 Hello everybody, is there anybody who has seen my talk on Monday about Blenz or so? I will repeat something, only a few things, because I think it became important even more after I heard the other talk. I'm a little bit astonished because this is kind of a side-by-product of my main topic and this ended up in the main talk room. What about mom? Mom is called Mentoring of the Months and Mentoring of the Months was one of my ideas which came exactly at the same time, you see it's January last year. My own mail was sent one day later what was just prepared. We had one post on our mailing list who wrote Dear Debian Packagers. We are looking for one of you to help us change the history of healthcare. Actually he was quite engaged and wanted to have a really large, heavy hospital management system packaged and we had it on our to-do list but it was so hard that we would not be able to do it without any help from Upstream because it's quite complex and I'm personally a physicist, I have no idea about all this stuff so I can have the knowledge about packaging and Upstream has the knowledge about the Upstream program so in my opinion this is quite a good fit and basically at the same time I have written the announcement of the Mentoring of the Months. It was by chance connected to the 10th birthday of Debian Mead but I learned in these 10 years of Debian Mead that there are people showing up and say hey I want to support you a little bit and I would like to do something and then you can never again something from this person. Anybody had the same experience? Whatever. So in the non-free world there is a boss and he gives money to somebody and if this somebody doesn't doing what he is supposed to do he will be fired. That's easy. In the free software world it's not that easy. So what to do to get at least some slight handle on these persons. And so I came up with the idea to say well I will spend my time to teach you and you are supposed to do some work and do some reports and so on and so on. I will tell you how it works in detail but first I want to show you another interesting thing in the Debian Mead team. We have about 23 Debian developers and maintainers who are not all very active but because we are doing some mentoring, because we are doing advertising of the project we have 110 Debian developers who confirmed that they are only in Debian because the Debian Mead project exists. For Debian Mead as a leaf project nobody really cares much about it in the main Debian universe. It's not important for several reasons but even if this more unimportant project can gather 10 developers who otherwise would not be in Debian we could do a lot of stuff more and one point of this is because we really care for all newcomers. Seven of these people even dived in other fields inside Debian so do not even necessarily be active in Debian Mead anymore and eight of them are working active in Debian Mead. What is mentoring of the month? The mentor currently only me but it's not necessarily the case just dedicates as part of his spare time. Well it's anyway my spare time what I'm doing for Debian so I cut a little bit from packaging myself and spent the time for the student. You should try to guide the student kindly into all secrets of Debian packaging and I think learning by example is the best way you can do something so it doesn't really help to reproduce a hello package which is fine but it's not full of pitfalls and real life examples have a lot of pitfalls you need to work around and in this process I also faced something which made some trouble for me and there was even more trouble for the newcomer so if the newcomer has a package he's interested in and basically we had a lot of these students we are upstream developers so they have a real interest to get a package they learn it on their real example and it's not necessarily upstream developers so the student is free to pick the package and I as a mentor reserve some vetoing rights just because I have sometimes experienced that it's too hard to do this in one month just some to say well it's nice if you want to package it but this doesn't work for instance we have in Debian Meet we have some kind of to-do list we have these task pages and we have here some packages where is some work done in SVN or Git and you can just continue something what is started or we have some other things which are not really started with so we have some really long to-do list where students could pick from or could do something else so the goals of mentoring of the months well the package in question is finished and uploaded after one month and the student is able to do advanced packaging tasks and is also introduced into the communication channels of Debian Meet I always want to make the student to communicate we are mailing list I personally don't like mails popping up in my private mailbox there should be always some public record which you can seek for and so communication and the package the communication as I said on mailing list I don't know why but I always face people who are too shy to post a mailing list or whatever but this is something I really want the students to do and well other readers might be bothered a little bit by this education and so it should be just tagged by the MOM tag so people could filter it or perhaps even people are only interested in this mentoring and then they could read it as well I have set five rules one of these is the responsiveness so if the mentor is posting something in the mailing list with the MOM subject the student should really try hard to comment on this so I have no idea what you mean can you help me or explain better or just the student should just respond with something it's quite frequent that you post something and to think the message is received but it is not really so this is his handshake principle you know from electronics then the receiver said yes I got it the student should also confirm understanding he should say well this is okay or what does it mean please explain he can also say I would prefer this or that over mine because I'm not that strict on my opinion because newcomers maybe have more ideas about the upstream program than me so they are way more right than I or maybe there's an alternative and I do not want to put my strong opinion onto the student the students should also follow changes he should subscribe the commit list or alternatively should pull from the repository and read the log files and the student should also try to find a useful comment to confirm that he understand what was committed because sometimes I can explain the student please do this or that change but sometimes it's way longer to explain what to do and I just commit a small change put a comment on it and then the student gets also the message and it's more straightforward so it's not that I want to do all the coding to put on the student if there is something available in the repository the student should confirm that he was able to build the package you cannot always be sure that the student just checks out everything and knows the process of building so I want him to say well I was able to build and everything fine I continue working with this well in case of problems the student should ask for the dbn-made mailing list also is non-subject and he should show to others we are working on a problem so others might join or not things should be sorted out via open discussion and there are possibly, most possibly a lot of silent lurkers on our mailing list we do not even know who is subscribed and who's reading this and perhaps other people could learn it alternatively you could do the MOM with ILC channel I admit I'm not so frequently on ILC basically only on Depcons but if the student prefers this we could do some meetings also to get some faster communication and the student should post reports what he has done what's he doing every day so how is the progress working and I think these reports are the way to prove that he is really working on what we agreed upon because I agreed upon teaching the students and the students just reports back and shows that he did understand something in summary I can say mentoring of the month is work for both but I really think if you work on it it also shows that it's fun to work because both people can learn something the mentor trades his spare time for the work of the student and he also trains silent observers and the focus is not only on the technical details but also on learning to know relevant communication channels this is also quite an interesting thing because we have a lot of people working silently on their own and do not really know how to find friends after hearing the talk this morning about the woman in Debian and I've seen that Paul Tech has some statistics that in Google summer of course 0% women applicants out of 181 but in Google outreach program for women they had 100 applicants I'm wondering should I explicitly dedicate every second month for women only or so I don't know I don't know if it's because we are quite niche projects if there are really so many women but I could consider this or try this if other projects might adopt this idea of MOM it could be some way to help also here as a result we had in the first year four MOM periods and in this year one I have not a student every month and the most interesting thing is actually the first one it's not yet uploaded but in this MOM work upstream learned that they need to change their build system and so we need to wait for the next upstream which is supposed to happen soon and finally we got something into Debian or we will get something really soon which we never managed over all the ten years of Debian mid-existence so this is a really valuable thing to train people because otherwise we wouldn't manage it so finally I think this is kind of good result it also happened that people put their name on the queue we are using a wiki page I will show you the link in the end and there's a table and you put your name on the table and everything is quite informal and some people consider doing it so what can I do? as I said I cannot fire anybody as a conclusion I think the time I spent into mentoring is really worth the effort because you have no student for every month the workload is bearable somehow so I think it's not very much more than I'm doing anyway because I do not restrict my teaching work on the mailing list to this project I'm teaching on the mailing list anyway and so it's a little bit more formalized and a bit more strict and hopefully inviting and actually I'm also learning myself because I'm a Debian developer for 15 years I'm not really sure if I have read every document which should be read and specifically I have not read them the last ten years so the student is new and reads the documents I'm really learning, I learn features I would never have learned if I wouldn't have done this teaching the major advantage for me is that by the training we could pull up the knowledge of upstream and our packaging stuff and this is a very efficient way to get packages which are really hard for us to do so sponsoring of blends what does it mean? well I learned that the blends concept is widely unknown amongst newcomers and also amongst Debian developers I'm talking about blends since 2003 Debian 3 with different names but people are widely ignoring this topic or thinking well this is a cool idea but we have no time to do it and well this is fine everybody can spend this time as they want but the thing is that newcomers might desperately seek for a sponsor and simply don't know how to find one but in principle every blend should have a team around and should be really really involved in sponsoring the packages but some blends doesn't fly in the sense that there is some maintainer having a package and asking for sponsoring and Debian mentors list so what can you do? I think we could kill two birds with one stone we can get the package sponsored after proving that you understood the blends techniques how do I think about this? well I personally want to make the blends concept way more popular than it currently is and the maintainer of a package which could be in a blend is seeking a sponsor so we can find a common solution also here there are some rules sponsoring of blends means the first rule is the maintainer should confirm that he has understood the blends principle that means have read the blends documentation is a member of some team on Elliot on reading the relevant mailing list frequently observed that there are ITPs I'm always reading the ITP list which are relevant for say geographic information systems multimedia games and these people are single maintainers not really connected to a team and I always say well would you consider maintaining this team or the Debian science team or so to get some connection to people so I really hope that if we seek for a sponsor it makes obvious that this person has no contact I try to get this contact via the blends so the second rule is your packages maintain in a VCS used by the blends team the technical background behind is we are checking the VCS here in our blends tools and it shows up here so if a package is in SVN all the information is obtained from SVN so if you really put your packaging there you have to do nearly nothing to show up on the web page so one thing is to make the sponsor aware of this and the other thing is that we get the information straight your package is listed on the blends task pages which I've shown you which is really really easy you just put an additional line in the control file like it is very easy and then after one day once the contract was running it is there so the world knows about your package and you get some extra chance that somebody might pick it and sponsor it and the fourth rule is if you are unable to find a sponsor on the specific blends list even after posting there at least twice I will sponsor it for you so you should seek in your own team and if the team doesn't cope with it I will do it so these are the rules this concept is quite new and we have only two cases for the moment one was sponsored and this was fine and the other one I sent in some change request, please change this and that and got no response I think two or three months the question was how new is new so I do not really remember when I announced this but two or three months and I am also looking on relevant mailing list and I am reading Debian mentors and I try to catch maintainers in need of a sponsor I am also looking for instance on the list of derivatives there is always geo distribution which is finally in Ubuntu derivative who is in principle competing with the Debian GIST team they don't know each other they also want to make a GIST distribution of free software they don't know from each other but should they do also not know that there is a Debian Java team but there would be some need they are asking question how can I package Java applications and I am right to the mailing list there is a Debian Java list and nothing happens so I also if I see there is some package near to be ready I posted them you could get it into Debian Stride if you follow these four rules not yet so I think the thing is new I am always sending the link to the wiki page and hope that something will happen if you might notice that there is some candidate for this sponsoring of blends rules please redirect them to me I hope I can I can bear the rush you put on me now and what I just put on the slides when I was sitting in your talk is a third thing so mentoring of the months, sponsoring of blends and there is also face to face meeting and now I am coming to the repetition of what I said on Monday I want to have you a very quick look what happened since 2011 when we started doing early sprints in our team and in these sprints we not only were Debian developers we were upstream developers and users about 20, 25 people sitting together we had in 2011 in January last year in February and this also in February and the effect is really amazing and by the way thanks to Debian for sponsoring the sprints you see here the usual statistics you might ignore that I am always this large red line but what you see here 2011 you have a solid base compared to this one these are newcomers and these newcomers are constant and actually these people who are long standing these are long standing ones might drop their activity so 2011 you have some obvious increase in the uploads of Debian made packages next metrics is a discussion on the Debian made user mailing list you see quite the same effect right you have another thing Debian developer mailing list also 2011 it is an increase a measurable increase who is fixing bugs in the Debian made team you see since 2011 a lot more people fixing bugs right and commits to the Debian made VCS same effect so it's quite consistent and finally in the packages we have in Debian made we have a lot of biology packages and these sprints were actually biology developers the increase is in this biology section you see here the other are quite constant increasing but you don't see this increase so if you meet face to face with interested people you get some drastically effort for your project even if it's such a side project leave project like Debian made I can't stop saying this if you would do all this stuff in multimedia games or so we could have a lot of more people so we always had the discussion here I have in two talks or three talks here heard that people have trouble finding friends in Debian I've seen it on the mailing list well it is not that hard the answer is create inviting teams around certain topics that if somebody comes to Debian with a certain interest and everybody has some interest to install Debian why shouldn't he otherwise so if it should be natural so for me it's if I'm a biologist I'm looking around what distribution has the most biological packages ah that's Debian, let's try it and then it comes and sees oh there's a team behind it and then you will contact the team this is quite a natural thing since well since 2011 or so formally there was not so much so create strong teams and you will make it very easy for us to find new members for your team either this is my definition for a team waking up in the morning and realizing that somebody else has solved your problem from yesterday and I really have realized this we have some Debian developer in the team who just joins the Debian team because it's fun in this team it's Thorsten Alterholtz he's not connected to biology, medicine anyway but he said well that's fun, let's join this and he's doing QA work, that's nice and he made some in December some advent calendar to push people to fix the bug every day to close the windows or whatever so this is really fun and it works because we try to invite people so these are some links our policy document which is also helpful for newcomers this is even a fourth point newcomers can read the main points how to behave inside the team mentoring of the months, sponsoring of blends and well that's basically all I will upload this PDF document and you can click on the links and now well I talked two thirds of this buff I just want to hear new ideas, new... whatever, any comments raise your hands please tell us more about organizing Sprint yes there is, I think there is a mailing list Debian Sprints at list.debian.org you should check out there is a mailing list, Debian Sprints and there you can announce that you want to do Sprint and then you should create a wiki page with some information given and you fill in the location and so there is a template you just fill in Luca yes about Sprints please organize Sprints I mean we have clearly have the budget for that if you think it's useful for your team just contact me or the Debian Sprints mailing list and yeah it's really easy to organize as well if I understood the question correctly it was kind of about what are the steps required to organize a Sprint can you explain the steps you began to talk about there is this wiki page but then what do you need to know what planning do you need to do how do you invite people, these sorts of things I think yes, okay I'm very happy that somebody in our team is doing all the work for this and I just have to come to the Sprints it's nice, he is caring for some hotel we have the rule to meet at some place at the beach it was in Lübeck it was in Southport in England and it was close to Kiel wherever, find a small hotel preferably with some better bandwidth than we have chosen but yes and then try to find people and this person in our team has a very good ability to attract people I would never think about he is writing emails to people hey you have this package and you might be interested in this and please come to our Sprint and he writes to 50 people and 20 also will come this is a good mix of Debian developers and other people and this makes some point there were even Ubuntu people on the Sprint there were even derivatives from Ubuntu which is called Biolinux and the effect after our first Sprint was that these Biolinux people are now using the same VCS as we so we are working on the same code and there is a package migrated via Detail of Ubuntu to their distribution and if they have changes we intercorporate it and if we do changes they have it as well so this is quite efficient so try to find friends for your project and then put them in one place and lock the doors so this is Pizzai and Kola or whatever how long have Deor Sprint's last and how many have you run since 2011? we have run three one per year and they run from Friday afternoon to Sunday evening depending how much so a little bit longer than weekend any more questions we can also keep on talking about the other mentoring stuff we have we have 15 minutes left barely so if you have other ideas how we can get new developers or we can create a friendly environment for men and women do you think it would help to have more blends for not so specific users maybe maybe let's put names what about having a blend for ESFC desktop or ESFC desktop yes I think this is a good idea and because you say not so specific you need to decide how narrow you make the focus of your blend for instance in Debian you have a GIS team and an OpenStreetMap team and both have common packages and both are separate I don't think this is a good idea you need to get some critical mass to put there are perhaps 10 developers and not 3 there and 5 there and then if I started with medicine nobody immediately connects biology with medicine but biology was a lot of stuff it was there we used it and so this built some creative base and then other things came around so try to make it large enough to last some time to get some critical mass I think there is another question well I think the idea of blend here is really interesting it sounds almost like they are just a collection of people who use Debian who care about some topic of packages and the fact that there is a blend is almost separate from the fact that it's just people who are interested in that topic of packages there is no reason you couldn't have a Debian email sprint or something you can do this print on any topic and so I guess the thing that I am trying to think through is that what you are talking about with blends just makes me think it's some notion of teams and I guess I am struggling to see the difference between blends and teams and maybe we should try harder to make more topical packages be in a team the blend is actually a team working together on a certain user oriented topic it is user oriented for certain work fields and you have some tasks in it and my idea was just to attract people who are not necessarily geeks but just want to do their normal work with Debian and I also assumed that we would have way more blends and I pushed the principle on people I wrote the stuff for the Debian team all the framework and they said well that's nice and they use it now and there is also this Debian science blend which is actually well actually we should have a Debian mathematics, Debian physics Debian electronics but there is nobody really engaged in separating it out and making a real team around this topic we would need such people who are doing this and I think if I understand correctly the core concept of a blend is that it's a variant of Debian that when installed contains all of those packages is that right? Yes a blend is completely integrated into Debian but it's not just that it's integrated there is an installable a sub installable Debian installable via meta packages we would like to have something to say well create a DVD just with this blend we have the idea it was asked on Monday in IRC you could put it on task cell they just select your blend there is an open bug report I think from 2003 also with bone fix I mean it sounds it sounds to be like I haven't thought this through very carefully so it might just be crazy that we should just rename blends to topics the naming topic you have not seen my talk the name of blends changed over the time I can repeat this we have time it was first Debian internal projects and we wanted to split from this technical project the user oriented this was somehow logical and then somebody suggested Debian distributions which was a total failure because if you hear this you are smiling you know so well and I suggested Debian internal solutions or something like this which sounded not that bad in my opinion but once I did this people rise there and I've never seen these people before I have never have written any code seen any code from them they are not posting on the mailing list but once they came they wanted their opinion on they raised their hand and said well I have an opinion we should not use this name we should use something else and then there was some voting and now it's called blends so I do not really want to go this street twice I see I personally see a lot of people use for blends for having people being able to provide multiple variants of Debian for security maybe a live city for security people and some of them might be overlapping but probably overlapping we have overlap between Debian and Debian so there is overlap it's just also a way of having people not forking Debian just for a specific need it can help having those people working inside Debian and contributing inside Debian rather than forking and having their own for me it's a blending kind of making a Debian derivative the right way by staying inside Debian and maybe you finally can do some nice background or release something as your product but it's done inside Debian and I think the key concept you have about keeping the work inside Debian is well taken for me I kind of didn't realize that blends I thought that the point of blends was to create non derivative derivatives like an installable Debian med image or something but it sounds like you don't even have an installable Debian med image and why would you want one whatever the meta package is called so it seems like we should try hard to run around to all of the users of Debian who have friends who are dds and say is there a topic of Debian you care about create a blend today this is what I'm doing since 2003 sorry that I was 10 years of doing this I'm sorry that I'm so late to the party yeah well this is actually my point I was this is blends topic I was degraded to the second talk room and there were basically people they have medicine also related and other people think well this stuff that is not interesting for me and now I'm here for getting a larger team and people I got more attention perhaps it worked this way on my next step cons in my talk the term blends will not happen I will find a funny title and talk about it and let's see any other questions we have 5 minutes left is it easy to discover the meta packages that make up a blend at the moment mechanically I hope so it has a common prefix also in that case could we not have a submenu on the expert install or whatever well we could have a lot of time but it is a fact that this task cell stuff was not accepted well I'm not talking about the task cell I'm talking about the initial install the installer or whatever you could where you can say which default desktop you want instead of saying that you could have a parallel menu on the first bit of the debut installer with the menu being constructed automatically from all the whatever way suggested I'm all for it okay I can't really show this here now the point with that is that you could probably include new debs in your blend and change the nature of the installer most probably but we are lacking the technical manpower in this right so if anybody has some idea I'm all for it there is also a frequent question do you have a dvd you can I said well set of dvd is actually our work but people want this one right this is dvd made or whatever and so you can do it easily by using dvd live and put all the meta package on it then you have it or you can do some other clever tricks but this would be nice if somebody would do this and what I'm always doing these web pages which are now very much because they contain everything translated with a pubcon stuff and maybe it's working again showing again no network whatever maybe it's back now yes it's back what I'm always advertising is we have all this translated description what belongs to the blend so if there is a colleague you can upload a screenshot of mine I made it also for my colleagues they are working on different operating systems right using sometimes free software I'm not aware of this we have all these applications you have you have screenshots you should have screenshots on the right you have screenshots you can see it is really translated and everything is coming from UDD so the only thing you do to structure the blend is say depends package name depends package name and everything is done with this framework we have dedicated bugs pages so if a biologist wants to help you fix the bug you can go to the biology topic and find the bugs in these and we have other tools which are ready for it's just need to be used I will want to other buffs with multi-media, deviant giz and deviant games and we try to do it in Bosnia has to go in now in the depthcon 11 I was sitting in the deviant games buff and it was 45 minutes and I started from scratch and made them a template a framework which up to these web pages there was no change until now to put another games or make some other tasks which are I'm lacking the knowledge about games these knowledge needs to be put into the framework and perhaps we make something out of this or try to revitalize deviant junior or so the problem with games is that they are so diverse that we probably need to compartment to compartmentize that because for example it's not the same the same kind of people who play quake and play chess and it's all the same team probably in deviant junior or however we decide to call it it might be quite easier because the range is different but we also might need to separate between different I'm sorry if I interrupt you but that's not really the point hospital information system biology, medical imaging this is as far as different things like quake and frozen butter or whatever we just need to find the right categories for this Is there a way to make tags or something like that to filter similar packages like for example I'm interested in this kind of game development we can do it that would be great so time is over thank you everybody I had one more question do you want to ok then