 So, for the last talk today in this room, we're starting with Leandro Gomez. He will talk about building free software communities. Leandro is one of the local team members of the DevCon organization and a long time free software advocate here in Nicaragua. So, Leandro, please, they're all yours. Please, the microphone for Leandro. No, no. Okay. So, welcome. If you're here, you're interested in community work. So, this isn't going to be a lecture. I hope it's going to be the start of a discussion about how to improve communities inside Evian. So, presentation is not working. Nice. So, maybe I'll start telling you who I am. My name is Leandro. I'm one of the DevCon organizers and current team leader of the Devian Nicaragua community. I'm a contributor to the Devian project and Devian users since 2000. I have been involved in community work in free software communities, both at the local level in Nicaragua and internationally. And I'm going to talk a bit about my experience in community work and about Devian community especially and what we lack inside the Devian community and how we can improve it. So, maybe we should start defining what is a local group, what is a local community. For instance, a local community or a local group can be city-based. For example, Devian Hamburg, for Devian users in Hamburg or country-based like Devian Nicaragua that is representing a whole country. A local group usually represents Devian in this case in events, in free software events or technological events, have a booth maybe or organize their own events like Devian Day or install fests or key sign-in parties. Next, please. So, Devian Nicaragua is a community that is very, very young. We were established around the year 2007. We have a webpage that is devian.org.ni and an IRC channel, we represent Devian in organized events since year 2008, approximately. The Devian community in Nicaragua is very special. We work together very closely with other communities. For example, if there is a Alphadora launch party or an Ubuntu event or whatever, the Devian community always works together with other communities. We have very, very good relationships between the different communities. I know that this isn't the case always in many countries, but in Nicaragua we do. So, it's composed mostly of our community of Devian users and contributors. We don't have yet any Devian maintainer or Devian developer yet. Hopefully, we will have after this Devian conference people interested in getting more involved in Devian. So, we do a lot of events. We had an event recently that was the Devian tour. We had several talks and conferences in universities in different cities. We also have packaging sessions. This one was from 2008, I think, where René Mayorga, a Devian developer from El Salvador, came and gave us a packaging session. We also have, well, InstallFest. We have conferences mostly at universities, but also we have social events. I think it's underestimated the significance and importance of social events. And this is something we try to do as often as we can, not only being in front of the computer, but also trying to relate to each other and one of the key success, I think, of our community is that we are not only colleagues, we're also friends, very good friends, and I think that is very important. So, when we talk about local groups, maybe we should look at what other communities are doing. The Fedora community has a program that is called Fedora Ambassadors. That is one representative or several representatives per country that represents Fedora. They have something called FAMSCO that is the Fedora Ambassadors Steering Committee, or something like that, that is a governing body that is in charge of giving resources and helping ambassadors in different countries. Then we have also the example of the Ubuntu community. The Ubuntu community has what they call the local teams. The local teams are the localist abbreviation of local community, and they have around, I don't know, 200, 220 local groups all over the world. In Europe, North, South America, Asia, Africa, Australia, Oceania, and they are governed by a body that is called the Ubuntu local council, or Ubuntu local community council that is composed of six members, six board members. I was a member of the Ubuntu local council for two years, two years I think, yeah, and what we did was helping new teams to get approved status. They have two different distinctions between teams, new teams and approved teams. A new team is a team that is forming at this beginning to form, and an approved team is a team that has been active for six months, 12 months, and have done events and have set up all the resources like mailing lists, websites and everything. That's another model. It's a bit bureaucratic maybe, but it works well in the sense that they have a group of people advising the new communities and helping to grow the new communities. In that sense, it's quite good. So in the case of Debian, we have Debian local groups. There is a wiki page, wiki.ebian.org slash local groups, where there is a list of approximately 35, 35 local groups from 23 countries. Yes, I'm coming back to that in a moment. Why should we care about local groups? Well, Debian has a strong user base, a very strong user base, not only because of Debian itself, also because of the derivatives that are very popular, and the local groups are a new way to reach out to new users. It's a very good way to reach out to new users, and maybe someone could say, we don't care about users. Why will we reach out to new users? Well, because new users can become contributors to the project. So this page, these local groups in the wiki that I talked about in the last slide is outdated. There is 35 local groups listed there, and maybe half of them is not active. If you go to the mailing list of those groups, there are archives from 2004, and then there is nothing. So that's something that definitely needs to be fixed. The other thing is that the wiki page of the local groups don't have any useful content. If you go to that wiki and want to start a new group, there is no content or there is nothing to say how to start a local group. That should be something that has to be listed on the group. If I come from Nicaragua or Costa Rica or Panama, and I want to start a Debian group in my country, I need to know what should I do, how should I start. And that's definitely something that must be on that wiki. Another thing is that there is no list of available resources. When I talk about available resources, it's maybe when you start a new group, you need to set up some basic resources for communication, for example, like a mailing list, like an IRC channel, and that's something that the Debian project can help with. To have an IRC channel on Debian, on ircdebian.org, or a mailing list in Debian namespace, that could be something that the project could help with. And there is no information on how to proceed with that. The thing is that because of that, many groups choose to do the things the wrong way. Some groups have, for example, their page at Debian.org.country, for example, Debian.org.ni, in Nicaragua, Debian.org.ve Venezuela, and so on. And some countries have another domain that is completely unrelated, and that's not uniform, say that. Another thing is sharing experiences. There is no way of sharing experiences we, in our community, we do a lot of interesting things, and I'm sure that other communities do the same thing, but there is no place where we can share those experiences with other communities. And then there aren't a point of contact between the local user groups and the Debian developers or the subprojects of the Debian project. For example, local groups, one of the tasks they can do is, for example, translating, and there is no connection, no contact between these local groups that are maybe interested in translating and the Debian translating teams. So what can we do to fix this? One of the things is to encourage the creation of local Debian community. I think it's a great idea to have someone representing Debian at a local level. It could be at city level or country level if the country is small or even at a university. The other thing is to maintain a directory, an updated directory of local Debian user groups. So if someone wants to know where can I find a Debian group in Honduras, for example, you can look at that directory and there is an email, a contact person, maybe an LRC channel or something. The other thing is create, as I said before, create useful content, create content that is relevant to this group, not only the groups that are creating or forming, also for the groups that are already working. And then also establish best practices. When I talk about best practices, I mean how to solve conflicts. It's an important thing. And managing resources, how do we find events, something like that, and yes, maybe how to organize events. The other thing I think we don't do very well is publicizing what we do. Tell others what we do. Tell others what the local groups do. There is maybe a mini debconf or a Debian event or a Debian booth somewhere and we don't know, we don't find out because it's not properly communicated to others. So one of the things we can do is increase the visibility of the local events and initiatives. Maybe through the Debian planet, maybe have a Debian user group account where one can post what the different Debian groups around the world are doing. And maybe also coordinate with the publicity team and make some stories in the Debian project news. And another thing, one of the last things, is establish not so bureaucratic and excluding governance model. Because while someone must maybe coordinate this effort but not doing it, it's so rigid, also bureaucratic. And that's all for me. I don't know if you have some questions or comments. Well, I just have one question. How do you deal with the people to continue working in the communities here in Nicaragua? Because in El Salvador sometimes we have a few years back, some people were active in the communities, but later on there was no people to take those work. Yes, it has been a problem here with some communities. Some communities, there are very, very active persons who start the community and do all the work. And then with that person has other things to do, maybe work, real life, then the community dies. What we are doing here in Nicaragua are trying to mentor people. For example, here at the Central American University they have a local user group. And what they do is that they mentor other students so they can take over when the student graduates. And it works very well. What we try to do is that the new people coming to the community give them responsibilities so they can learn by doing. And it has worked so far, I think. Obviously there are experienced people, veterans, old people like me that started many years ago, community that still are working, but you see many new faces. For example, this year we had Felizal, Yeratuka, and we had, I don't know, 50 volunteers. And when you look at the group photo after the event, half of the people, I didn't know the name, because they are new people. So I think it's really working. I think there is a big difference going back to the early slides of your talk. There is a big difference, I believe, precisely given what makes Debian unique. You compared, and I think it's an interesting exercise, how is the local Debian community working to how are other distributions communities. So yeah, that shows clearly that the mentioned ones, Ubuntu and Fedora, the international groups do have a following for creating user groups. While in Debian, well, I am aware of very, very few user groups around the world. What I think that serves more usually, and maybe better, I don't know, is the fact that instead of being something that, it's not delegated, but instead of being the central authority approving you to be the local leader, I think the process is backwards. If there is a local community, and usually if the local community registers Debian.org.ni, nobody will care. I mean, in some places we have seen that Debian demands a domain name to be given back because it was used for a unclear purpose. But I don't think we can expect Debian to go down and create local communities. It's the other way around, the way you've been working here, and well, that's the reason I was first attracted to Central America because you have managed to keep the, to make out of the very different and disconnected local communities, not only of the five countries, but of the many different local places to build a larger community. And that shows that there is the power to build larger projects. So I think that that's the reaction in which this should be pushed and grown. Yeah, I think I also don't believe that you can create communities from up and down. They must grow organically. I think that really. But I think Debian could also, the Debian project could also encourage or help or make life easier maybe for the growing communities, for the new communities, or else that happens. What happens in El Salvador, for example, there are people that are working hard many, many years and then they get tired. Well, people that are officially blessed and all that also get tired. Yes, of course. So, well, for example, what has been discussed by several people so far in this conference is that Debian now has this role of non-uploading the developer. That role has been used for people doing translation documentation work. It could be used for people doing art work. It could be used for people doing like global breaching or wide-reaching community work. I mean, it's not defined. So I think you are in a great position to start exploring that role. Because as Stefano said, we only have five non-uploading CDs. And the other thing is we still don't know what to do with that role. It's a role we needed. And at least we have five people who have a field with their profiles. But, well, we need more people to show different ways to use it. Yeah, I think that's a big problem, really, because many people think that it's difficult to get into Debian. It's difficult to contribute to Debian. And I think Debian is the easiest community to get involved with. It's really easy. It's just jump in, do the work, and really, really, it's really easy. But that's why I think we need user groups also. I don't think it's a question of the ease or difficulty of getting involved. Maybe it's a perception from some people that they're not a developer. So there's like two tracks. There's like a developer and there's not a developer. You don't have to be a software developer or an engineer to believe in the principles of free software. And so that's something that needs to be debated over and over again, is to work out just who is a member of Debian. Is it someone who can do packaging and do software engineering, or is it someone who believes in these principles? Where is the right balance? I mean, for me, the principles are actually more important. So I think that we should actually be focusing on that area as a community. I think the communities are great in that sense because it attracts not only developers or programmers, it attracts a broad public. We have, I don't know, lawyers in our community, business administrators, and really developers or programmers, or very few. That's exactly what the non-uploading DD status has said. The project has agreed that we want more people who aren't developers contributing to Debian. And if you go back to that slide of things that need to be done, all of those are great projects for someone who wants to get involved in Debian. We could really use a guide on how to start a community. I'm the only Debian developer in my city. There may be two or three other people I know who I have persuaded to help contribute things to Debian. I wish we had a bigger community, but I don't have the time to make it happen. I would love other people to try and help push that. And if there were more resources for that, it would be useful. Any more questions? I don't think this talk can reach a conclusion. Maybe the main conclusion is you have to do more work. We have to do more work. Everybody has to do more work. I think, again, if you're working around this topic, it means, well, you may be not uploading the number six. That's the path. I think everybody recognizes you have done a lot of work so far. And, well, all of you just... I mean, I know many from you are not from this country. Just the fact of traveling to Nicaragua and devoting some days to be here, it shows there is interest. And there are things you can surely point out that need to be done. Well, it's an interesting exercise to do talking in English, having just two guys who don't understand Spanish speaking here in the front. I think it's interesting. And also that this talk can be useful for other people later on. So you want to discuss this further? We're going to have a buff on Friday here at Roberto Terana at 3 o'clock, 3 p.m. So you're welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much.