 as publicity is also well part of what we do on the on the Debian website to attract our users we have this publicity buff here in the round room at debcon 11 today Alexander Reichlich mail from the publicity team will give I will leave this buff well welcome for joining me here now in the round room instead of going to the multi-art talk I'm sure it will be made available later as video so you probably know miss anything for those of you who attended my hour talk yesterday I'm sorry our talk yesterday I had on the last slide the list of open issues and I think we can more or less use it as a well kind of targets audience agenda thanks again of our today I think we just need to clean it up a little bit I think it doesn't make any sense to discuss the distinction between internal and external communication besides that we would like to have a small well text on planet Debian so that was a point brought up yesterday that because many people look at Planet Debian and take it as something official from Debian we would like to have them at a small statement on the on the bottom of Planet Debian that it is just some opinions and nothing official by Debian do we agree on that or would we like to discuss that okay one thumbs up no thumbs down okay so I just noted down as something we agree on or someone else so other topic press team can trigger partial rebuilds I think that's in the domain of the web team to fix it actually the web team consists of translators who would like to see that translators published so sooner or later it will be fixed well what else I use this well maybe I start with that topic because some of you might have noticed already it's something I really like to talk about because I think it's quite important to us it's block Debian org just right come in yesterday and the talk wasn't really the time to give any details about that but a small status update on that is our Debian system administrator team sitting there not the only one from well our Debian system administrators are currently testing the software we might use for that maybe you just can say a few words about that well the idea is to use the idea is to use software called open melody which can generate static HTML content which we then can with a some sort of post commit hook after committing the after publishing the content are synced to every website mirror so we have actually so we end up with block DB and are also being in Geo DNS and so every user faced website is not only on a single machine but published on several machines from the Debian project that's the current idea we are looking into that software if it's suitable for for that what the press team wants yeah that sounds really good if I understand it correctly the idea was to have every Debian developer be able to write an article but I think that will happen in a in a later that will happen in a later state in a later so the we in the in the box we had this morning we said we want to have some single sign-on authentication for web applications the idea for that is so that every Debian developer who has a login to dbdebian.org is able to write stuff or to use web applications with one password if in the end this works out with a melody as well I think the publicity team is very will be very happy about that I'm not sure how fast that will happen as we are still as we as we haven't set any single sign-on or whatever up at the moment ok maybe you had you showed how the publicity team team currently works so how you gather information and how this information is being published that might help others within this room to find out how you are working and maybe getting the team a bit bigger that's a good idea I'm sorry I didn't have really time to I didn't really time to prepare that this both properly you might have noticed we were kind of busy last days well the publicity team and therefore also the press team has currently a mailing list and an ISE channel this is our ISE channel no no it's not that's our ISE channel and our well if you can't read it it's just an ISE channel with people joining in and dropping out occasionally so nothing really important to see okay our workflow as I tried to say to explain yesterday is more or less that we are kind of a mouth group there's not really a borderline who's a member of the publicity team or not so basically everyone can jump in and propose ideas and if they are good it will be done usually we hope that if you join and have an idea you also well if you join and have an idea you we usually expect you to also have some so the will to invest some time into making your idea come true the actual work well obviously ISE and the mailing list are just used for communication the actual work is mostly done via our subversion repository it's very easy usually we use the subversion announcement to draft announcement and the project news before moving the documents into the website well we have some explanations how the version works on the wiki pages if there's something missing just tell me and we can expand the documentation one point we might try to discuss is how to get the deviant project news workflow changed improve whatever to have them actually on a regular interval as you might have noticed we tried to send them out bi-weekly so we that's kind of distracting I'm going back to the Titan pet sorry we try to send them out bi-weekly so that actually means we take ten days for editing them where everyone can write articles or usually we have a small to-do list on the top of the counterft everyone can edit it on the on the second Friday we usually freeze it to give people time to review our English and also for translators to well do the translations and over the weekend that's done and we try to release the deviant project news then on the next Monday if you look at our web page you will see that it's not strictly every two weeks so how do we change that I mean the deviant project news were once the deviant weekly news and I'm I really love that back then I changed the name to project news so any ideas how do we get more people involved in adding the deviant project news and well at least proposing topics but if I haven't mentioned it often enough every deviant developer has right access to our subversion repository well it has again right access to our subversion repositories was small buck with the alien moves with the alien migration but now again every developer can just write stuff into it so but gizmo is wanting to say something probably maybe we want something smaller because actually as far as I see it is really big so we want to put more information in it and this probably gives you a more bigger time frame between the two so probably want something smaller and at the same time as soon as we get the news we get the news out in one week instead of waiting this could be an idea but then if you have blocked of deviant talk probably is useless because on the blog is instantaneous yeah so I don't I'm sorry for being late actually I don't know if we really want to separate what it goes to the blog and what goes to the deviant project news so if the blog wants to be just one single shot as the news comes to the deviant publicity mailing list or if the blog wants to be the deviant project news put it on the blog so each time you have a news you put that on the blog as well as it is now sort of sort of we're asking for random input any idea any idea okay steal ideas from other people and an idea to steal would be to use the Twitter style users you know crowdsource your news so basically if you if you could if you can make the users who just rarely watch the lists you know who don't really invest time to become SVN committers and you know like that if you get them to if you get them to if you just said you have a basic problem you don't even have the list of topics to cover you know you're saying well you even you want any kind of contribution at all so you gotta start small you gotta start getting people to give you the basics of the basics and there was an old old idea thread from I think it was Russell Coker who first submitted it to Debian private many years ago we should summarize threads on the mailing lists but that sounds very ambitious but if implemented in an interface combined with the list Debian org archive then you could have the readers you could poke the readers and say okay we noticed you hit you read three messages from this thread through our list archive interface what was this about you know one word is just enough you know take it and then that way you could build a metadata database you know you could gather metadata about all this unpossible data that requires all the oldest man hours to process and to digest and to put it into Debian project news you know start small that would be my main idea okay well I agree with was on there if there's this kind of major thread on a mailing list some kind of discussion going on it should be mentioned in the Debian project news and I agree with you if we if we send out there's some discussion going on two weeks later it might be even contract contract productive yeah well image in some small flame war which is just ceased then being mentioned in the Debian project news that rising up again that's something we obviously don't want to do I'm not really sure if taking the mailing lists will gain us much as again we get to the topic of tracking website users but I'm I don't think that many people read our mailing lists we as a list archive I guess it's mostly pointers from various news sites or users or yeah it's a just my personal feeling that I don't think it will gain us much but but again I'm not against doing it I'm just going off the reality of there's there's a site called nebel.com that pops up in Google search results all the time for me so I'm guessing that Google leads you know Sergio engines lead on a lot of users on to our mailing list through the mailing lists through archives and then they figure out oh something's going on here people are discussing something that's useful to me or interesting or something so I'm guessing if we would if we exploit this vector of people coming in we might gain something obviously there's a lot of technical effort involved in getting this to work just a small addendum you notice the publicity group is very small and the more technical section over there is probably crowded so if you could if you have an organizational issue that you you may help fix with a technical issue throw it to the lines over there and then maybe something will happen use the resource that we do have over there so by the way it was not a criticism against the Debian project news the fact that it was long it was very well done but still it's very big I think that for a week is here okay yeah I think that we have a parallel problem I mean I'm speaking now as a Debian events team we have a problem that people usually don't publicize their stuff to the correct mailing list so we don't get the information as when we want the information we get the information because we dig into the mailing list blocks personal stuff whatever so we arrive late and actually it is good idea just because our users tell us something so if you get the news about any events or a new release or something that is important when it is important we probably have more news we need to we need sort of filtering that's clear but we probably have more material and in that case we have we can have Debian weekly news or we can have a two-week news or we can have three week can have even I've even have two in one week if there's something which is really important and this is something that I will I would like to discuss with the event box as well even event team as well because it's the same stuff with events so we we publish events before big events there's no problem for small events there's real problem there are some events that they were not announced properly and they discovered that on blog post and then you tell the people look you should have sent an email and they don't reply even to do your request so I know the story yeah I know once was member of science team too I know that you actually you left the burden on me and Francesca and Martin but it was a good choice and so I think that it's just a question of education of our user as soon as there's something it's clear that we cannot do I mean it's clear that we don't leave any ideal world so this will never happen for everything but still probably we need to tell more information to people about what we want to publish today what we want to know and then they will just probably help us in a better way let me let me take one step back here what is deviant project news supposed to achieve the deviant project news are supposed to inform the deviant community whatever whoever that might be about things happening in the deviant well universe that's I'm getting more detailed the deviant community and everything is happening there is quite big it's ranging from well people porting deviant to the herd kernel up to people creating nice to video tutorials or something like that so it's a very wide universe and no one actually can know everything but there's a lot happening on the other side of the universe so to speak which might be interesting or at least nice to know so it's basically trying to be a summary of events taking place so let me come to my point I think our or your our our point is not being very quick here we do not really need to be current on a daily or weekly level if we get out news two weeks too late it is not bad because people who have not read the relevant mailing lists usually want to be informed what's happening maybe they will in some special cases take retakes and some discussions on after the event but I think this is not the typical case I think the typical case is people want to be informed in a larger time perspective well I think our events team will hardly disagree that it's okay to inform two weeks later about the deviant taking place I also think there are thumb well mailing lists that's that's okay to post a summary two weeks later but I think there are a lot of threads where some more input of our actual users might be useful for example several threads on the deep-in desktop mailing list come to my mind where well even desktop is obviously targeting users so involving users can't be that long okay in it on the other hand people who do not read deviant desktop are not interested in the daily discussions on on that topic well why do they not read it then well I give you I can give you one example to give you one example we you might well you might remember that we have a squeeze release recently and before the release on the desktop mailing list was discussed the default team which should come with squeeze there were some proposals and then the space fun scene which I think I can't show you it's well the rocket team one it was a discussion I think over one weekend and some people loved the well the result of the discussions and some people just hate us for the same I'm not entirely sure if it would have been well more useful to have more people involved in that discussion but I think it would have been good idea to have the possibility to mention that discussion I think I think and now for something completely different one of the most major points of the deviant project news when I started them again was to show the people that the deviant project is still alive because back then we had no newsletter we had occasionally an announcement some of some announcement for we're just usual stuff like well point release some security bugs fixed nothing really happening well not to say anything about stable releases but that's how other people might see it and so the deviant project news is our well is the community's voice to the world it should tell the other people that we are alive we are doing things and inform the users as a side effect kind of well what I would like to bring up again what Gizmo already started was the fact when we will have or when we have blocked db and arc what will happen to the deviant project news because if we are doing regular content public publishing regular content is the deviant project news still a thing that should be sent out or should we just have the users reading the block dbn.org thing so to slightly this might sound like I'm derailing that question but it's with a relevant comment I hope the free software foundation recently about a year and a half ago started publishing a monthly newsletter and they found that having a consistent publication frequency really helped them maintain the readership of that newsletter at the same time the deviant weekly product news appears to be published at just about exactly once a month now so it seems to me that if we admit that the deviant product news is monthly then this leads a lot of space for the blog and also a lot of space for the micro updates of micro blogging services I also think that having a blog is not gonna make the project news unnecessary because in my perception what people like most about the project news is that they aggregate things it's a lot like a digest you get them every two weeks or maybe a bit less often and it's not much work to keep up with the going going on in the community you just read through the mail and basically have a rough idea what's going on and I think the people who like this aggregation service that we do for them are exactly those who would not like to keep up with a steady stream of blog posts or micro blog posts or whatever so maybe this is crazy but I guess at some point the project news would probably also have to summarize what's been in the project blog or something so yeah it's a lot of work all this aggregation because it's manual work and there's few people who like this type of stuff but I think they're really really useful and we should not abandon that even if you have a blog and other so going back to what Arne said before I really think that we need to decide what goes to the Debian project news because I'm such kind of a person that don't like microboggling that don't like identical Twitter whatever I want to get emails I get the emails now I can read whenever I want I don't want to be online to read something and so this means that in my opinion whatever goes to the blog whatever goes to the identical account whatever goes to Twitter whatever we want must have an email being it in on Debian events or Debian event sorry the Debian publicity announced Debian announced whatever just create two mailing list one that get microboggling posts and one that they could summarize or digest stuff but I think that we really need to publish as much as possible as we can because I mean we have the DPL in Taiwan and there were no mention of that on the Debian events news and this is just because it was a single talk it was a decision by the events team probably me and not by the other two because I got the email and I replied it was not worth to put on the major events in Debian because we only put major events when we have real presence I mean a big presence not that I'm not saying that the DPL is not a big present but the talk by the DPL without any background why it was invited there whatever and announced two days before the talk I don't think it's worth it as she said about the Free Software Foundation newsletter I still get it I mean I mean I read it I don't read it read it so much because I'm in Europe and unfortunately whatever happens there is mostly in Boston and US but I get the Free Software Foundation Europe newsletter and they have the same problem sometimes you get an information which is too old and you say yourself what's the problem what's the what's the what's worth it with that still they send the information so probably you want to know what happens no matter what no matter if it's actual or not and at the same time you need to advise people what's going on so it's a double problem I mean in my opinion and there's no right solution I'm sorry just quickly I think obviously all of the Debian publicity outlets should include email mechanisms to receive them so obviously the blog for an email subscribe and obviously there should be a way to subscribe to the identity feed by email and then if that's what you how you want to read them then you can be part of listening to those outlets still actually when the project news was still called weekly news I translated them to German for a pretty long time and at some point I wasn't able to get the translation done in time or timely manner and I wondered myself if I should send it out three days four days later and actually I just did and I added a short paragraph on top where I explained the situation that it's delayed and I'm sorry for that and actually several people responded and said yes thanks for sending it out nevertheless so even if it's might be old news and a bit outdated people still like to have the constant stream it's exactly like that if you want to give an idea of the Debian presence we must send out even if it's outdated because it's the only way that people knows we are there we are alive if you want to reach user to participate in something we must send it out only before because otherwise the user don't go because it's too late but I still don't think that that this is the objective of Debian project news this is an objective of mailing lists for example Debian events EU well also do we have a sense of how many people are subscribed to receive Debian product news versus the identity feed versus Debian events EU because that'll give us a sense of which of those is succeeding at convincing people we exist statistic stats I increase the font size a bit so it's readable whatever you're looking at reads news is read by 20 sooth 22,000 people I think I once checked somehow you can such a it's dropping out there but I think that about well I think somewhere you can see the point where we restarted the Debian project news again and so announce mailing list it's read by security announced 31,000 people announced 29,000 people okay okay so we're just checking all the website numbers right now on the mailing list numbers actually where are we going with this I can't check the publicity list because the publicity list is on alias isn't it but it can't find it any case I don't think this is super usable by now I mean it's great we have big numbers it's it's it's fantasy it's motivating and it should make us go on well and it obviously points out that the mailing lists and the newsletters are far from being dead yeah that I agree I just wanted to give one other thing into the discussion in my perception when doing the the weekly news and after that the project news the problem often wasn't how fast do we get our pieces written up and is it too late and should we wait another week or not really most often the problem that we had was getting them full or at least over a certain threshold that we felt was necessary in order to have this sent out to be a proper project news and really the problem I think that that makes us lower it's not so much writing the pieces up it's collecting topics because yeah everybody still exists in here Sweden lots and lots of mailing lists and trying to keep up with everything but then there's all this stuff going on in mailing lists with local in that in local languages and there's other stuff we miss and stuff that went down in some IRC channel and whatever so maybe something that would help the project news to to be faster or to be bigger or whatever you wanted them to be would be to somehow find a way to make it easier for people to point us towards put potential topics like I don't know the most stupid thing that comes to mind is a website with a text field where you basically just drop a URL send hit the send button and walk away or I don't know the identity some kind of cool website URL sending account and there's all this kind of stuff already existing anyway well what we can easily do is well going in the direction of crowdsourcing is to have say on Thursday or even one day before that and then on the TV in an identical the slash TV in calling for content for the TV in project news before it's getting forced frozen that's something you can obviously do what I've never tried that before well it's just an idea and as we as a publicity team decide what's be is published on identica I think it's no problem in getting the axe for that well about getting news items in your view mailing them to devian use should do it too isn't it please I'm mailing it to the mailing list yeah but it's okay but it rarely happens so it rarely happens every issue has on the bottom of it and if you want to continue reading it please send an email to that list something like that I don't think well some deep in developers sometimes and in something but I never see I think I never got something from an ordinary user so to speak I'm wondering if actually anyone read is reading it so but but surely sending it to us list does work if anyone on the live stream is hearing it and would like to add some content to the devian project news please manage to devian publicity at lists dot devian dot org so but I think this might have another you wanted to add something but I'm feeling we are running out of time no it's just a general comment I would like to stress the fact that things evolved quite in a well way I mean we I really subscribe to the to the devian publicity mailing list after last year events buff and at least I see people involved there I see at least two or three different requests for translating or checking the English announcement of something and this is something that I think I would like to to stress out because it's it's a big thank you to the team is working quite well and really we are now trying to improve things but seeing what happens before and where we are now we should see the stuff in a positive way so thank you very much am I getting read well yeah I think we we improved over the last four years I think constantly as it doesn't mean we can't get better plenty of new items for the event stuff which is actually is part of the publicity stuff so we decided last just to remark we decided last year at the beginning of this year mostly that there's an events team that replied to the events at debian.org at us but everything is discussed on publicity mailing list so actually we are just a sub sub team of the publicity team so similar as press adivian organs a publicity team so any other ideas any other topics I think we have still three minutes left looking at my old to-do list from yesterday oh sorry yeah I think I think I said this last year but publicity is one side of it there's also the other side gauging public opinion about devian this is something we haven't looked at yet but I hope we start to at some point and the other thing I wanted to mention was Ubuntu locos we don't really have any such thing in devian in Ubuntu they mostly use for marketing I would guess that's what you would say so it might be interesting to explore this within the publicity team at least think about it well doing marketing and the meaning of gathering of website logos or are we speaking of I think we have one very strong local team which is the Swiss one so sorry I should explain more about the thing so it's an abbreviation for local community and they call it loco and yeah so they organize events locally and hack fests and whatever but I think it's mostly used for marketing stuff yes and to some degree we are in a completely different situation here because there is canonical backing up the local teams sending them material stuff for presenting at events and things like that and we don't really have the resources to send stuff around so again I don't want to publicize my buff my buff sorry the events buff later but we are going to discuss that how are we aware of and how many community devian has in the world in the sense how many communities are really community driven by devian developers of devian people which are involved with the devian publicity with anything else because otherwise it's very difficult I mean Ronda say about told about the devian ch community but actually we are trying to be to do stuff in Switzerland and we don't do anything because there are no big events still we are present because we produce merchandise so that's the main reason people knows the devian ch community otherwise we don't have any big events in devian in Switzerland but so do we have any other communities in the world we I know we have devian France we have devian in Italy in Germany UK so I think that we need the census of a census is it an English word I mean we need to know how many real communities there are and then we can go on we can start from there but it should not start from zero just just to add we are we just mentioned European devian communities but there are quite a lot of in South America as well in North America there are many worldwide but we are not really collecting the information about them in one central place we just learned from them from time to time when we see mostly merchandising okay that's really a good way to get known okay how could one do such a devian community just the final question how would one do such a thing like a devian community census we had the census for the derivative so just make an announcement and see how many people reply well I really hope that's a devian community is larger than the number of derivative there's also a few things I can look at like I remember when we did the last release we had this thing going on asking people who who had local release parties to just check by send a picture or say hi or something and we got messages basically from all over the world telling us that they're having a release party in somewhere and so obviously if there's a party there's a community so yeah maybe we should like rather look for evidence of communities and and see what we can find instead of asking them to add an old register or show up or something well as a matter of fact devian's birthday is coming up it's 18th birthday so one would one would expect so what one would expect to have a lot of parties worldwide but I think on the wiki page there are currently four devian birthday celebrations registered okay yeah time's up well you know where to find us you know our mailing list our ISE channel we hopefully get some minutes written out of that and well see you next year and in our