package to put in the archive is quite hard nowadays because everything that we really need is already there. But we have a good opportunity coming that is the freeze where we need people to fix bugs. And fixing bugs in unrelated packages is a very, very good way to learn packages and to see how things are done across the archive and it's a very, very good way to help Debian. Well, but I don't have RC bugs in mind, so. Okay. Well, yeah, there exists a concept of bugs-washing parties where people around your city will get together and try to fix these release-critical bugs that are preventing Debian from being released. Maybe we can have some of these people do that with some of you after this, actually. I see some nods, so that's pretty good, actually. Anyone else on this side want to introduce yourself or a part of Debian you work on and have a task you want to offer? Yeah. I'm Antonio Tercero. I maintain Ruby, LXC, Vagrant, Chef, Redmine, JQuery and lots of other things that I want people to help. So if you, so you see that there's a lot of trendy stuff like Chef and Vagrant and Redmine also is very useful but I unfortunately don't use it myself anymore. So, and I have a couple of other packages so if you want to help maintaining those packages that are already there is usually way better than trying to add a new package unless you actually use that new package yourself. Yeah. I saw some other hands here of people who wanted to talk about they wanted to, yeah, just hand it over to anyone, really. Oh, hey. Does it work? Yes, it does. Hi, I'm Medhi. Before being elected as DPL, I was in the OCaml team and we were looking for volunteers to do packaging work and testing the applications. So if you're interested in functional programming I'll be more than happy to monitor and show you how OCaml is great. And if you're also into Python I'm also looking for volunteers to do like web interface for newcomers to easily find new things to do in Debian. I don't know if you've heard about what can I do for Fedora and the project would be to do something like what I can do for Debian based on the same code but I don't think it's for Debian. Cool, and I saw some other hand that people want to talk, yeah. So I maintain... I maintain... What's your name? I'm Thomas. I maintain all of OpenStack in Debian and that's nearly 400 packages and I need help. Hi. Hi. Yeah. Okay. Actually, I should probably be on that side because I think I don't really know whether that was just for... Okay, well, then you can make... For mentees also for newbies because I'm a newbie to Debian. So, anyways, my name is Shirish. I had been... I was a Debian... No, I was a U.N.2 refugee to Debian about... Well, you tell me, are you looking for something to do or are you looking... I'm looking for something to do. Actually, I'm supposed to be... Then... The publicity stuff. Oh, okay. Well, you should answer these questions for me. Yeah, so no, okay. So one thing I know about Debian, it's solid and it saved me a lot of headache, a lot of times. What I would like to work on is publicity, but unfortunately, I've just been overwhelmed by DEBKONF. So all my grand plans of covering DEBKONF just went for a toss, a huge toss. And now I'm trying to see if I can somehow do something with that. Thank you. And what's one thing you like about Debian? But I guess even you said, I forget. Actually, everything. I mean, just the... Just the huge amount of packages that I have. I actually like is there's a way that you can search for packages without, you know, without... with keywords. I don't... I forget the command right now, but there's a way through which I can find that out. I really love about it. Cool. Yeah. Okay, so you should go to that side. And also you should leave the mic where you are and see if anyone else on your side wants to talk about tasks they can offer to people. Good. I know. Questions already? Doesn't work, right? Okay, it works. And you're Thomas still? Yes. Great. That didn't change at all. Okay. One of the packages that I have, and I'm upstream, it's called Debokker. Anybody used it? No? Debokker. It's a... it's a small program to build packages, and it has a lot of Debian packages in Docker, hence Debokker. And it's like quite experimental. However, it's in stable. I mean, experimental as a project, not as a working software, it actually works in a stable way. It's experimental because what I would like to do is to make contributions to Debian easier because I find them quite difficult to make. It's like, for example, to provide a patch and test it yourself is actually quite difficult, I find, especially if you don't run Debian, which is kind of like obvious, but maybe. But with Debokker, you can actually build packages on any system that runs Docker, right? So you could theoretically contribute to Debian on, I guess, macOS, right? Yeah. I think it runs there. So I have this small software, and I kind of... I'm thinking how to make it better if you are interested in that kind of stuff, and that could actually teach you how to package because it actually wraps around packaging and that kind of stuff. And if you like Docker, I don't know. Okay. Great. So that would be my... And we have one more on this side, if you can... And there's Tobias. Hello. I am Alexandre. I am part of the Go Packaging team where we maintain a lot of things, that tools that play with containers, for example. Those are tools that are all relatively new, and it's a new language, also a new language in Debian, which means we are very much behind in terms of all the libraries we have to get in. So it's a team that went from like 100 to 400 packages in the last six months, and we are relatively a small amount of people. So, yeah, if you want to help, I'm sure you'll like it there. I'm also very much interested in configuration management tools and decentralized things. So, like, decentralized file sharing and communications. I do have some packages in that area if you're interested. So we have only five minutes left in the session. I want to sort of role play what good requests are from the mentor side to the mentee side are just before we switch into that. So, a good request is, Hi, person. You said you were interested in packaging tool, in fixing bugs and packages that you use. Bug number 749636 in CUPS is something where there's already a patch there and I just need someone to test it out. Can you do that? Yeah, I can do that. Great. And then you, like, go do that. And a bad one is, do you want to join the CUPS packaging team? Sorry to pick on you, Odex. And then they'll be very confused about what that entails and then they'll wander off. So it's essential for you all to think about some specific tasks that match the things that people have said here. And, you know, you don't have to say a specific bug number, you can be like, I'm sure there's a bug that you can test the patch for. And then you'll probably spend, like, three hours with them helping them set up P-Builder and so on. And that'll be actually good for everyone, even though it might seem like a long three hours. So, with that said, unless anything else, yeah, no, okay. What I want to do then is, like, stop videoing and switch to that, like, one-on-one chatting. So, yeah, one question or... I can look here. Okay, thanks. Okay, it's green now. Okay, so somebody mentioned that there are many packages already in Debian, but at the same time there are many orphan packages. Yes. So maybe somebody from people interested in packaging could adopt or take care of many packages without maintainers. If one of you is willing to be so kind to the Debian project as to instead of promoting a specific thing you work on, but instead say, I want to help some people, I found a random orphan package. Do you want to adopt it, random mentee? They'll say yes, because they don't know any better. And they're not even wrong to, because it's a great learning experience. So, you know, the kind of specific tasks that you offer people don't have to be in the sub-products that you work on. That's a great thing from Debian. You just have to get creative to meet their needs. Okay, so with that said, I'm going to stop being a microphone, and you all should stand up and swarm these people, and you all should start talking to them about specific tasks. And I'm going to turn off the mic. And I guess I can too. Thank you very much.