 Okay, so hello everyone. I just wanted to welcome you on this 17th edition of Dabconf in Cape Town. What? So everyone welcome. I'm Mehdi Doghi, the Debian project leader. So just wanted to say welcome and glad to see you here. I hope you will enjoy Dabconf as much as we will do all. And I will let Bernal and Ronda explain to you what is Dabconf and how to make it successful for as experience for you. Thank you Mehdi. I think we don't need this. Thank you very much. Okay, welcome. I attended Dabconf for the first time last year and two very valuable members of our community to me gave this talk. So I'm going to do my best to repeat it to you because it was very useful for me. This session is for people who are new to Dabconf as well as for people who have been to Dabconf before and you're all welcome to participate. Whether you are active or not actively participating, whether you want to get involved or are involved in Debian or do not want to get involved in Debian or Debconf. You are still welcome to participate. You are welcome to participate in any way that you would like to, whether that's actively or quietly what we call lurking. Whatever you do, be true to yourself. So this is true both for this session and for Debconf and I think Debian in general. The most important thing, you can ask front desk anything. Ronda, the most important thing about Debian and Debconf is our diversity statement. Do you want to tell us about it? Yes, there was a quite lengthy discussion. There was at one point the diversity statement proposed because to make it clear that Debian welcomes contribution from everyone and regardless of how they identify, how they are perceived and to make it clear that the Debian project welcomes contribution from everyone regardless of different types of discrimination that are going on or whatever. As long as people are working together in a constructive way, we will come everyone in the project and the same holds true for Debconf. And a lot of the work of Debian is technical, which I thought would be a huge barrier for me. I am technical, but in a completely different way. I don't understand computers and that's okay because a lot of the contributions is also, as we can see, creativity, graphic design, translating, all those sorts of things. And users are also very important. Can I ask how many of you are attending Debconf for the first time? Oh, wow. That makes me very happy. It makes all the hard work worth it. How many of you in this session has been to Debconf before? Okay, thank you also for being here. Okay, the next, so I forgot to say we have five points in this talk. The first one we just did, the welcome, the second one is a diversity statement, very important. Then I'm going to take you through the tips and tricks to make Debconf good for the team, which will include Polito's site tour as high voltage. No. Okay. So I think the most important thing, although it's really difficult sometimes because there's so much information, is the Debconf Wiki. It's very well curated. There's a lot of information on there and it's open to everyone to participate and to add and to edit just like a Wiki is. The Debconf mailing list is also very important for information and discussions. And a lot of things that are happening in addition to the technical part of Debconf happens on the mailing list as well as IRC. So you need to talk to people if you want to go sightseeing or drive around because sometimes those things don't make it onto the official channels. The IRC, who knows, who doesn't know what IRC is? We all know IRC. Excellent. I didn't know about IRC last year. Hashtag Debconf. And then there's also a bot which is misbehaving today, but tell us more about the bot. It was a bit of an x thing up. The TC Scattlebot is supposed to announce when the bot starts, when the full times are so we don't miss out the important part. And it also announces when people arrive so that you know when your peers are here. There's also the possibility to opt out from that because not everyone feels comfortable with being announced in an IRC session that they are here. Yeah. And it hopefully should also send to Twitter when the talk starts so that people who are remotely attending are watching through the video stream also aware which sessions are going on and where they can participate and watch them. And the IRC is a lovely channel that really makes us a global conference in the true sense of the word. Okay, from the globe I want to do some very location specific things. I'm introducing you to our nine to remember the right. That's the one. Yes, is F5 or F11 better? We'll see. We'll see how it works. This is Polito who has gone away again. Does someone have him here? No, he makes a horrible noise. This is our chicken. And when he arrived, he did a site tour so that you don't have to. But you're welcome to follow in his footsteps. This document is on the Internet somewhere. But I will quickly go through it with you. Polito's English is not that good. He also trusts no one. But he likes Cape Town, thankfully. This is our view from the city at night. This is our map. So we are the meal times and the residences are here. We are over here now, I think. Further up here? Sure. Okay. There is beer. I love beer. I understand not everybody loves beer, but I love beer. So as long as you're in this region, you're good. There's also a lot of good things to see. Yeah. Main road is for over there. Okay, this map is also in your register in your registration badges, along with most of the information that you need. Okay. Fuller Hall is our home. There's some deep camps, hack labs. There's the quiet hack lab. There's the happy feet hack lab, which is the most sociable one. And then there's also the super cow hack lab, which definitely has the best views. If you get up early enough, you can see the sunrise from the balcony of the happy feet hack lab. No, be quiet. Okay. There's also hack labs around the conference areas. We're just struggling with venue access. So we might update those venues. And there is internet in all of these places, as well as at the tennis club above. Right. Quiet hack lab looks like this. Very good hiding space. Okay, happy feet hack lab. It's very warm in temperature, but please don't switch too much heaters on on the same plug points. But you should be here most of the time. And it's nice and warm here now. Okay. Jamie Hall, I think we've moved up and down enough times today of those all nice and fit now. Okay, to get to ATMs and drawing money is right next to the Jamie steps. There's also is super fly here. There's a machine to buy a time. It doesn't work really well to buy a time from the banks on campus. So don't try to do that. Come talk to us. We've got a machine that is developed in South Africa for this problem. So please can use it. 28 times in there, which have a different charge that you have different feet that you have to pay if you withdraw money from there. I think the one on the left side is the cheaper one for foreign people. All right. Is it the FMV that was the net bank one that takes cards? Polito does not trust banks, neither do we. This is just right next to this one kind of the blast one. Yes. The three ATMs is a bit lower down. And there's also on that side is the lazily social. So if I could show you if we're here, the ATMs are over there. And there's also over here the lazily social, which is also where there's cafeterias and things. So I encourage you to walk around a little bit. Both of those are really close and they're fairly on the same level. You don't need to do up and down too much and go and explore. And on the weekends, it is a little bit quiet. In the week, there is a lot of activity because there are research staff and students here. So it's still fun to do. It's safe during the day. It's safe during night, but don't carry your valuables with you. Just for in case. Okay. Any other questions on this? Are we good? Right. You found the knock network operation center. You're not supposed to go in there. People are very busy. The 11 B is where you find the front desk. Very helpful people. Jami shuttle services. You can use the blue buses that are on campus. You need to show them this if they ask you. And there's also an emergency phone number, I think on you. If there is a problem and you're not around, like you're not seeing us. Yeah. Front desk has an emergency number. It can take SMS's. So if you suck anyway, just keep your badge with you at all times. This information will help you get home. Okay. We've got that. We've got that. Right. Then we also have a blue lab where there is computers where you can work on Graham. Do you want to say something about the blue lab? It's upstairs. It needs swipe card access. So you need to find someone with a card that looks like this to let you in, right? Okay. But they're all computers there. And if you need extra anything, that's a nice one. I'm not sure if we're using Snape, but most South African plugs look both like the European plugs and this three point South African plug. And we do sell adaptive plugs, but I think they ran out today. So they might be more again tomorrow. So if you do get stuck, just please come talk to us. Okay, tennis. We can play tennis here. You can hire rackets. If you want to do swimming or any other sports, if you want to do anything at all, please ask on RC or get in touch with us. We've been doing a lot of trips. I think a lot of you seen we're going walking with the dogs tomorrow afternoon. We like to do a lot of stuff. So please get involved. That's a nice way to meet people. Okay, I think we're almost finished. The club pub, I think is opening this evening again. It has a fireplace. It's very nice. That's where we spent the camp. And then the last one here has a couple of useful information on which I think I'll leave there for the moment. Okay, the next thing, person to person interaction. There's a lot of people here from all over the world, and our languages are very different. Some of us really struggle with English. Don't think about it too much. The important thing here is about sharing your ideas. Keep it simple, but say it. The point is communication, not being perfect. I know I speak very fast. If I speak to you, please tell me to slow down. Don't be afraid of that. Having said that, if you are a native English speaker, try to speak slowly. Try to avoid jargon or slang terms. Check in with that other person. Do you understand? Do I need to say this in another way? Say it in another way, just in case. Moderate your assertiveness. The other person needs to deal with your language barrier as well as your personality. Please bear that in mind. Give some time for the other person to understand and reply. And you're unquoting and re-curing with hilarious. When you have finished saying something, wait for three seconds before you say something else. This leaves a pause for the other person to finish parsing the audio that was buffered in streaming. Build the syntax stream. Navigate. Compile. Optimize. Understand. Figure out to reply and say it. And sometimes we need multiple parses. Don't be afraid to give constructive feedback. Don't be afraid to give compliments. If you need attention, volunteer. It's the best way to make friends. It's the best way to learn. You can do only an hour, half an hour a day. You meet interesting people. Sometimes you get an extra t-shirt even. Get out of your comfort zone. And then take the time to recover. It's okay to feel tired with a lot of exposure. It's okay to take time out. When you see a bunch of people standing in a group, try to include others in a common conversation. Sometimes it's really hard. There's language barriers. There's interest groups. But it's the only way you learn magical things about the other person. Do you want to tell us about the games that are being played at TIP? Well, there's one game which is quite infamous, which is called Mao. You see people sitting around the table with cards in between them and rarely speaking a word. They probably play Mao. And don't be afraid. It might be difficult at the first time, but it gets addictive. And you're not allowed to ask the room. Yeah. No speaking about the room. There's also games like Assassin, which I think is Maddox's favorite, right? No? Well, it was, but all the people he played with are dead now. There's Weerulf. There's board games. There's physical games like the tennis. There's also key signing. You've seen an email about the key signing party. It's a running thing. It happens all the time. I think Ganef is giving a talk about it at some stage. Gunnar. That's the reason for the numbers on the badge. So the people with numbers on the badges are part of the key signing list. But even if you don't have a number and have your key fingerprints on a slip of paper, you can still approach the people to exchange keys. Okay. Shall we spend a couple of minutes on questions? Do you have issues connecting to IRC or working with IRC? There are several people from the OFTC network team here as well. Just speak up, go to either me or go to the front desk. We will help you in getting IRC clients that have the OFTC network. Okay. There was another question in the back here. There's rumours. You're talking about the pub with a beer. There's rumours and I know this morning there was a private function there. So when that happens then it isn't open to other people. On Sundays it's open only if there was enough people on Saturday and there's enough beer. So I think you just need to check on IRC the whole time if it's open. The tennis pub also has beer and also has some snacks and we can arrange when that is open. It's just a hello and up your walk. No, we talk to someone who opens it but there is smaller operation than the pub so they're easier to just open and close. They only have bottle beer because I don't know about the number so we couldn't know. Is it open every confirmed? Okay. So the UCT pub is open tonight from 7 p.m. Matt comes in at 5 p.m. so I think 6 p.m. Okay, 6 p.m. But you'll definitely see people on IRC talking about it. It gets a lot of attention. Any other questions? This is the UCT club, the same thing you like. This is the microphone. Oh sorry, the tennis club here under that. No. So the question is is the UCT club the same as the tennis club? No, there's a sports centre downhill which is close to where you come in if you probably pass this big concrete looking building as you come into campus. That is the UCT club. The tennis club is very much uphill with tennis course. Okay. So the UCT club is on the bottom right of the man. So if you go out from full house down the stairs and to the left you'll get directly to it. I can try. Navigating in reverse here is really weird. I'm trying, I'm trying. Good to see you somewhere here. This is full house. These are the main stairs. And the tennis club is up here. And you saw the tennis club again. You play a game, point and tell. Okay, any more questions? There was supposed to be some campus walk that was supposed to be happening. I think that's tomorrow at four o'clock. Four o'clock in the afternoon? Yes. Thank you. And I think we'll probably, I don't know if we'll leave from here or from Fuller. It depends where my dogs are. Is that coming with? Okay. And that's with me. Yes, yes. But it'll be four o'clock and I'll probably... Say again? My one dogs, well they're not registered. They're like Polito. They don't trust IRC. They probably ate it. My one dog's name is Raz as in Rasputin and the other one's Fiona like in Shrek's Fiona. Are there heaters left at the reception of Fuller House? I don't know. Who can we ask about that? Are there heaters left for the personnel rooms? I did see a bunch delivered. I don't know if it was for us. We should get another batch of, I think, 10. That has been delivered and there's 10 more but I think the first batch of 40 has been delivered. But if you are cold, please let someone know. We can organize something for you. Okay. Another question? Hello, hello. I don't know if it works. Do you have any comments or remarks just if we want to go into Cape Town or explore the city a lot or at all? And just because someone keeps asking about cold, I'm Canadian. If you have cold fingers or cold fingers, put on a hat. It's not a joke. It's seriously the best thing to do. Dry clothes and a hat. There's probably been about 100 people who've been here for a week now and they've organized most of themselves. So as a local, I'm probably a worse person to ask because I don't know what challenges you have. I know that if you keep going down here, if you walk down here, down then main road is here and there's a lot of shops that sells beanies. There's also the UCT shop and they also sell beanies that's branded with University of Cape Town. Yeah. But also, if you get stuck, please ask. We do shopping trips a lot. So... I just wanted to add because the question was a bit, I guess, about how do we explore Cape Town when... Yeah. Cape Town is... Cape Town is... Cape Town is... is not kind of a completely safe city. Cape Town is not kind of a completely safe city. But the places where you run around, even at night, are safe if you're in a group. The thing is, there are people who just want money of you. There's no social security system in this country. So there are just very poor people and sometimes they are very desperate. So I would advise not to run around alone at night, unless you know the place is where you go. If you're in a group of three people or more, there is no real risk. The thing is, if you want to go into Cape Town, there's three options. One option is you call Uber or a taxi. Uber works very well here. And you usually go down to V&A waterfront. So V&A like Victoria and Albert and then waterfront. That's kind of the touristy location where there's overpriced restaurants and lots of funny sales shops. But there's also a big mall and so anything you would want to have, you find there and there's also great pictures opportunity towards the Table Mountain. So everybody goes down there and takes pictures of the Table Mountain. They're even kind of steel frames set up there. So tourists know where to stand to take pictures from Table Mountain. It's all very well laid out. So that's kind of the easy thing to do and probably something you should be doing. It's one of the options for the day trip on Wednesday. If that's enough for you and you just want to explore the city a bit. But you can easily do this in the evening as well or during the day when there's two sessions on which you're done. I'm not that interested in that. Do you say something about the day trips? I could. There were questions about the day trips. We would love you to sign up so that we know what to organize for you. The one option apparently has a big waiting list. Don't be afraid about that because we can probably organize more buses but we'll confirm. So just put your names down in terms of interest. Don't worry about that it's full or not full. And the options are on the wiki. I don't think I should. If you don't know what to choose, go to Cape Point. It's the best one. That's what I wanted to add. About three things you may want to do here. The one thing is the waterfront. Take the pictures. You need a nice day, right? If you don't see the Table Mountain you don't need to go down there because it's only overpriced malls then. The second thing is you may want to go to the Table Mountain or even up the Table Mountain to take the picture the other way around. There's one of the options on the day trip and you can go with Bernal. She will actually walk up there and if you're then still in the mood she will also walk down from there again. But you could take the cable car down as well. People with a more normal physical condition may just want to take the cable car down. It is very steep. It's a thousand meters steep uphill and another thousand down like heights. You may not want to do this. And then for the day trip there's one option which the locals here recommend which is basically go down to Cape Point which is the most southwestern point here in South Africa. And on the way there's a thing called Boulder Beach where sometimes a few penguins hang out and you can go and watch them. So that's kind of a nice South African experience in a day. So like these three are possibly the most you can fit in a week touristy while still attending the conference and doing what you really want to do here to interact with the Debian community. There's one more question? If you want to look more on the dangerous side where most of the penguins live in the city there's Long Street District. There are a couple of fringe districts. There's the Green Point District which is a very pink neighborhood. There's the Octimetry District which is very student, academic kind of people. And Woodstock which is a little more on the rough side but there's some very interesting spaces there. So if you want to live on a slightly more dangerous side of Cape Town I'd recommend going to Long Street. So I think chatting with David he sounds like he knows all the interesting spots afterwards. But time off here first so we know that we don't need to look for you. Yes. Okay, let's move on. You can still ask questions throughout. I thought it would be, well from last year it would be great if some of the past Debian conference could share their stories, maybe a highlight from Debian conference. There's so many stories. And if some of the new people to Debian conference tell us a bit about how you got here and why are you here? Any volunteers? Brenda, what's your best experience? What do you remember? My first Debian was 2005 in Helsinki and I was kind of nervous because I didn't know many people personally back then. I mean I lived in Austria and drove to some conferences in Germany and know some people from there but not so many Debian people. And it was kind of interesting there because so many people that you interacted with before just through IRC, chat, mail, whatever you now know personally and you get a completely different feeling for the people just by sitting together for 10 minutes, 15 minutes talking with them and the next email you received from them you're really completely different. Back then it was also still a lot of blame wars going on on the mailing list. Clearly that has sort of ceased but one of the things that I took for me from Helsinki is because Helsinki was Finland, Finland, lots of saunas and I said after that it's hard to engage in a blame war with someone you have been to so many. Right. Do you want to tell you three? Yes, Paul. So last year was my first TAPCOMF I knew in advance that TAPCOMF would be here this year and I thought well I'll go to Heidelberg it's close by for me, it's from Holland and next year I'll skip and see what happens but I think already during last TAPCOMF I decided that I really wanted to come here because it gave me so much energy while I was there meeting all these people working on stuff together maybe hard stuff, easy stuff, other stuff that people just asked you hey can you help and that was we need to get things done and then we just did it together so that was great for entity for me. How many bugs that you guys squashed last year? I don't know, I squashed a lot of other people's bugs. I did some of my own. Hi, my name is Shereesh, this is my first TAPCOMF. I came because basically I had heard about TAPCOMF for quite some time and we have been doing some TAPCOMFs in India so we hope to at some point we do not know but we are looking for a newbie we have some people from India here so we are looking for that new energy who can be with us and can help organize and I'm also looking forward to TAPCOMF organizers to give me their wisdom so I can use some of that maybe to make a formal bed whatever I need to know and also speak with my people that this is the thing that we need to work on so I hope to do that. I come from a place where it's average 35 degrees centigrade and this is 15 so I've been repeating the same dialogue so I think I've warmed up to the climate right now and other than that the community here is amazing and I've met a lot of new people the climate a lot of the things that are unfamiliar practices are unfamiliar so when you're at home I've been taught rigorously by my parents do not look at strangers do not even look at them don't talk to them nothing so here it's like oh random person just say hi start talking start a long conversation so it's a very different experience and it's really fun so this is just I've been here only for barely 24 hours so hopefully by the end of nine more days I can have a lot of wisdom to take back and it's a very great experience I've met a lot of people thank you thank you for the wonderful interview Hello everybody I'm Bedeal I guess I'm sort of the antithesis of a new person since I started in the Devian project in the fall of 1994 and I've been to every Devconf since Devconf 2 the thing that I wanted to add that I hadn't heard spoken about yet today which came up in the similar session last year and I thought was really important is if this is your first time in a Devconf and you meet somebody or you hear somebody giving a talk or in a session that you think is really interesting and you'd like to meet them or talk to them don't be shy about it the reason that I come to Devconf is to have the opportunity to meet new people that are enthusiastic about this project that I have now put well over 20 years of my life towards 20, wow it's a lot I don't even want to think about it it makes me feel old sometimes but please don't be shy about finding people whose names you recognize or that have said something that you think is interesting in a session or whatever and come talk to us it's the whole reason we're here thanks Bedeal okay one last thing we're going to do a little exercise now if you don't want to participate you don't have to but it is a lot of fun I want you each to have a pen and a paper there's some pens and papers in the front that we could distribute who can volunteer helping distribute these thank you you can tear the paper in half and share with other people if you can that's as much paper as I could organize a short notice okay I'm going to wash okay does everyone have a paper once you have your piece of paper could you fold it so that you have four sections you know where this is going how much do you like that's okay that's fine don't go smaller than that though you optimize things for a little bit don't you okay once you have these four pieces please take in your first quadrant what brings you to Debcom spend like one sentence, two sentence, not a lot secondly in your second sector what do you do in Debian or computer related if you don't do anything in Debian yet and in your third section what would you like to do in Debian I'll give you five minutes or so thank you what are you going to do a little exercise getting you a little bit out of your comfort zone but not too much what we're going to do now is ask you to meet up with someone take your paper with you and one partner asks the person the question what brings you to Debcom the other partner can read your answer because you know how often you stand there and you're like I don't answer and then when you stand there you're just like I don't know so now you do, you have your cheat sheet okay so let's do that and then we say swap you tell the other person what the answers are and I promise you it's going to descend into chaos and that is okay and then we're just going to do that once or twice or three times and then it's finished and you can take your paper with you and you can use it as a tool to make friends throughout Debcom does that sound good okay so I think do you want to stand up stand up, let's stand up, let's mingle with it