 I would like to really have a birth of a feather session, not a talk, and I would like to ask you to contribute and participate, not only by asking questions, but also by expressing expression options and criticizing the idea, if there's anything to be criticized. The basis of what I'm trying to talk about or what I would like to talk about is the small teams thing that DBM is a very big group by now, and it's starting to get to the bottom of its scalability. We have officially about 1,000 people as DBM developers, lots and lots of users, lots and lots of knowledgeable people, and some inactive maintainers, and we start to lose sight of each other, we don't know each other anymore, of course for a long time already, and I think that small teams are a very good way of addressing all these issues at once. Small teams, as I expressed in my platform, that's the URL there, under the small teams topic are I think one of the most important characteristics that a group as DBM can have to grow in a healthy way and in a scalable way. Because they can provide a smooth entry into DBM when people ask lots of questions, when people don't know the ways that DBM works yet, and where they need to learn a lot, and where they perhaps only want to help out a little bit in the beginning, at that point they could learn easier and more smoothly and without less interruptions and stuff in a small team. It's also a good way of getting to know people because you only have to learn to get along with 10 or so people, not with 1000 or the people who are hanging out on the big mailing list or on the ISE, and because you are able to get to know each other faster you're also more likely to get to know them quicker and feel at home faster. Because of that it's also much more likely that you don't drop out as fast. If you have friends and if you have people who you relate to, not only in a technical context but also in a social one where you can talk about any problems you might have, not only technical but also with your car or with your favorite football team losing again and stuff, this might be one possible place where you can start to talk about stuff and where you could meet others to relate to. That's not the goal to only talk about football or cars, but it's an additional thing that you might be interested in and your common developers, they might be able to be interested in the same things. I talk about groups on ISE where you have a little community which shares more than only technical problems. These small groups can also form a certain knowledge pool. When they work on a common subject they will communicate about problems and solutions and they will also be able to remember problems and solutions that others had before and be able to ask the other one how did you solve this again and how did that work and they also will be able to help others to solve the same problem again and perhaps solve the same problem themselves perhaps. So knowledge is spread out and it's not in one single place but it's in several places at once. Because these teams can grow and divide themselves, they are also very good way to scale because they are self-organizing. There's no central authority which will be needed to talk to when the team splits up into two groups, into two smaller groups again, once it grew. Once the team discovered that one part is more interested in the translation part for example of a program and the other part is more interested in further development and they have reached a certain size and they might just be able to split up and still have ties there that work on their own on these special focus topics. One question, I'm sorry Mr. Starr. Do you have in mind teams, small teams of developers or end users or both? Actually it can be a very smooth new maintainer process actually where the training happens in the group and it doesn't need a formalized thing more or less. Once you notice that this person grew into a very knowledgeable person in this field you might just tell them, hey, why don't you get a DB account you could work even more efficient then. We think that you know everything that's needed to be a full-fledged DB developer and others might not be interested in that. Perhaps they would just like to translate this little application forever and update strings and stuff or perhaps others come into the group and by just asking questions because they have problems with these kind of applications in Debian and with time they not only know the application but they also become interested in developing it further and then they might even do that. Actually in these small groups it's also much easier to develop your special skills your talents that you as a person inherently have even further to say you might notice for the first time that you are very good at graphics design not just programming and with help of others in that group you might develop that skill further and further and become, well, learn in that context. Others might perhaps notice that they are good leaders for these kind of small groups and it's really hard in Debian right now to develop leadership skills because leaders are right now kind of frowned upon and in these kind of groups it would be possible to train without being able to do much damage in the small scale these kind of talents and things which are definitely there but are right now in Debian partly recognized and, yeah, not really and within these small groups communication gets much easier because you have only few people who are, you have to relate to you know people better, you know what their buttons are what they need to talk about and how to explain stuff because it can be informal and it takes less effort perhaps the knowledge within the group is probably better distributed and communication is easier then I also gave some characteristics of what the team should be like in my platform they shouldn't be growing too big the sweet spot is I guess seven people and if it becomes too big then people who side of each other they drop out and the mere missing action problem reappears if the group is small people who drop out who seem to drop out can be caught much easier it's not about catching people it's more like keeping people hot on the topic so to speak or if someone is having a hard time in real life you might either support him or know what's going on and trigger him once the problem is perhaps over so that he can come back into the group or can come back to working in the group and the group must be aware and should be aware and you might even look forward to the point where it divides where it's not one group but two groups it might be, some people might feel like oh it's so cozy with these few people here and we don't ever want to grow and don't ever want to separate but actually it should be in their minds that's not a bad thing and that it means actually that it's a healthy process to at some point split up and extend the whole growth process and that it's a healthy and normal thing it's a biological thing so to say and these people must be somehow compatible social compatible yeah that's what I said so if some people have a do you know what I mean with social compatible it's hard to explain a field can someone think of a good example? maybe it's a German understanding only a German understanding perhaps is it a German thing to say social compatibility? if you dislike another one then you will not work with them together you don't understand me? of course yeah but it's not just communication it could even be like work habits some people might like to check everything into version control very quickly and have everything well documented and some people may have a completely different style to that and it would irritate each other if they had to work together and they weren't really having the same style and for this for the communication it's also important that people spend time together that they don't just and that this communication is kind of real time that it's not mailing lists are kind of not very lively well it can be lively but they it's hard to get the character of a person on a mailing list mailing lists can be much different than meetings like this or ISC or other more interactive things so it would be good if the contact is as real as possible and if people are in the same time zone even so that they can meet on ISC or what not regularly or if they have phone meetings for example even I'm not sure could be everything what I also said before is that the team should not concern itself about technical matters only even if it's a technical working group that it should be possible to bring up personal issues that's important for for growing friends more or less the goal is not to have an exclusive group of friends but to have people who feel something positive for each other who have some kind of respect for each other not only working-wise but perhaps even socially the team will not work together what should we do if it doesn't work in this team that comes to conflict resolution the question was what could we do if we if people can't work together in these kind of small groups so if one or two members of the team are just stupid say it this way if people are just stupid to be dealt with well there's always the option to to leave them for example that's the ultimate reason the ultimate to fork it's possible that these two people are more people that fits better into another group and then you should encourage them to look for that group if they are working on the same topic if they are working on the same topic and these socially stupid persons are technically perfect yeah that's interesting is it? I think teams are never affixed in this dynamic process some members will leave the team and others will join the team so there's always this dynamic thing of course you also should be able to address such issues that you should point out to a person that you should perhaps change in a certain way or that the whole group needs to perhaps adjust and become more stupid the problem is that the people form around the task I have no certain thing in mind now it might happen that people who are formed around certain tasks are just not able to communicate what they want to solve the task I think in real life it's not that common I think usually when you form a group and people notice that they don't fit in they just don't grow in further it's not that much of a real problem I think and it's more likely that people who work well together or actually form a group I think the real life events are very important for small things and if there is a communication problem when I say you I would have something else to say but you must make your best to have people just meet actually just like we are doing here I used to say that people are very unlikely to fling together when they have met once in real life and this is at least very important not easy to do this is important for a team's life to just meet and as you said to be kind of a group of friends and share something else than technical tasks true another thing which I also briefly mentioned was that the group should be open to new people they shouldn't form this we are feeling together we are feeling so good together we don't want new people because they would disturb our nice little world here but they should be open for people who want to come into the group who have additional talents and who want to participate they should be they should even have some kind of smooth entry point where they can easy tasks for newcomers actually it's not true that new people in a group want the sexy problems right away spare checking the documentation is an excellent task for new people really things that need no high skill set just to come into the thing just to get used to the whole process simple things are much more effective to rope people into the real work which comes sometimes later than the sexy technical problems which are to be solved later another good thing for a team is to have some kind of leader I think you see that in lots of places in DBM the international internationalization project has good leaders I think DBM installer has good leaders Davian Adieu has a leader there are other groups in local contacts which have leaders and that works actually well it helps it's not that there are small kings also which don't listen to people but they are of course caring for the group in some way and they try to further this group it's nothing to be scared about that someone might become the evil over what not friends well, kind of like the opposite what do you do if you want a team and you're ready to lead and you have all kinds of information but nobody likes your software enough to join the team I think you know what I'm referring to yeah webman is a problem Enrico's team has the same problem with staff tags and he started with what up it's not true that nobody likes that it's not like nobody likes webman well, it's not true everyone wants to help and they say they're ready to help and then they take one look at it and you never hear from them again that's the problem it seems to be popular with the users they have a look at the code yeah yeah Enrico tries the approach of giving simple tasks to people to actually have the simple tasks ready and tries to rope people into doing them first and to get them more and more interested yeah this is one thing I made for the shadow package maintenance to get more people involved we have a lot of areas and we started by your localization tasks and I get a few people for localization tasks bug triaging is very important and it doesn't require as much skill as you might think doing some good bug triaging needs a good knowledge of the bug tracking system but not necessarily a good knowledge of the software and it's quite easy to give this task to new people as long as they know baby and you know that's what I wrote on my platform more or less and you didn't elect me yeah this is why we are here so we have to choose between Brandon and you and we choose to see you you and I voted for Brandon so what problems do you see what do you think what would you like to talk about regarding small teams I want to give my experience with the Germans called the Linux team what we are doing and how we are working together so we started this this year to experiment one weekend in a month so we have every month we have one weekend to learn and to work together and if somebody joins this weekend I really know if I could work with him or not so it's a good chance to know about people more than by mailing list by IRC but there is a mathematical it looks like a mathematical problem I have done a lot of work in political issues and I saw the groups are always depending between 10 and 15 people if it goes up it will split nearly automatically and if it goes down less than 5 or 4 people it will die so I don't know I'm sociologist but I didn't found out why it is but it looks like a mathematical problem in communication have you tried to split the group no have you tried to develop a new leader in that group no we tried to build other regions regional groups is the approach in the northern part and there are other groups what I'm thinking what is important to find a solution for somebody who wants not more join this group a good solution not to lose his space so if there is trouble and somebody is coming how to solve this actually what you are saying in range of people, numbers of people who can work together that often is an indication of the potential of the leader most people or most leaders have a certain number of open parts which they can keep connections up on and often the leader is the social person in the group who keeps everyone involved in stuff and these some people manage somehow magically to attract over 100 people and keep them alive and keep them going I'm not such a person but there are actually different types of leaders and the type of leader which is ultimately effective is that leader who looks for new leaders makes them grow up take over responsibility and take over part of the group there is now a working and learning weekend now in Germany at the same time great and it's running really you can go to the ISE you can see what they are doing so I think the point is actually at this it's a scalability problem and it's a leadership development problem at that point often groups need leaders and most groups in Debian actually have leaders and yeah some are smaller maybe our leaders in Debian because of our technical culture we based the skills to be a leader mostly on technical skills yes this is probably a problem we probably more need leaders with social skills as you said and maybe less technical things because if you have both the technical things and the seat of leader you can become a dictator okay and just if you have I speak by experience about this shadow thing because I don't know a single byte of this the code of this package I upload and this is quite good because you have good people who give you good advices and you just have to organize the things so that they work and this is the role of the leader and sometimes just hide himself or herself and just hear and listen and summarize that's a part of the group of leaders about the scalability it probably depends on the size of the project because saying 10 to 15 when you talk about Debian packages is a lot of people and I'm afraid that not much teams will reach that limit 10 people I'm just quoting from Debian privates it sucks that our former DPR is a magistrate in psychology and did the fuck about that I think this is a really priceless example I do not speak about these defects he did not thought about but I think it's not true but the reasoning that he is a magistrate of Parxology to use that he did something wrong this is a completely bad example of what happens in Debian it doesn't matter what he studied it's just to be a leader and not having anything by the way he is technical in several things I think did everyone understand that? okay no why do you rephrase you understood Andreas pointed out that TBM I think was criticized for being not only technical person and a Debian leader which in my point of view is not really helpful and not good TBM is one of those where people have underdeveloped ports he kept up with hundreds of people under their personal situations true he wasn't very visible to the anonymous people in Debian I think he only worked with the port I'm not too sure he was very very open at the beginning I can mention he personally would tell me why they weren't able to hold him he just disappeared and laughed last year of almost two years period he was very not visible anymore but before that he was very visible when I started with him he was quite he was quite open quite helpful I've really only seen him on the Debian intellectual channel and practically no one else not the problem the problem is that people based their reasoning on the fact that he is studying psychology he was completely ill actually I got the same feedback from people when I asked for feedback why I didn't get elected and someone said that I should try to build up a good technical reputation before I would attempt to become Debian project leader which is I think not the best way to approach this but I also got questions about how drawbacks of small groups have said that it might become a fight in fight between small groups in Debian that the current team would start blocking the installer or that Debian Agu would hinder the development of what not I don't know have you ever experienced this I think it's a different type of group if I would say it's a smaller group it's a release group which also says that it's a small group of people it's very open to 8 people I can join our discussion channel I see everyone can write a mail of course it's an off topic discussion it's a no off topic discussion please for for these groups I don't see anything of course sometimes the kernel team, the installer teams release teams have different opinions the kernel versions but I think in the end we got to a solution we all could live with it nobody was really happy but the facts didn't allow it to work even one group was totally happy because it was just difficult that happens sometimes but I think in the end it was very productive go together other teams more hidden I would say this person is also part of the team I never knew that before when I was astonished when I was in Vancouver I was like in vain, oh that sounds like a team's cut in two members of the team's cut to the first meeting I don't even know when I get to the plane yeah and then it's really something I'm not so happy with and it's probably difficult to work with such a team because when it was announced that for example Teams Cut makes the meetings public or it makes the published minutes of the meeting I think I've said one or two minutes minutes is a detailed election which is something extreme as a goal such as things that make it a bit more difficult and for example for these teams we make our meetings public if we have meetings we usually make meetings in public so of course sometimes exceptions because the public is the default not the exception and I think this question is which way of team do you want to like have different such situations could you rephrase that into a more clear statement I think that's the kind of I think we have different types of teams and with such I would say open teams it's it's very easy to get on together especially if there's a connecting point it will happen very fast there are people who are in both teams that's true between the Stoner team and the Colonel team that's true between the Stoner team and the Lisa team for example and other teams if the team membership happens on a more an other criteria it might be more difficult of course the teams will have a good reason for example security team will read Windows 6