 Alright, hello everyone. Welcome to Debian for Shy People, which is going to be a buff led by Ashish LaRoya. Ashish has graciously offered to try to reduce the IO latency by having two mics in circulation, so he's going to run that mic and I'll run this one. So, yeah, welcome. Ashish? Hi, yeah. So, wow, so loud. Right, hi. I wanted to, I organized a buff with the same name last year and I want to sort of just set the tone for a minute or two about what I want us to achieve and then I want to really have an open discussion. So, to achieve that open discussion, like Dan said, I'll be walking this microphone around and handing it to people rather than standing up here because that doesn't seem like a buff to me. So, yeah, well I guess I began this Debian for Shy People topic about a year ago because I think that a lot of the issues that are addressed by diversity groups are actually just issues of social interaction and ensuring that's of high quality and ensuring that people who aren't sure of themselves or who under-appreciate their own skills that Debian can still get their contributions. And I gave an example of this in my last talk about how there's some people on the Debian Mentors list who, when they don't get a sponsor for a package, they try emailing the list again twice, three times and this is something that some people will do and other people won't. So I want to sort of, Debian deserves to get contributions from both of those people and I want to think about actions we can take, maybe structural changes we can make in processes or ways, things we can do on mailing lists that would be different or other kind of communication media so that we are open to people who under-evaluate their own skills. So to that end, there's this gobby document on the web which I'll be taking notes, I'll try to take notes on during the talk. It's on the directory debconf11, dc11-buff-shy-people. If you're running the mic, you might not be able to take notes. Yeah, that just struck me. Is anyone willing to take notes to that? Okay, great, thank you. So I guess I want to start by having us, I guess I want to start by having us name positive kinds of interactions we've had with people that have helped reassure ourselves. Does anyone have any actually nice experiences to share about interacting with Debian people if you're unsure of yourself? Surely someone has something nice to say. I can go first. As I've been working on Debexpo and I've been putting a lot of energy into it, it's been really great to get thank yous in person from people like Pabs and online from people like Christoph Haas who maintains mentors.debian.net. Does anything, at moments where you're unsure of yourself, has anything nice happened to you when you've been working on things in Debian? Is that a clear enough question? Do you want to try rephrasing it, Daniel? Well, I can just speak for myself in terms of some things where when the Debian maintainer process was put into place, I mentioned to a couple of people that it was something that I had considered when I heard that it was starting up and I got feedback from them. It was something that I had considered but that I wasn't sure I was ready to go ahead and do that and I got feedback from them that was very immediate saying, no, you're in exactly the position that this was intended to cover. There's no reason you shouldn't do it right now and we can just be done with it. So just asking some, the process was basically me asking someone or mentioning it as a possibility and then getting immediate feedback from them that it was a good thing. My presentation please, first? Well, I'm Victor. I'm not actively contributing to Debian but in fact I worked with Gunnar Wolf and was changed because I was working with Red Hat and one time he suggested me to use Debian and I said, well, teach me how to and the first thing that he told me, try and do and that and you need to learn again all over the things and it's really different than the other thing and was like, why? You are sitting with me here and we don't help me. And I think most of the list at one time was like this, like if you ask for something that was obvious for other peoples, you get go and read manual and install that and try this and read that and then maybe you don't need to ask this. It was a very good thing. In fact, I ended using Debian and I'm... No, I was a very good team at the end that Gunnar don't have to teach me how to install at that time Debian because I understand a lot of things in the process but in the moment it was annoying because I was sitting right here and he was here and hey, what now? Could you at least ask him for help when you were stuck or did he just say no, read the manual all the time? Well, he was busy, written something for other things and go and read these or search the web, that kind of things. Yeah. Useful pointers. Well then we can switch to negative experiences. I mean, I think what I want to do is talk for a while about those and get a sense of what the social, cultural, personality, irritating problems are in Debian then maybe we can spend some of the time at the end if we don't fill it all with negative experiences. We can spend some of the time at the end thinking about ways to actually improve those. So, has anyone had a moment where you've not been sure that the work you've been doing for Debian was good and you feel like the community disappointed you? Which part? Well, my experience has been in general very positive and there have been only a few cases of, like, I've been wondering if I've made somebody really upset or something but I think the general problem is that you need to know who to talk to and sometimes you send email and you get no reply and that's very unsure for a new user. So, I don't know how to fix it but that I think is a major issue. I can add another negative experience which is when I actually applied for DD I was initially deferred because I was asked can you give a list of everything you've done for Debian and if not then maybe you haven't contributed enough and I felt put off by that because I don't actually like to, I don't want to make a list that feels like I'm bragging and it just seemed kind of like, well, if that's what I have to do then I'm not going to do it and I was actually deferred for many years as a result in the DD process, in the MM process. I mean, I think one of the most discouraging things we do is on the Debian Mentors List having people wait a lot and like you said, I'm receiving no answers to your emails. Anyone else have any negative experiences they can share? When Debian, you weren't sure of yourself and then Debian failed to help bring you up? It's not a personal experience but sometimes you see ITP probably of new contributors so they are willing to help us provide a new software and someone just replies, oh, why are you crap, do you package this PHP application which is not really needed? So, this is probably not a good way to start either in Debian. Well, when I started making Depth Tags like, I don't know, 2003 or something, I was just alone and I was just building this thing and it took like five years before people kind of realized it wasn't such a bad idea and I count myself lucky I'm a slightly stubborn person when I think something works because if I had waited for somebody to say, well, yeah, that's a really cool idea. Depth, you know, Depth Tags. I'm just saying that it took something like, I don't know, five years or something for Depth Tags to get officially kind of recognized as something useful and Depth Tags? And luckily I'm a stubborn person or I would have given up. Anyone else have any negative experiences to report or negative things you've seen that you think are discouraging new contributors? I can relay a comment from ISC. Lucille's 2011 says that this ask.debian.net was a huge success and maybe something in that regard could be made for contributors as well, not only users. Not to derail entirely, but so you'll know what ask.debian.net is. Have you all? So ask.debian.net is a question and answer forum that I guess, well, it's modeled after the website Stack Overflow indirectly. If you've seen Stack Overflow, it should look similar. In terms of, I guess I could probably tell this to the ISC person on IRC, but the ask.debian.net site, could we just pile on to it and tell new contributors to ask questions there also? Is anyone here of the DDS and contributors, mentors, whoever, do they use it? Like, do you have, are you listening to the text? Well, I would subscribe to some of the RSS feed if maybe. If maybe. How long's it been going? I think about a year. Does anyone know better than that? Maybe eight months? Well, so maybe we can, maybe to respond directly to what you said about the NM process. Do you think that it would be an improvement? Is there something that NM could have asked you that would have generated the same response that they needed that would have encouraged you to actually apply at that point? I'm not, I mean, I think that the NM process has actually changed dramatically since I was initially deferred. So I think that most of that has been fixed in that, I don't know if there was, there were discussions earlier today about things like DD portfolio and mind change logs and where it actually is easier for an application maintainer to retrieve that information without requiring every NM, every applicant to go through and list up all of their contributions, which I think would be good. So I think that part might be solved by now. Thank you to the folks who have worked on solving it. I think that was one of them. And one remark about the terrible threat of Naveen DeVal, I think it was about the PHP Web App that was apparently reasonably high quality, but a few people didn't know that, so they pretended it wasn't... So there were two problems with that thread, as I recall. One was that there was the sort of assumption of knowledge by the people who were like, oh man, another PHP Web App, it probably sucks. But the other problem is that then they implied that through that communication they implied that that person's work wasn't valuable. And so I wonder if... One thing that I've read is that if you're in a public conversation forum and one person says something that's offensive or hurtful to somebody else, it's really valuable for a third person to step up and say to person A that that was a hurtful thing to say. Do people feel that way here? Would it have improved the thread if we asked people to reply maybe privately to the version of the poster or maybe to all of Naveen DeVal saying your tone is unacceptable? Yes, clearly yes. I mean, it's something that is going on for a few years now and I think we're seeing the result. I mean, Naveen DeVal is much more... I don't know, it's less aggressive than it used to be, at least in my opinion. And I guess it's because there are several people, me included, who reply from time to time to say, well, that's not a reasonable thing to say and please sing twice before writing. You always have people who won't listen but if you get three or four similar answers maybe you sing twice really. One thing I want to emphasize is that even if you just join Naveen DeVal and watch for lousy threads where people are mean to each other and you reply saying you're being mean, stop it, or something more concrete, like you should make sure you've reviewed the package before you try to provide feedback like this and secondarily, the tone you're using is hostile to new contributors. If people want to join Naveen DeVal and assign themselves the task of doing that and sort of being the nice person police that would probably be extremely valuable, I think, to the project. Even if you don't feel like contributing to the technical side of that. There's this talk from... I don't remember the names, I think Fitzgerald, something, and Sussman. It's called Poisonous People in Open Source and it's a very catchy name for basically being nice to other people. So, yeah, that's one of those things. When you have this nice community and everybody's nice to each other and then there's someone screaming and being mean, it really sticks out like a sore thumb. So, yeah, when you can tone it down thoroughly by reminding people to be nice to each other, with time it just fixes itself because it really sticks out. Well, I think that part of the point of the talk is that if you don't cut off those poisonous people, then they take over the project or they ruin the property or else. So, yeah, you can address it that way. I just wanted to comment on that. One of my concerns about this kind of labeling is that it labels a person as sort of irredeemably poisonous and some of the best messages that I've actually read in a nasty discussion are apologies from people who have realized that they've crossed a line. Maybe they make an excuse, maybe they don't make an excuse and they just apologize, but I think that itself can set a tone and a bar, an expectation. And maybe folks here have crossed over a line or said something they didn't mean to say and an apology can set a tone far better than a, you know, you shouldn't do that email because it's somebody saying, oh, right, there are community standards here to respect. So, perhaps the reason nobody's talking is because of the selection bias of the people attending. At least on behalf of part of the people that are not typing, maybe it's also because we want to, I want to understand the other side and the thing is, when I started being a DD, I tried to be close to people who tried to approach, but then I don't have time, I have other things and I have not been very supportive of newcomers. So, I mean, I want to know what's the mood in that area. You said you want to know what the mood is. Yeah. I mean, one thing that I thought about doing is running an event for projects to sign up where running an event for individuals to sign up to maybe for a week hang out on an open source project mailing list and every time they see something that they think will turn off, oh, something turned off indeed. Anyway, anytime the, so you make a sort of team of roving nice people where your job as a nice person for a week is to go to a project chosen by you, hang out on their mailing list for a week and every time you see something that you think is hostile or will turn people off or that people who are unsure of themselves will make them extra unsure of themselves, you reply. And then after a week your job is done and you can go back to your normal life. Is this the kind of thing that people will be interested in rotating positions inside Debian for? Would anybody sign up for that? Just a question slightly deviled advocate here. How do you filter out energy sinks? How do you do what? How do you filter out energy sinks? Tell me more about the kind of energy sink you mean. Like, I mean, sometimes you have people who are positively shy, sometimes you have people who feign shyness because they are attention seeking and those can be severe energy sinks because the more you try and help, the more they ask for help. And so I've tried to be nice generally through my Debian career and you reach a point where you become a target for energy sinks and you sort of need to find ways to say no, but if you start being helpful at the beginning, it becomes harder to say no. That is at the moment one of the biggest conundrums I find in trying to be nice and helpful sort of thing. I kind of hit that wall and I'm puzzled. I mean, I can provide part of an answer, but I hope other people can provide other parts of an answer. I would say that one reason I'm theoretically structuring this roaming nice person task to be limited in time is that at least then you know that people who are going to be energy sinks can only suck your energy for a week. And similarly, really hypothetically, we can have forced vacations for DDs during which time, like one or two months a year, you can't do any uploading. You're not responsible for anything. You don't have to reply to any emails on Debian Develop. And you make sure that before the vacation somebody else knows enough about your packages that things are not going to break. The other thing is that if you set one difficult thing, well, if you can set a policy for what kinds of emails you are and aren't going to answer or at least what kinds of answers you're going to send and you make that policy really clear, that can help. Like Pab Salt wrote on the Debian Mentors thread that I was reading to refresh my talk before about how he doesn't, at least at that point, upload... He doesn't sponsor packages. He only reviews them. Because he doesn't want to create the burden for Debian or maybe Leaf packages that stick around. If you could possibly find that some rule you can set for yourself similarly. But is there? Is that useful? What do you think? It's fine in a context of the thing you'd like to set up. At the moment I fail to see ways to apply that in everyday life. I can't tell people, I'll be nice to you for a week. And then I'll tell you to sort of... Or I can't be nice to somebody for a week and then stop replying their private email if they contact me in private because I have been nice to them. And so they will contact me in private and say, well, you've been nice to me. Well, yeah, it will stay a conundrum for me, I guess, for a while. I try to make it a definite policy not to answer private emails to me, which are related to a certain topic, like, I don't know, HDPD or traffic service or something. And so when someone mails to me in private, I just reply, please take this on the list. So that sort of stuff that... Because I don't know everything and I'm not there always, so that kind of explanation helps you get out of that corner, I think. I would like to reply to Enrico because I've seen this problem many times in IRC channels. Don't you think there's a certain time or when you come to realize that whether the person is actually doing some work or he's just bothering you with all the questions? Because I personally feel that if a person is trying and he's asking you questions, you have some instinct which tells you that he actually tried to do something. So don't you think that? Should I take the mic to say I didn't understand what you say? I feel really bad doing that. I'm saying that you talked about being overnight for a long period of time and that it gets boring. So don't you think you come to realize after some amount of time that whether the person is actually doing something or he's just crawling? Yes, I can realize that, that's fine. But once you realize that, once you realize that your efforts instead of having been efforts to help somebody, you've been feeding the energy beast, it's much more difficult to disengage from the energy beast because they can go to other people and say, look, that person helped me and now they hate me. And then you need to handle all the other people that say, what did that person do to make you hate that person and so on and so forth. And you create the monster while trying to be nice. Another thing which helps in this case is to have a support back channel. So we have an HDPD channel and then we have Apogee support where the main crew doing IRC support hangs out and which is very healthy because then you don't let the anger out in the main channel on people you're trying to help. So you have a channel where you can scream and communicate in each other and say, okay, that's a troll, I kicked him or whatever. I don't know, I've never kicked anybody. I've hopped for a couple of years now and I've never kicked anyone. I managed to come by quite fine. But yeah, have a back channel. Absolutely. It should be mandatory in Debian to have a ranting cabal to vent out frustration instead of Debian lists like with a small number of friends and even better to have a hugging cabal because when you have a channel where everybody runs, you kind of just feed each other's frustration whereas if you have a channel when you say, oh dear, I had such a difficult day, look at that, it's awful. And somebody replies like hugs. That kind of improves your life a little bit. And yeah, thoroughly suggested, small cabals of huggers are the way to go. I think there's a Debian hugs IRC channel. Wait, is there really? If not, it should be. Can someone just join IRC and see if Debian hugs is... Anyway. Debian hugs, that was the psychiatrist's channel. Oh, okay. Great, let's keep that going. That's a good idea. Well, I know about Debian Say Hi, which is a different story. Some of you might not know that the Debian QA group is half a go or so. Well, team, whatever, efforts, not a group, it's everyone. It's really confusing to say anything about Debian QA X. Anyway, the Debian QA effort has a Debian hyphen QA IRC channel and people used to join it and try to say hello to each other and also do QA work sometimes. And some part of the IRC channel said, stop wasting our scroll back saying hello, hello, hold this, hello, hello. So, the people who liked saying hello made the Debian say hi, IRC channel. And there, they say hello and also they do QA work. So, I'm a big fan. It should be made like the Debian private hugs email list where everything you email here must always stay private and also you're expected probably to reply saying hug. I already got three hugs. Just now. Okay, so maybe Debian hugs is the answer to all of our culture problems. We can all go home. I'm going to go join the IRC channel. But that wasn't really like, even if it sounds silly, it's a really good idea. Are there other like culture changes that could improve the situation? One thing we've talked about in the past is, one thing that lots of projects have talked about on and off is altering the way mailing lists work so that you can slow down flame wars. I don't know. There's a whole topic. I'm not going to say anything. Go ahead. So, one thing I've noticed about my participation in DebConf is I tend to hang around the same people and talk to the same people and stuff like that. So, next year I think I plan to not talk to anyone that I've already met before and say hi to new people. I encourage anyone else who wants to do that to do so. Last year, DebConf was not on video. Was better? Was better the participation you were in? What's the question? I don't understand. The last year was above with the same name but was not in video. Was in the... Well, was not taped. Right. It was not taped just because the video team didn't have access to that room. I remember that when... I also don't attend that. But I remember loud and a lot of people, the making noise. And here it's very clearly. And I think maybe the cameras and this thing is not helping. Well, I think we also didn't have the microphones to worry about. Yeah, I guess in a way the cameras are hurting because you have to move the microphone around. Last year I also presented more wacky ideas which I could dig up that list of wacky ideas again. But I... Well, what? Okay. I definitely have the feeling that cameras and microphones don't help shy people speak up. So really would suggest not doing that. Good idea. I mean, if we want we could just kill the video and then we could all yell at each other. And then have a group chat. That'd be fine with me. Okay. One thing that on the Topiki Pab said like about how you interact with people you've never met before. I was missing something like an introduction round. But how you do that with 300 people. I was wondering if we could set up some kind of, I don't know, speed dating like mechanism. So I mean you make two lines and you have one minute per person to actually, you know, just say, hey, I'm Luna and I'm doing this and this and this and Dibyan and the other person that can do that. And you say, oh great, I've used this package. Wow, it's so cool that you're getting into Dibyan. And so you can figure it out later for the conference because there's a lot of faces that I've... Well, I have to look, you know, for the name tag and say, hmm... This person looks scary. I'm not going to... That line of people introducing themselves to each other is called the key signing. So at this year's Key Signing Party we didn't do a monstrously long line. We actually divided into 10 groups of 10 to 12 people each and people were expected within their group to introduce each other, talk about who they were. And it's not more than, you know, one or two minutes per person but it was intended to be more of a social opportunity than just, here's my ID, here's my fingerprint, you know, sign my key. Did they do that? Some people did. Enrico didn't understand. That could have been because everyone was talking when I was trying to explain what I was hoping would happen. So we could turn off the cameras and continue these conversations. So I believe it's about self-confidence and actually many people who are trying to work on them doesn't know their own skills. So when they speak with some DD they don't exactly know what they actually know. So they see them as some weirdos and think that they cannot help at anything. So that's why probably they are a little bit shy. So should we actually turn off the cameras? Is there a consensus on that? Does anyone want to think we should keep the camera on? Maybe it's a different question. Okay. Maybe I should have thought about what I was going to say in a second a little longer but I didn't have time, he was so fast. And allow me, you know, a second. Maybe I have the feeling that we are trying very hard to switch or consider what we could be doing to accommodate better shy people or people who don't like asking questions or all kinds of different people. And I wonder whether there is something that we can do in a different level. That is not how the project can change to accommodate these people but what we can do is a project to help these people. I mean, don't get me wrong. I don't want to say shyness is wrong in any way. I'm sure that shy people probably would like to overcome or be able to overcome selectively their shyness in certain environments where they feel comfortable. So maybe we can find ways in which we can help them to overcome this shyness. Of course on the one hand, by making the environment such that they feel comfortable but maybe on the other hand by passing on some sort of skills, some ideas or maybe creating a motivation for them to just try it. Like for instance saying on every Saturday from now on at noon for one hour the good questions are the stupid ones and get laughed at and only the stupid questions are the good ones. Something to get people to just dip their feet into the water and find out that they don't get their head bitten off. I've got an idea. That is a terrible idea. I know, but it worked. You said something. Yes, but was it helpful? I don't know. You're okay now and on air. Oh great, obviously not. Okay, who's next? Who wants to go on air? A really simple question. You want to dedicate an hour a week for that. Well, you should consider time zones of course. And what's wrong with asking those questions on the main channel? You expect to get the resources for answering that from people on the main channel. One thing to consider is to create a dedicated channel for that but of course then no one will be on the dedicated channel. So why, Debian Mentors was originally created to distract people from Debian development. So how would you expect to get new questions answered on the channel? That's a very good question I think and it shows that I really didn't have enough time to prepare what I was going to say. We did talk about this over lunch a little bit and I have this feeling that the sentence you know no question is a stupid question. Only the unasked questions are stupid questions. How many times have you heard that? Does it apply to pretty much every forum that you know of because there are no forum nowadays could potentially or possibly even say that no we actually think that some questions are stupid. Every forum out there says only the unasked questions are the stupid questions and what's the result? The result is that people don't, it becomes so inflated, so mainstream that people don't consider that anymore and if we had the one hour on the Saturday afternoon considering time zones and everything, it gets a little bit more complicated than this but I'm just running some abstract ideas. If we make an event out of this, like Debbie and Balloon Party where you can't do anything wrong and the stupider you get, the better it is. If we had something like this we actually made it a specific event that started and ended in very constrained periods of time. Maybe that would be an additional reminder for people. Maybe that would be an additional motivation. History has a name for it and it's called Carnival. Pretty much any society has a Carnival situation in which rules are broken. We tend to have the 1st of April or Debbie and Curiosa for it but it's not just quite what you're talking about. It's just a data point along those lines. The only thing that worries me about your, well Martin's proposal and wording is that I don't think anybody wants to say, okay, it's time for the stupid questions. Now I'm going to ask. And if nobody laughs at my questions it's that they're really stupid so I should stop asking forever. That idea may be a good idea with a better wording. It's an idea so elaborate on it. I see your point entirely and yeah, no we don't want to say like, this is the time when the stupid people can speak up and at other times shut up. No, obviously we don't want to create this sort of environment. What I would like to create is an environment, an explicit, even more explicit environment than saying it over and over again. That this is the time when you can't do any mistake. When you will not be judged for something that you might do and later regret. This is the time that we dedicate for you to gain experience without having to fear that there will be negative consequences because everybody involved in the experiment gives you this credit and knows that this is for the specific purpose to help people find out that no matter the fact I will not get killed or laughed at because everybody here has made mistakes and survived. Another stupid question for this forum. Are the people who, are those people who will ask the questions the shy people or those who will not read the manual? How many of those? I want to trade. Let me put that on cue. Let me trade microphones. I just want to respond to a couple of things that have been said. I sort of misnamed this bof. I guess I think that it's not so much about shy people so much as for all of us in our moment of insecurity it's not about the person or a label. The other is that there's what you're talking about with these events that you run periodically where you say you can ask stupid questions now. I've been running a couple of things like that on IRC for other projects. We call them build it events and it's just where if you want to become a new contributor but you don't know how then if you're having trouble even just getting your build environment working show up to IRC at this particular time and then Debian Women ran similar one of those for Debian and there were like 25 people or so who showed up. I just wanted to quickly respond to that and it popped up in my head at LCA which is another conference very good conference. They have a I think it's like newbie orientation walk or something like that and that's before the actual conference starts it is like one hour or something like that especially for the people who have never been there to meet and find out from the regulars what happens at this conference and maybe something like this you know maybe an orientation hour weekly where you can ask anything something like that. LCA has more than just the newbie orientation session which is in the afternoon of the day before LCA. LCA also has a a program specifically for partners of attendees and it has a document that's maintained explaining about LCA to people who've never been there before as well. So it's trying quite hard to be friendly to people around the community. I think we're about out of time. Okay well thanks I hope you all keep talking about like cultural personal issues outside of this room and maybe without a camera. Cheers.