 Hello, everyone. Welcome to the leadership in DPN Boff or because of panels. I'm very excited about the session today. We have all the excellent speakers here with us right now. And I would like to introduce our first speaker, Jonathan Carter. He is your current DPN project leader. I believe that most of you already know Jonathan. He based out of South Africa. He has been a Linux user since 1999 and DPN developed since 2017. Of course, he is also a member of many teams inside DPN, and he was part of the DEBCOM committee from 2017-2019. Jonathan, would you like to talk briefly about the purpose and the ideas of this leadership panel? Yes, so welcome to the leadership in Debian session. We've had some DPL panels in the past, but as... Oops, my note is cut off. That's very nice. One second. So what did I say? We can hear you. We've had some DPL panels in the past, but as far as I know, this is the first time we're having a discussion specifically on this topic of leadership. So feel free to add questions to the etherpad at any time, and we'll try to get all questions answered. So there are many ways in which one can be a leader. I remember back when I was in grade three, our teacher told our class how important it was to always set a good example, because if we do something like throw a piece of litter on the ground instead of in the bin, someone who's in grade one will see that and end up emulating that kind of behavior. So I guess you could say that's a form of leading by example. Now in Debian, we have many kinds of leadership roles, and in many ways, every Debian developer is a type of leader already. I also think that leadership and trust go hand in hand. When a leader loses their trust in the community, they also lose the support of that community. So as an organization, we are vendor neutral and exist to serve the best interests of our users. And while it's sometimes difficult to figure out exactly what the right choices are for our users, we do try our best and with that we've gained a lot of trust, gained the trust of a large community of users out there. And in many ways, the Debian project itself plays a leadership role within the software world. So when I became DPL, it was my intention to buy a good book or two on the topic of leadership. Unfortunately, I've been a bit too busy and I haven't gotten around to that yet. But I've been enjoying an account on Twitter that's called Picard Management Tips that I'll share in the links. It's quite funny. But with that, I'm not going to link it too much on the topic. I think I've explained it a bit. I'm going to let Hong continue to introduce the rest of the speakers in this session as well. Thank you, Jonathan. As Jonathan mentioned, you can go into the e-taback. You can find it on the schedule to start to write our question to the speakers. So I would have the honor to continue to introduce other Debian leaders. Bidale, good to see you again here. So Bidale, who first contributed to what we now call free software back in 1979, he joined the Debian project in 1994 before the first stable release and had been involved ever since. He maintains a number of packages and in the past served at the DPL, the chair of technical committee and even briefly as a project secretary. He's now retired from the corporate world but co-owns and operates a successful open hardware business together with Cat Packard. Bidale also served on the boards of several non-profit organizations, including software freedom conservancy, freedom box foundation, and the amateur radio digital communications. Welcome, Bidale. Okay, so next I have my lovely friend Ilana here as well. So Ilana has been using Debian for nearly 15 years and become a Debian developer in 2017. She currently lives closer packaging team, which she revised in 2017 and serves as a member of the technical committee. Outside of Debian, she is a Python software foundation fellow, chair of the community's instrument special interest group and a director of the open source initiative where she serves as a chair of the affiliate committee and also serves on the licensed committee. Ilana currently works for Red Hat as a principal site reliability engineer and tech lead on the Azure Red Hat OpenStrip team. Welcome, Ilana. Maga. Maga has been a Debian developer for almost 15 years and has been serving in the technical committee since 2016. Where are you based now, Maga? I'm currently in Germany. I'm originally from Argentina. Okay, cool. I'm also in Germany. She's been working in Linux Industries in 2003, including eight years working at Google. She was involved in the organization of DevCon for a while. In particular, she was part of the main org team for DevCon 8 in Argentina and DevCon 15 in Germany as well as have a different task in other editions. Bruce. Our famous Bruce is also here now. Bruce's parents got a second DPL. He was the first to contribute to the base system. Sorry, there's a change. So let me, by contributing development this way and for other innovation, why he was the DPL, he is said to be the creator of the modern Linux distribution. He also created a busy box for the Debian installer. He was the principal author of the Debian social contract and the Debian free software guidelines which became a reference for many other projects three days on the open source community. Later, of course, it became the open source definition. He was one of the founders of the software in the public interest. And he gave a very inspiring talk a few days ago at the conference. Welcome Bruce again. Thanks very much. Next I have Enrico. Enrico is a DPL developer and currently DPL account manager who handle all your financial features. He also, I guess is it or not. So he looks after new maintenance site nm.dbn.org, contributors.dbn.org, devtags.dbn.org and sso.dbn.org. Yeah, maintaining many other services. Welcome, Enrico. And we have finally, last but not least, we have Steve. Steve had been around DBM since 1996 working on a lot of different things over the years. He was DPL for two times. He's currently a member of a lot of teams. I installed images, community team and more. He was also even silly enough to have run DevCon back in the team in the distant past. Okay, so I have all the speakers here now. Jonathan, let me check if we have any questions. So already, do you want to kick off with a topic? Yeah, let me see. Is there any topic anyone would start with or shall we jump into questions already? I'll start with one. Great. Okay, so I think that one of the most important ways in which leadership has been shown in Debian is that Debian has been the source of great ideas, which everyone in Linux distributions in the open source community uses. And I wanted to go into the unpronounceable sentence in my bio because it's actually an example. One of the things that I did as the second Debian project leader was that Ian Murdoch was personally maintaining the entire base system. That means all of the very important packages in Debian that it took for the system to boot and install other packages Ian maintained those solely by himself. And when I came in as project leader, I took those packages and distributed them all to other developers. Now today that sounds really simple, but back then no one had actually ever tried distributing all of the core components of an operating system to people that had not even met each other. At that time I had not met another Debian developer. And it worked. And of course, this is what all of the community developed Linux distributions do today. Similarly Debian exercise leadership in the Debian free software guidelines, which became the open source definition in many technical decisions. And I'm just talking about the ones I worked on. Obviously there have been many, many others. So I think that that is actually the most important part of leadership in Debian is that Debian provides leadership. Yeah, even if you look at apps and other tools, other package managers that came after it, it kind of emulates the same way that apps work. So if you do a pep install or remove or any of the package managers from other tools, it's kind of copied some of the good ideas that we have in Debian. So yeah, definitely an example of leadership from Debian right there. Yeah, so talking about Debian leadership, there is a question directly to the Debian leadership on the topic like racism as a global issue. So how do we as leaders in the project respond to these issues? Oh, Hong, that's my question. So do you want me to ask that one? Yes, so I think it's related. We talk about the leadership, how to respond to certain global issues. I think we can answer this question as a group. Yeah, so I'll read what I wrote in the etherpad. I'm finding it sort of difficult this week to focus on the conference, to focus on technical issues like Bruce has discussed, because while I'm Canadian, I'm based in the U.S., and the injustice of police brutality, particularly against black Americans, is first and foremost on my mind right now. So while Debian is not an American project, racism is a global issue that affects all of our community and our contributors' well-being. So how do we as leaders in the project respond to these issues? I feel like we've been floundering. We have been floundering. I mentioned that in my DPL talk as well. We've failed to address or make a statement for Black Lives Matter that I think it's still not too late to do. But tonight, I also watched the news for the first time in the last week and saw the latest police brutality incident. And I actually thought, you know, it's been nice having this break in escape from the news and all the bad news in the world for the last week when I've had my head so deep in Debian. But it also hits home again. I took a break the last week from all of that, but for most people in the world, they don't have a choice. If you're a woman or if you're black or if you're transsexual, you don't get to take a break or go on a little holiday from that. It just hit that home again and I wanted to comment on that. So I don't have any solutions yet. Maybe we can discuss that further. But it is tough. It just doesn't stop all the bad news that happens out there and especially when it concerns Black people and especially in the U.S. I could ramble on this probably for the next hour. Sorry, I won't go on too long. But we have that even in South Africa, the institutional police problems where it's still Black people being targeted, even though the police is Black, but it's so institutionalized in the police system that that still continues, even though it's not white policemen anymore. But I think we do need to try to prevent institutional problems, institutional racism too, but all kinds of institutional problems within Debian because we actually don't often, we don't talk about it at all ever. And I think we need to do that a bit more. I'll take that if you wish. Sure. So I think we have to make sure our own house is clean first. And that means that Debian needs to have policies and processes that prevent racial discrimination within its own organization. And I think for the most part that we've done that, we have to make sure that they actually work. Second to that, yes, we can make statements. If you look on my own website, parents.com, you'll notice there's a statement on solidarity with Black Lives Matter, which goes through my own incident as being on the receiving side of prejudice since I grew up as a reasonably severely handicapped young person, grew out of it eventually. And so the question becomes, can Debian take an active role against injustice and racial prejudice? And one of the suggestions has been ethical licensing where you have a license that says, this can't be used for racial injustice. And those have been around for a very long time. When I started work on the Debian free software guidelines, there was already the spice license that said the software may not be used by the police of South Africa. At that time, South Africa had ended apartheid and the license still stood. So it was potentially a problem rather than a solution. Forward to today, ethical licenses are again a concern. And my problem with them is I don't believe that you can enforce social justice in a copyright court. Yeah, I completely agree with that, Bruce. I think we have to be really careful. I think it's totally appropriate for all of us as participants in the Debian project to care about these issues and to try, as Jonathan started off, saying that we should try to lead by example. And as Bruce indicated, let's make really sure that the Debian project internally isn't propagating any particularly bad behaviors in this area. But I think it's equally important that we sort of remember that the reason that we come together in Debian is to collaborate on creating something which actually has immense social value, and that is an operating system composed entirely of free software. And in doing so, we are actually doing lots of things that are socially useful, making technology available, addressing digital divide issues in various places around the world. And I don't know that we necessarily have to take on every problem that the world has as a first order concern of the project as a whole. Jonathan, I would totally support your putting out some supporting messages in the name of the project. And I would certainly hope that these are issues that all of us individually care about. I think what I'm just trying to express is that we need to be careful not to get so argued in on this that we're unable to continue to be able to productively collaborate on that thing which brought us together in the first place. Yeah, and one of the reasons that I raised this question was specifically because I find the project's lack of response to this issue making it difficult for me to collaborate. Like, how can I care about technology when people are dying in the streets? It's very difficult. And, you know, police brutality is certainly not just an issue in the United States. It's an issue globally. So, while Debian is a global project, you know, I think that we are maybe in a unique position to consider how free software can interact with some of these issues and serve as a liberating force. Yeah, so there is actually a very similar question. And maybe other speaker can jump in asking about if Debian is doing something of Lance some thing to bring in more ethics into the conversation around technology and computing. Steve Maga, Enrico, do you want to answer to that? Is there something that we're doing currently of Lance to do? So, of course, Debian has always been talking about the ethics of free software and making sure that everybody can get involved, everybody can contribute, everybody is free to use, to develop, to learn from that free software. That is priority one. It always has been for us. There is a lot, this is a huge topic as people have already been saying. Not everybody in Debian, in the community, necessarily agrees about all of the politics of everything we do, but I think that's what the one place that we actually do have, or we should expect 100% overlap. We want to be empowering people with the great free software that we're distributing, that we're developing, that we're helping to maintain and making it possible for everybody out there, regardless of race, creed or colour, to get involved. We historically have not been a great place for people of colour or people of minorities, such as women. That's a more of a historical accident than anything else. The best thing we can absolutely do for me is help people to get involved, help people to benefit from what we do, whether that helps them to pull themselves into a better place, to catch up on some of the privilege that, hey, I and others here have benefited from, that's a great start. As to taking on police brutality and all that, wonderful if we can do that too. It can't be our first priority, obviously it's something that worries lots of us. Getting women involved in Debian, and this is going back to when there were 60 people on the Debian project, has always been very difficult and something as project leader that at that time I certainly wasn't able to get a handle on. It was indeed very frustrating and it exists the same way today in ham radio, women are very much monopoly and sometimes I feel like I know all of the women in ham radio and it's something that I would love other people to give us better solutions for. Yeah, I mean Bruce, like VE6JIT, I come from that world too, it's alienating constantly everywhere and even in this discussion there are three women on the panel but my focus of my subject was racism. These are problems that I don't necessarily think that this is a wider diversity question and there was a great diversity session that I watched on the opening day of the conference. I specifically want to focus on the question that I raise to the leadership, looking at this panel, we do not have racial diversity. It's not something that we're doing a good job on in the project and it's not something that I think people are going to be like, oh yes, here's a solution on a silver platter, please come and implement it. I think that we can do better. I'm not necessarily sure how to do better but I think that one of the ways that we can do better is not necessarily changing the topic when like we have these hard things raised and to sit and think and try to respond to the direct things that we are being asked to solve and not necessarily redirect to things that are, we're doing a better job at. I was very happy to see that there were talks on speaking and writing one of the 22 scheduled Indian languages in this conference, a language that I'm sad to admit I've never heard of and that kind of work helps. Yeah, so attic is a huge topic, right? We can go on forever but let's move on to the next question. Enrico, is that okay for you that we continue with the next question? I thought that you raised your hand if you want to add something. Yeah, I don't want to talk the thing so if you want to move on, something else is fine. Yeah, so maybe you can take the next question that I... It's about volunteering times for DBM projects so the question is that DBM volunteers are not employees of DBM context how can we limit the work and therefore opinion wage at risk with being linear with uppay availability? So, yes, I'm not so sure that I would... I understand this question but perhaps it's about the balance between volunteers for DBM project and their normal job. So if somebody want to thank it, Marga? I think I understand the question maybe. So I think the point here is the famous meritocracy story, like we say DBM is a meritocracy like it's a good thing and it's like the one that has the most time is the one that gets to do the most things and then the person that has the most time available basically their opinion ends up having more value because they had more time available. I think this is where the question is going. I'm not sure but this is my understanding of the question. I think the person who's the most assertive is the one who gets listened to the most and that's not necessarily a good thing. Right, so I mentioned the meritocracy, like that's a good thing because many times the meritocracy thing is used like a way to hit people into compliance and to like okay, I have this package I have done this thing and so you need to like do what I say even if it's not necessarily the best option or the thing that benefits the community the most so I'm very skeptical of meritocracy in general I think there's like more things to consider when when this thing what's the right decision for the project. Bidale, come off mutant, say that again. Bidale, are you unmuted? Am I unmuted now? Yes. Toggles are such a wonderful user interface thing. Look, so Marguer, absolutely right. There are fundamental problems with the concept of meritocracy but in Debian, I don't know how we're ever going to avoid being what I call a doocracy which is, you know, those who do end up being the ones who do and this may in fact just utterly disqualify me from being able to help solve some of these problems because I don't really see any way around that. I think to some extent this comes back to some of the very fundamental sort of early decisions that were made about how the project would organize itself and this notion of the way our constitution is structured where individual developers have an immense amount of authority and we only sort of invoke others in the project when there are situations or problems or questions that individual developers can't resolve on their own and in some sense this tickles my brain about the difference between leadership and management. We somehow have a structure that seems to sort of encourage reactive processes more than proactive or visionary or leadership processes because one of the things I think about when I think about applying metrics other than straight meritocracy is how would we go about making concrete decisions about technical direction in a way other than we do now and I sort of don't know how to do that without creating some other kind of structures within the project. So we kind of so far defined ourselves as democracy with the idea who puts in the work gets to decide the direction while reflecting on writing notes for my Nanowikis talk there was a graph that has an axis towards building on the relationship not just on what one wants to do to get and so the people who have time and energy could also invest some in building a relationship or community around their work and who has extra time could think of empowering others with that time rather than go on their own way however it would mean asking people to switch from development to management or coordination which might not be what people are motivated to do or want to do with their time in Debian. So it's a bit of a tricky thing because we're working on volunteers it's pretty hard to ask people what to volunteer on so it may be that we are structurally stuck there but it would be politically interesting to see if we can divert some of that energy to bring in more use energy to pull in rather than just to move on. Steve So rather than thinking about management and coordination where I tend to find actually personally this is entirely a personal thing I actually get a great deal out of mentorship and training and helping other people get up to speed these days there were never enough in hours in the day to do the technical things I want to be working on because let's be honest there are always more projects than there are hours in the day it's a really, really fun thing to help other people get up to speed ideally to go off and do some of those things for me particularly the boring things I don't want to do that's my take Yes and anyone want to comment on this question okay so we have 14 minutes left let's take another question on the top of the list is Debian or should Debian be more opinionated as a group to push this to a wide changes and a thought experiment to avoid the obvious in phase system discussion making up are more installed by default I also based the question on the chat for the speakers who would like to take this question Bruce if you are speaking you're muted Okay well this worked before anyway I think that that's a job for Debian derivative distributions because Debian is the universal operating system that was another leadership thing and if you want to deliberately make an operating system that isn't universal you can do things like Debian.edu etc where you can specialize in that way and kind of lead the people by the hand the problem with doing that with a universal distribution is that it gets in the way when people do corner cases for example when I'm putting Debian on a relatively small system I don't want to GUI I don't want anything about a GUI on that kind of system Well we have two members of the technical committee on this call as well so I'm wondering if they have any opinions on distribution wide changes or if there's ways that people should propose it or if they should involve the CTT in that I don't know if you have any opinions but I'd like to hear from you about that We have a session tomorrow and we're going to be discussing some things like that. Marga maybe want to talk more about that Sure one of the things that is on the table is whether the committee should do more design work and if the answer is no then how can more design work get done? I feel that actually Debian should do more technical leadership in the world of distributions I feel Debian did do this in the past like for example at the beginning of this talk we mentioned APT was a leadership thing. No distribution had a system that resolved the dependencies for you. The first one was Debian and at the time Debian was constantly innovating and bringing more and more things to the Linux distribution space and at some point it's just being stable became the one and only thing and the innovation I'm exaggerating but the innovation kind of stopped and I feel that this is something if we want to keep Debian relevant we need to change it I don't think the technical way is the way to change it but finding a way where Debian can actually innovate and bring innovation to the Linux distribution space is one of the we need to do to keep Debian relevant. Thank you and I think that is all the questions we have on the pad and there are a bunch of comments that are for us but I don't see Enrico did you have a comment to make on that one? No I was waving my agreement Okay Fine Well I think at this point we can have all of the individual speakers give a couple minutes of their own commentary Yeah sure Absolutely So let's just go around the table I'll start just to get everyone started I wasn't a very good Debian project leader and I found out over time that I don't want to do operations I don't want to run an organization I want to have the ideas and get those in place and then go on with other things and so that was actually very frustrating for me being a DPL and being in that operational role and it was pretty frustrating in all the other organizations that I participated in I think that we have to be cognizant that the people who have the ideas are not always really good operational people there are leaders but they're not the people who carry things on day after day and we need to as a project differentiate those kinds of people Who's next Malga? Sure, one of the potential topics that we're in the pad was ideas to improve the role of the DPL and last year in the first round we didn't have any DPL candidates we watched very scary for me because I was the chair of the technical committee so it had implications anyway at that point there were a few interesting discussions on this topic why don't we have any candidates what is going on is this something that we should change and then we got a bunch of candidates and everything just got back on track and we kind of forgot and I think this is something that we might actually need to think I don't know maybe Jonathan give your take giving the chair the current DPL but I feel that the amount of tasks that are expected from the DPL it's very large maybe because different DPLs have done different things throughout the time and now like there's all this baggage of all the things that are expected from a DPL and it might be too much for just one person to carry and instead it would make more sense for this to be a group of people and some people could devote their time more to operations which Bruce was saying and other people could devote their time to technical design and others could devote their time to like people leadership whatever but that spreading the load would be better for the project I don't know this is something that I think it's an idea worth exploring I think to do but I would like for us to think more about this and whether it's a thing that makes sense for us and if so what do we need to do to make it happen I'll pin that and come back to it when it's my turn yeah so actually there is a question from the IRC perhaps we can also take this question do you think the age profile in the projects and how it changed over time effectively means ability to innovate the communities in aging less young people joined over time I'd actually love to speak to that because I actually have exactly the opposite impression of Debian it's interesting when people decide to put together something like this session that people like me get invited to come join in and I'm of course happy to come share a thought or two from past experience but I've been fascinated the last couple in-person deb-cons that I attended were really full of what I thought of as young enthusiastic ambitious people who had much more energy to tackle the kinds of problems we've been talking about in this session than I do and so I actually have great hope for the future of Debian I look at the rest of the folks that are in this particular session and it's not I don't think it's a really good representation of the cross-sectional demographics of the project this group is in some ways I guess sort of self-selected for people that have been around for a while and you know have some history and some experience to perhaps offer but my personal impression of Debian is wow so many young people with so much enthusiasm and so many great ideas that I wouldn't have even thought of so I think some of this of course is you only get to a leadership position by already having some experience to draw on and some of us here or I feel quite old sometimes when I see some of the really enthusiastic younger folks what they're achieving Debian has been growing older on average to a certain extent I think that was always going to be going to be the case just because lots of us who started off 20 something years ago have no intention of going away anytime soon but that doesn't stop us from encouraging new people to get involved and continuing to use their ideas and even you know steal some of their enthusiasm like use their great their great ideas use their great passion and keep things going I mean one of my best friends is a 14 year old girl in fact is the daughter of a DD I'm sure a bunch of people here will know exactly who I'm talking about she'll be a DD, she's already been working on things it's just a matter of time today I ended up doing some training in my day job of an intern who and I was amazed at this told me how fun he thought packaging was, yeah I'll steal him next let's keep going, let's keep on finding the new people who want to join in I think Ilona's next am I? am I supposed to talk about being like the you know token young person on the panel or if you have something to say I mean I am the token young person on the panel I will relate that back maybe to one of the things that was discussed earlier with respect to the the burden I'll call it of being a Debian project leader as this session has been ongoing I have been receiving multiple IRC messages from multiple lovely people saying eHashman for DPL and every single one of them that I have responded with saying it's a 20 hour a week unpaid job I have a 40 hour a week day job I can't do that work traditionally a lot of the folks that we've had in DPL positions that were very successful were either in academia or freelancing and were basically able to self-fund large portions of their time and so when people are like you're an excited young person like you're in a leadership role Debian you should do things and my response to that is like and how am I going to be compensated for that labor like I got to eat and you know I can't spend 20 hours a week unpaid on top of my 40 hours a week day job and my 40 hours a week day job might not give me that time to spend you know it's exhausting the community is wrestling right now with a lot of topics of sustainability compensating developers fairly for their labor I know that that's in Debian a particular fraught topic going back to like you know the scandal of Dunk Tank but these are things that I think that we will have to wrestle with in the future as a project I don't think that we can keep brushing this off the table and say like yeah yeah yeah let's just keep funding it with like volunteer effort that will be sustainable and the project will be fine forever thanks two minutes Enrico you would like to say the final words wow that's a lot to ask but maybe the DPL should have the final word final words and then Jonathan of course also gonna go to say his final words everyone can have okay so I may say the things that I wanted to say about ethics and kind of touching racism a bit so we have two different bits about ethics in Debian one is about Debian itself and we have to our core points no discrimination about fields of endeavor so there is no ethics requirement about what you can use Debian for but that is different from the ethics of our community for example I think that the most important people is that we do not want Debian people keep other people out of Debian as long as they interact constructively with our community and that has a lot of implications also with regard to racism and I would like it's blatant that we do not have many people of color in the project and I would like to know why and I am not competent in investigating on that I think we have money we could probably put some into asking for help trying to find out if we have some structural issue for example that keep people out one thing about sending out a statement that was this hardening for me was to the herding cut bit about getting a statement out I think we lack a lot of project managing to keep discussion focused and keep a goal inside when there is something which is like time based or because people start with passion and then get distracted or frustrated and drift off and then a synchronous communication you can't even see that a person has drifted off and an effort loses team and then it's gone we do not have a lot of project management in the sense of people keeping track of where an effort is leading I would like to see some more of that because if it's technical thing yeah okay it doesn't make this release it will make the next one if it's about getting a statement to completion and publication then we don't wait for the next release there will be a statement to make I would like to have more efforts about keeping things focused because the intentions of that but on the topic of keeping things focused we are now two minutes over time can I just say one thing before we get cut off so firstly I'm going to take the Black Lives Matter thing into another session then we can make some concrete plans to bring this forward and then the second thing on the role of DPL I want to talk more about that I'll do it some other time but the plan is to make the role of DPL smaller so that it is an easier job and that it doesn't take it's 20 plus it's on the other side of 20 hours a week not below it but I think we can make it a simpler job so that the average DD can take it on and it's not a huge burden and that's all I'm going to say at this point thanks okay thank you very much all the speakers and for the participant for all your contribution on the pad there are a lot of excellent comments there so the speaker please go to the pad and follow up on those comments thank you everyone ciao