 Okay, welcome to the second talk. We have Moray Allen here, who will talk about paths into Debian, different ways of getting into Debian, and Moray is a long-term Debian contributor and currently one of the Debconf chairs. So enjoy his talk. Moray. Hi, so this is also meant to be a discussion, so I hope you can kind of wake up slightly and get ready to say some things as well, not just on RCE, either, maybe. So first, before starting off, I'd actually be interested to hear from a couple of people, or a few people, if they can say how they originally came, started doing things in Debian, or why they, I mean, if you're at Debconf, presumably you've had some contact with Debian. I don't know, can I volunteer someone, or maybe like Ashish or Margo, or someone else can say something if we have an audience mic? So I started using Debian around 2001, 2002, and I started just as a user, then I wanted to contribute more, but I didn't know how, so my first point of contribution was trying to create good bug reports, and so trying to be good at that, and starting doing some patches, and then I went to Debconf 4, and to me that was like a turning point in my involvement in Debian, putting faces into names, and I don't know, knowing the people that I was speaking to on IRC, knowing how they reacted, the way they acted, it made me much more comfortable in the Debian community, and I very quickly after that I started like, maintaining packages and doing a lot of other stuff. Ashish was good as hell. So I also began using Debian around 2001, and then I started, I mean, I evangelized Debian a lot to my friends, and they were surprised when I seemed to know what every package did, when they were just running it just upgraded, like what is the block ID to do, and around 2004 or so decided I want to contribute more to free software, not just projects that I started, and was trying to choose between contributing to Debian or Ubuntu, and chose Debian because it was an older, more community-based distribution, and the thing I did in Debian would flow into Ubuntu, and it has these goals of free software, and it's not written anywhere, but basically of being as excellent and perfect as possible, and so I found some random tools that had ITPs, RFPs, requests for packages that I could package, and those were pretty easy, and I found a sponsor by shaking the mentors list, I guess, and then I met Mako Hill, who became a friend of mine, through mutual friend, and then I started doing a lot more in Debian, and I started maintaining the Alpine mail reader, and then became a DDD, and somewhere along this, while not yet a DDD, went to a DebConf, and that also really made me much more excited about the project, so I guess I'll emphasize that's a seven-year gap from 01 to 08, with the activity really going up a lot starting five or six years in. Maybe someone, we can force someone hiding at the back of the room, I'm sure someone has, must have got to Debian somehow. Well, I remember the times when I was using this proprietary operating system, and well, I knew it quite well, but I didn't like it so much, so I read on mostly Usenet that there's this linux thingy, and I got curious, and reading Usenet postings, it looked like the cool guys are all using Debian, so I looked into Debian too. Well, and at some point I wanted to know how this is created, I started to read mailing lists, I tried to learn packaging, and well, and then some people helped me along the way, like sponsoring packages invited me to join teams, and since that time I really enjoyed being part of this social project called Debian, which creates an operating system. So, yeah, maybe just to be interested in who's here, how many people in the room think that they, well, how many people feel that they are currently contributing to Debian, I guess probably most people here? Or, and who is, who didn't put their hands up in the previous question? Okay, and out of people who are contributing, let's say how many people have been contributing up to two years, and then maybe kind of between two and four years, four and eight years, and eight to 16 years, and anyone in the room with more than 16 years? Probably they're in the bar. Okay, so maybe we can hear later on some more people's own versions of how they've got into Debian, but I'll just present a few things to say how the processes have changed a bit over time. So really the, well, if we had someone like Bdell here, if you haven't heard about from some, find Bdell in the bar later, and you can ask him how he got involved in Debian, say, pretty much in the early days of Debian, it just meant you sent an email saying, hi, I want to upload packages, and you got the FTP password, and that was it. Some processes started to develop over time later on, which kind of culminated in the famous NM, or new maintainer process as it was at the time, which itself then evolved over time and became a kind of feared by people as a big bureaucratic stage with, again, not necessarily the truth, but at least the perception from people was they needed to kind of write essays on the philosophy of free software, be some kind of carnal hacker, licensed guru, lawyer, everything else. And also it just, again, the perception rather than necessarily the reality was this took a long time to go through. In practice, at any stage, every time we've had the NM process, there have always been occasional people who had passed it in kind of one evening, a few miles backwards and forwards. But for most people, I mean for myself, when I went through NM, you get this, I got this huge list of questions which just seemed intimidating, and maybe I took a few weeks or a month or two to really get around to finding time to apply to it properly. And then the whole process then stretched out over a few months, which is pretty typical. Much more recently, as a formal process for getting into Debian again, people have created the so- called DM status, which is in a way, I mean some people will disagree with me for saying this, but in a way it's meant to be a kind of sticking plaster for the fact that NM was seen as difficult or slow. This is to say that just much more easily, if you were doing some work in Debian already, you could just apply for this status and be able to upload your packages without needing a sponsor anymore. Now, both of those are kind of to give people some formal status, but again, unlike when Debian started off, to be able to get any kind of formal status, you already need to be doing some work, which is really a kind of chicken and egg problem for a lot of people, that people don't feel entitled necessarily to do the work if they haven't got some status, but they can't get the status until they start. Our motto for this in Debian has always just been that there's no problem, people should come along and they should just start working on something, but if you're really new to the project and don't yet have a good social link, don't yet understand how things work, that can be quite difficult. The traditional way to get involved in Debian, as to be recognized as some kind of contributor, has been by doing packages. Traditionally, since the kind of time we had the new maintainer process, the way this has generally worked is to tell people, if someone comes along seeming interested in working on Debian, then you say, yeah, just adopt some package. You can just look at the WNPP, which is a list of packages that have been orphaned or the current maintainer is looking for replacement, maybe. You can look through that and find some package that you could take. A problem there, though, is that actually pretty often packages have been orphaned or are being orphaned for some reason. Sometimes, and often the current maintainer really knows, for example, the package is basically dead, the dead upstream maybe, there's not so much interest, but because they invested a lot of time in it over the years, it's hard for them just to say, we should kill this package. So they say, well, let's find some new victim to take this on. But it can be then dispiriting if you are the lucky winner of the new package, that you then find out you've got this package which no one's fixing bugs upstream, maybe it's becoming incompatible with other parts of the system, it's kind of out of date or problematic. So you see a lot of people who adopt packages and then maybe six months later or a year later, they haven't really changed much and they kind of find it difficult to move on from that. An alternative approach which, again, is a good approach in some ways, if you're interested in packaging, is just to find some software that isn't packaged yet and package it. But unfortunately, Debian is quite big now. So probably most of the software that a lot of people really want to use and that has a clear license and that is possible to package without going mad has already been packaged. So again, even a lot of software that maybe isn't packaged and seems useful, nowadays often it will be a web app. And the upstreams for web apps extremely rarely are interested in the idea of having them packaged. They think they should just make some huge, terrible U download which overwrites half your system and installs a few languages you hadn't heard of and plus PHP and MySQL and whatever else. So again, well, if you're really an advanced packager, you can try to kind of disentangle that all and make something clean. It's really a nightmare if this is your first experience of Debian packaging. So a kind of what people might be recommended to do more recently within packaging would be, say, to join a packaging team. But again, even in that there is kind of trouble because if you're not in the team yet and if you're not making contributions yet, say you turn up, even if you find where to speak to the current members of the team, maybe on some RSE channel, if you turn up and say, oh, hi, I've never done any Debian work yet. I don't know anything about packages, but I want to help. If you're lucky, they'll say, well, great, we'll mentor you. But in a lot of teams, there's likely to be a kind of lack of interest because they don't really have the time to mentor someone or they're worried that you'll just break something. It varies a lot between different teams, but again, there's no way easily to find out which teams will be receptive necessarily if you're just a new person who turns up. The other issue, so up to now, in the examples, I was talking about packaging, which has always been traditionally how we got people to be recognized contributors of Debian. But in the last few years, there's been much more recognition within the project that, yes, packaging is central to Debian, but it's not the only way that people should be working on it. And we've always, in fact, had a huge proportion of people who contributed to Debian who've done their contributions through other methods. So one that has happened over the years often and has been very successful at getting new people involved in the project has been translations. Now, this is kind of seen as a success story because Christian took it on himself to push this a lot for Debian Installer and then through that to try and build up language translation teams for other areas of packaging. But, and then did active things like we've always had the exciting maps of the world showing coverage for DI, so there's a kind of game element or you can get your country, your language, higher up the list by helping out and so on. But even in translations, in the more general area, if you look at just translations of the upstream software itself, which is actually what users see most of the time, then we don't have any kind of, anyone leading the same kind of effort. So again, if someone comes to Debian as a translator, we can direct them to maybe help with DI or to help with Debian translations, other things like this, but there's still, it's kind of hard for someone who's just starting off. Maybe what they were interested in is actually having some piece of software they use a lot in their language or improving it. And again, even where there are existing translators, they like the packaging people, can be a bit territorial, that they have their own ideas about how you should translate technical terms into the language, for example. So if you come along with someone else with a different idea, then it can be hard to kind of get yourself in there and be seen as a useful contributor and to get really started off. In translations, at least we've had some kind of structure. If you look at another example of a non-packaging outweigh of contributing to Debian, then we have, in many areas of Debian, we would like some kind of design or artwork. But really at the moment, there's no kind of social infrastructure for that whatsoever. If you're a member of Debian already, or if you are known to people who are, if you're already part of the community, then maybe you can produce something, people will pick it up and use it for the website or use it for Debian t-shirts, whatever it is. But if you come along, again, as an outside person, we've had quite a few people over the years who come along and they say, for example, I've sat in my bedroom for the last six months and here's a redesign of the Debian website. Now, they've probably put a lot of work into that and they have something that we could actually be using, but when they come where there's no social infrastructure and they just come and try and dump something like that and say, well, can you use it? Unfortunately, the answer is normally, people doesn't work technically and people just don't like it, they would have preferred something else and so on. So again, this is an example of an area which is not packaging where really there is no way at the moment to easily draw people in and even though we would actually like people to work on this a lot more. So again, the unsolicited work in this kind of area is often just really gets thrown away. At least if you do a package, even if it's for some software that no one uses, your package will go into the archive and be there until it gets orphaned sometime later. If you do some artwork or a redesign of some website and you shove it onto a list, then often it's just chucked away without anything at all. So again, I mean, there's many other areas at the moment in Debian where we would like much more help, but we just have at the moment no way really to get people in. We occasionally are lucky because we find them through people who are doing packaging, for example. They happen to make some contact with someone locally in a place or whatever, but it seems to me that we could be doing a lot more to try to actively encourage people in these kind of areas or have some, I mean, again, as it has been discussed in during this Debian, for example, some kind of welcoming for people who turn up. But again, even if you have some a kind of front desk approach, you still need somewhere to direct them. You can't have a couple of people who are going to know exactly what to do with all these people in every different area like this. And again, these are really the areas where we actually need the most help in a way. In packaging, of course we want new people, but we kind of do that pretty well at the moment, whereas artwork, we're okay, maybe. Translations, we're good in some parts, less good in some others. Something like fundraising, we are desperately short of people to work on and the same for press. And in both of these areas, most of the people who are currently working are people who came for some other reason to Debian first, whereas actually there's a huge number of people out there who have real expertise in these areas and we could be learning from if we could somehow make contact and draw them into Debian. So if you are a new person and imagine that you are out there and you find out about Debian and you want to start working, we do have some documentation online, but as it is kind of normal for Debian, we have various slightly contradictory things. Actually, yeah, I mean, we've got stuff on the Wiki too, but even on the main website, we have a few things like this that you might bump into. I'm trying to drag a window across. So you might find this page. If you look for, you go online and you start searching for how do I work in Debian, then you might bump into this one. It's kind of quite nice page. It's got some useful information, but this is on the slash intro slash help on Debian.org, which sounds a kind of sensible place for someone to start. But if you see it starts off, yeah, you can do some, you can report bugs, you could help with support, internationalization, BTS, Wiki, you could start a new Debian port yourself. I mean, maybe that will happen. Different architectures, do security bugs you can donate. But again, there's nothing here about what might be described as the kind of non-technical contributions. And also, it's just a kind of big block of text with a few links out, but no, again, there's a lack of the kind of social aspect of what do you actually do with this? If you're someone who likes to sit in your bedroom and hack, maybe that's fine. You can go and read 20 different documents and come out with some great idea. But a lot of people, when they turn up, they're expecting to speak to someone and say, well, what should I do? Or is it really a good idea for me to work on this thing? Let's do another one of these. So this is on slash develop slash join. So yeah, how to join Debian? It sounds a good idea too. So what do we have here? We say you should read the DFSG, okay? Read lots of mailing lists. Yep, you can read, you can look for orphan packages. That's the kind of big contribution, that's under the contributing heading here. Basically look for orphan packages or pick up something that's half dead already. And then yeah, we've got a kind of couple of bits that have been tacked on as a kind of afterthought paragraph that actually you could also do documentation or website or translation. And then it's pointed out that actually you don't need to join Debian anyway, which is kind of true, but maybe if you were looking to join Debian then it could be a bit off-putting to say actually you don't need to bother. And again, yeah, so this then describes exactly you can become a DM, which is allowed to upload packages, you can become a DD, and yeah, this should take so many months and so on. So I mean, it's all accurate and useful information, but it's not necessarily very welcoming for someone who just turns up. And a third one from Debian. So again, you might, if you follow the links from the other pages or you might find this directly from Google, then you come here, which again tells you the first big point on the page about becoming a new member is to say you don't need to be a new member to do anything, go away. But we're open, it's okay. Then you can sponsor, do bugs, do packaging teams. But in this case, there's not even much mention of the kind of non-technical things. Is there a question or a point? I think you're being a bit harsh on the wording. I don't think they're trying to send people away. I think they're trying to reassure people that they can start working straight away. Like, you don't have to be a DD already. So we're not a closed group who's only open to Debian developers. You can get in without being closed. Yeah, I mean, I agree. I'm being a bit sarcastic that maybe that's the original intention. Yeah, I just think you're trying to put a negative meaning on it, which the wording isn't trying to convey. I'll micro agree with Ian, even though I wasn't originally gonna talk about that. But yes, I think this wording does a good job of being inviting. Although, if we really believe that, then we should go test it with some random technical people. And that leads me to my major thought here, which is, to the extent that we think this documentation works for people, then we should be able to find, any of us should be able to find five fairly technical friends to show up to this page and then quiz them afterwards and say, here are the things that we think you should have learned from this page. Did you learn those things? And actually, you do the alphabet way. You hear the questions and you find out their answers and you run it against the known good answers. And so user testing this stuff is my major suggestion here so far. The other suggestion I have is that we don't know, I can think of some semi-radical things we could do to improve our, how we describe these things and where we put them. My major suggestion for that would be to put on the front page as you scroll down. Here's the way to contribute of the month. But if we do that, we won't know if it's working unless we set up to measuring infrastructure. So we should do that. Hello, okay. So for developing there is really good documentation but did you click on the writing documentation link for the, on the developers' corner? There's nothing what suggests that how to join the documentation theme. So, and I suspect that's a little bit for the non-technical areas as well that the, how to join in the sub areas is not very well documented and you can see it. If I just browse the page and I saw nothing about, hmm, where should I start? Man page one, page new maintenance guide, but nothing, so here we can start. Look for that. We need to have to make that some translation. So maybe at this point we could just compare quickly what some other distributions apparently that do exist are the Linux distributions or other free software distributions whatever we want to call. So let's look at what do Fedora do here? Is this Fedora? I meant to make the font a bit larger. So yeah, if you go to the join Fedora page, then I don't know. I mean, I think even before going into all what the information is, maybe you can, for me this feels a bit more of a kind of a friendly welcoming page. So yeah, you have chat, join the lists, read planet, get free stuff, and then if you carry on down, we've got maybe you're one of these kind of people. You could be a content writer, a designer, a people person, an OS developer, translator, or a web developer as examples. So you see here the kind of packaging thing is not shoved up as the kind of main thing with others and afterthought, but it's a lot of different types of people who can contribute in different ways. And this, I don't know, again, just some, obviously it's different for different people, but to me the page here seems maybe to have more of a feeling that they really want people to come and work in these kind of ways. Just another couple of examples. So let's Linux Mint, apparently, it's some kind of newfangled Linux thing. So they have a get involved page here. This is a kind of bit different because they start off with, you can do sponsoring and things like this, but then you come down, join the community. And in fact, so they have joined the community without even saying you need to make a technical contribution. You can make a forum account and start chatting to people and that is already, you are joining the community by doing that. You can help others, debug and so on. Then they've got new ideas, translation, artwork, code. So again, there's a, maybe I think I prefer the Fedora one, but again, it's a set of different ways you can contribute with examples that might apply to a broad range of people. And as a final example here, I have again some distribution I heard of some time. So yeah, again, happy smiling people picture, although there are some women in there, not so many, and not necessarily a broad racial distribution, whatever, but anyway, and they have, yeah. So this says whether you're experienced or getting started, you can join the community, you can do it locally, you can chat online, you can help people, then some happy quotations from Yo-No, Yo-No, and then again, different ways to contribute, developers, documentation, design, translation, quality. I mean, in this case actually, they've kind of kept the Debian terminology a bit that developers are the technical people and the rest are something else, but still, at least they've kind of got a broad range of things there. And then again, also giving just links back to things like their Planet blog website and so on. So one possibility of one way to help people may be just basically to try and make the website information a bit more consistent and a bit more friendly to people. I think this would be a great thing if some people who have time were happy to work on, of course that's, I think I'm not trying to say that people wouldn't like it to be friendly or better at the moment, whatever, it's just again, obviously a lack of time so it's maybe some people in this room would have some interest in working on that. I just, I'm trying to leave some time for discussion, but I've got a few other slides to come through, so another thing that seems to me would be helpful from this kind, if we have this kind of website, which again, people have agreed for years as a good idea and people have done different versions in the Wiki or elsewhere, different initiatives at different times, there's some kind of more central list of, even within each of these areas, tasks that you can easily get started on. But again, maybe ideally with the kind of people that you should contact for them, not just to say this is some bit of code that's needed, but this work on this area is needed, talk to this person or this list or so on. And in fact, this could also help existing Debian contributors who are looking for something new to work on. Again, there's been a lot of discussion in this DEBCON as in the previous period, recently about different ways that we can do kind of mentoring within the project, different ways we can have temporary internships of people, whether that's in Debian overall or people who are already in Debian, even within specific teams. A few teams have already done this to try that you can try joining the team for a few months and see how you get on. And again, this is also something that's useful for existing contributors. Again, another thing that people generally agree is a good idea, I don't think this is controversial, is to say that to have more contribution, more communication from teams of what they're up to. Again, this helps within the project, it helps people who are actively trying to get into the project. I mean, I was actually, again, I was pointed out to me, this also helps people who just want to lurk, to start with. The more you have kind of good information clearly there, whether it's on lists or even on planet, even on IRC, but as long as it's on some channel that people can kind of find. A lot of the people who do want, certainly a lot of people who want to work in the technical areas, maybe they want to just lurk on a channel for a few months first and see what happens. But they can only, people who are not yet in the community can only do that if they can find out how to do it. Not if everything happens on some IRC channel that's hidden from the channel list and not advertised anywhere, so on. It seems a lot of people who get, a lot, if you ask people how they got into Debian, for most people there was some pre-existing personal link. Although I think it's very important that we could have some better information on a website and so on, that's not normally sufficient to really draw people into a community. Most people, they have someone they knew in their town or someone they knew from university, whatever it was, who originally introduced them to Debian. So one thing that's being brought up and actually Zach was quite interested in the idea, although not much has really happened on it in the last couple of years, but again due to lack of time from people, is the idea of pushing some more kind of activity of local Debian organizations. What we have successfully done is to create bureaucratic Debian organizations in many countries which can hold money and things like this. There's been, it's much more variable between different areas whether they actually have any kind of social meeting or any events or things like this. And often what happens in practice is that you have a few Debian developers in the city and they may occasionally meet for drinks themselves but they don't really advertise that as a Debian event, they just meeting with their friends, which obviously is fair enough, but it does seem that there is some space for us to more actively push some of these things as local groups or whatever. Obviously again in many places, in most of the relevant places there are already different technical meetings including things like Linux user groups. But certainly nowadays, maybe 10 years ago there was much more overlap in my personal experience, there was more overlap then between the kind of Debian developer style or interest and things like Linux user groups. Now a lot of them have moved much more to actually be Linux user groups as the name suggests and have things like talks about how to use open office or this kind of stuff that isn't typically so interesting to people who are pushing to actually make some free software contribution, it's a slightly different angle. So again I'm not trying to say that we should fork off or split away from any groups we are part of already, but in many places, certainly in bigger cities around the world it may make sense to have some kind of advertised Debian meeting even if in practice it's just a couple of DDs who meet for a drink. There's not really any harm to advertise that and see if anyone else comes along who wants to get involved. So we've still got a few minutes so I've listed here a few topics people might want to make some comment about or tell me why it's a really stupid idea or whatever. So things like local groups, again if anyone wants this, if anyone has specific ideas about the website or would like to volunteer to help work on that, anyone who wants to, who thinks, or I mean again there are some kind of task list already but it really needs some people to more actively curate them to try to seek out things that are easy topics to people to join or find points of contact and so on. Again other ways, if anyone has ideas of other ways that we can find people for what are normally kind of described as the non-technical tasks, as all the tasks that aren't packaging in general actually and other ideas that people have. So who wants to start? I can say something. I think that the ideas were great about how to simplify documentation. I think we should do that but it does not solve the core problem you mentioned in the beginning that many people might want to have social interactions in someone and I'm not sure if it's possible to do that online, maybe we can try to do that but I really like the local groups idea but the problem with local groups is kind of you need quite a high density so that it works because people don't want to travel many hours for these meetings but it's something I'm considering to experiment with in Switzerland. I think it could work like rotating between cities every second month or something and then maybe we'll see how it goes. Hi, actually as one or one and a half things I think you missed what we could start with and what I was doing myself is I just started with some QA things which are obvious to do, which are described as websites and we just need somebody to have time. I mean they are low hanging fruits, they are high hanging fruits, they are very high hanging fruits so one could go up step by step. In the past I have seen once a non-developer who contributed quite many patches to the bug reports. In fact, there were so high quality, that I recommended him to start a process without a package and he went through. So yes, you could do this technical work without packages through the embosses and that's something I think we should recommend to more people and yes, it also helps them very much because we don't get yet another thing which needs to be cared of, but some of the tasks take care of the things that we actually really need help like now. Okay, there's one question from IRC about if there's a possibility or even a policy about providing infrastructure like mailing lists to local groups. Listmasters or Alioth admins want to comment. I could of course, I could comment even if not being a listmaster, but yes, so our case versus is being done so I assume it will be done for other groups as well. In Brazil, what we did was we created an Alioth project for Debian Brazil and then we create local lists inside that project on Alioth so we really trust listmasters who create those lists. So along these lines I'm very involved in Python user groups and every year at the yearly Python conference in the US there's a birds of a feather session with people who run local user groups and more than once I've seen the following conversation. Somebody says, oh yeah, I was trying to get a Python user group started in my random town in Ohio and I made a mailing list and I tried to advertise that nobody came but what I found most remarkable was that once the person sitting next to that person said, actually, I live in the same town and started to mail a Python user group right at the same time but I started mine on meetup.com and then we were flooded with attendees and we've had a great time and we eventually merged with the one sitting next to me and this is not to be an overwhelming endorsement of meetup in particular but just to say that the tasks of not just creating the group but getting the word out about the group are separate and both of them are hard and getting the word out is the harder part. No I think again, I mean it's if you have a couple of Debian people in the same city already, the easiest way is just to make them then meet socially as it is but advertise it then there's no, they don't need to feel bad if they don't have 100 people turn up at the meeting. I mean as even if it's purely a social thing that still gives a much easier social access for new people to come along and have a chat. Anyone here at DebKonf, have you met someone at DebKonf who lives in the same country as you who you did not know they lived in the same country as you until you met them at DebKonf? A few hands, I mean I met someone at the dinner, yeah, I met someone at the dinner who met someone across the table who both lived in Paris, they just didn't know. Which is to say that getting the word out is still really hard? Yeah, I organized the box question party in Shanghai and there was a lot of people who showed up who had never made anything in Debian and it was great but I was not expecting that and I think it would have been even better if I could have found some tasks for them which was up to their level and I think that maybe some others could have the same experience, that's why I wanted to share. Yeah, I've also seen this where bug squatting parties have basically turned into kind of mentoring or introductory events because the people who turned up were people who wanted to get involved in Debian rather than people who were already ready to start squashing RC bugs. Which is fine but again maybe it's we shouldn't just focus on this kind of bug squashing even though that's more directly, more immediately useful for Debian in the short term that really if you get people involved in this way that will in a long term have a bigger benefit. Yeah, so you mentioned quite a lot of very interesting ideas about improving all those ways to get into Debian. If you had to choose, well you also mentioned that lots of people lack time. If you had to choose just the three main ideas that you think you should do right now as soon as possible. It's tricky because some of the ideas I think would be most useful also require more time. So I think having, if you had a kind of welcoming people plus a curated task list and points of contact then those two already would make a huge difference but finding this list of tasks that are accessible for people coming in at different levels is a huge amount of work itself. And obviously in many cases you might even have tasks where it's quicker for someone just to fix it themselves than to really document it. But having those kind of tasks available documented is a useful thing. And again I think the local groups would make a, if we imagine we could flick a switch and have local Debian groups in every major city it would be a huge difference but again you can't just make that happen overnight. Shish again. Okay, cool. Yeah, so it seems like we got a bunch of critical mass for a Debian welcoming team yesterday and the core notion behind that is taking people who have already shown up to the project somehow, made a wiki edit or probably initially just gotten all the way through to uploading a sponsored package and welcoming them. I think we are going to end up over the next six months with some kind of bug curation because we'll want that when communicating with people. So if anyone else is interested in joining this welcoming team to greet New People then please find me, I'm a Shish afterwards. The microphone's not working over there I think. No, no, not video. Again I really want to stress out the point of that. The other ways of getting into Debian like contributing to doc or art are very well documented because someone said to me today, okay, file a bug against the new maintainers guide. Even I who is used to packages, I just thought, okay, where should I go? Then there's nothing on the web page until I thought, wait, there's a package and that's for non-technical people even much more counter-intuitive and this is the part. The basic steps are already done but we have to refine them. Yeah, well many Debian teams are not even well documented for people within the teams at the moment. There are already quite a few teams where people within them have trouble to know what's happening. When I started with IT, documentation was a way to get into because I read the documentation, tried to understand it, tried to use it and there I could go into it and this is for some semi-technical people easier and yeah. And who in the room would be interested in principle in participating in a Debian local group in their city or their region? Yeah, so I think it's possible to make these things happen. Do we have a, we're almost coming at a time. Do anyone else have another point or two? There's any, again, any of the people at the back hiding at the back of the room have a willing to voice their opinion? No, all sleeping. Just wanted to mention my very small experience. Last year I organized a best question part in Dublin just because it was the freeze and I saw there was no other Debian events and then I realized there was no Debian community and a lot of people show up and well I had to leave the country anyway so I couldn't continue much with that but there is kind of a local Debian group now that hopefully will grow with time but it was amazing to see that there was interest just somebody needed to do the first step and gather the people. It was the same in Barcelona that we have, well we have a, we use the Debian user Catalan for doing social things. Well it's a user and we can, a lot of people is asking for technical reasons but it's only used to prepare like we did a party, we did a workshop and people is looking for doing more things. So it's what Tincho has said. One person has to do something and then. I think we're pretty much out of time but Ashish wants to say something quickly. Okay, so Ashish, some last short comment but yeah. This will be very short if you guys make it short so it seems like we have a lot of great user grouping energy but we don't have anybody organizing the effort of making sure Debian local user groups happen. So what we need is two people who are willing to be co-meta organizers of Debian local user groups to keep track of those so we don't have the same event next year at DevCon so we can say that that's gotten better. So who's interested in getting in touch with local user groups and making sure that our wiki documentation about local user groups is up to date. I'm happy to help you with it. Yeah, I'm also willing to help on this but again I travel a lot so it's hard for me to constantly have time on it. So it would be very nice if one or two people maybe who, even people who aren't yet feeling that they contribute a lot to Debian this is a great way to get started in itself. Cool, we'll start with you and we'll talk more afterwards. So thanks to Mare for this great session and I hope in the next year we will see many local user groups throughout the world and in a true Debian spirit they can grow from the bottom up and it does not need coordination from the top so don't wait for the coordinators to form your local user group, thanks. Thank you.