 That seems to work. So shall we begin? I would like to introduce you to Alex Reicherschmeyer, Debbie M. Fenboy, who just happened to run into us yesterday out of nowhere. So he will talk to you about the publicity team, how you can help, and how we can help you. OK. Thanks. So thanks for showing up. And as said, I'm Alexander Reicherschmeyer. By coincidence, I'm not only a fanboy who joined yesterday's project. I'm also kind of founder or unofficial leader or whatever inspiration to others of the publicity team. And well, now here I am to talk a little bit about the publicity team and what you can do for us and we can do for you. A small warning, you might have seen that just my notebook crashed after a second. I can't see my own slides right now. So if I look constantly on my own slides, it's not because I don't know them. It's just because I want to know what I'm actually showing to you at the moment. So well, let's see how it works out. So well, what I plan for today is a small introduction, who we are. So an important point, how to actually get in contact with us, what we are actually doing, so that you actually know why you would to contact us, how you can help us. And then a list of open issues which might get solved during the DebConf or might get solved later. So let's start with who we are. Well, while I'm talking about the publicity team, I should tell you that there are actually two teams. The publicity team, of which I created here and surely incomplete list. I basically looked at our IRC channel and looked who has been active in the last time. And then I found out that I forgot something by looking at the mailing list. And I'm sure I forgot also some other people. I'm pretty sorry if anyone considers himself part of the publicity team and I forgot to add him or her. Anyone in the audience? Good. Well, as I said, we have the publicity team. And on the other hand, we have the press team, which considers of some members, sorry, Schultze, Mike Reichler and myself. We have also one assistant, Paul Weiss, who is not here. And who just became a member two days ago, one day ago. Well, at the start of the conference, Francesca, you might also know that I'm standing alone here on the stage. The others are a little bit shy, but sometimes I can convince them to stand up and wave to you. So be nice to them. So now we have two teams. The interesting question is, why? Well, the publicity team is, as I have shown you, there are many members. And basically, everyone can join our list, join our LSE channel, join their own ideas. That's how the publicity team works. People joining, trying to help, coming with their own ideas, doing things I've never thought about before. For example, Francesca just started organizing scheduled question and answer sessions with different teams. That's how the publicity team works. It also means that everything is done. We are public channels, public mailing lists, and go, everyone can join. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time to draft an announcement or something like that. That's how the publicity team works. So the press team, on the other hand, I've shown you before, has just a few members. So it's strongly structured. All the members are official delegates, thanks to SAC. And that's needed because sometimes they need to be able to speak on behalf of the project. Journalists show up, ask a question, and want an answer within hours. There's no time to propose a GR and let the project decide on it. That just wouldn't work. So we need to have some people who can do their very best to speak for the project. And that's why there are delegates, and that's why there are so few of them. As I said, we are contact point for journalists. And our email alias is private. It's not the public list. In fact, I think every Debian developer can read the press mailbox on the master server. I'm not really sure about that. But it's not the public list. That's my point. That's the difference between the two teams. But of course, we work closely together. As you can see, I'm a member of both teams. So is Michael. So are Francesca and Pap's. And well, that's just why we have the two teams. So the important thing, how to contact us. As said, we have an ISC channel, Debian Publicity. You can just join. No password, no anything. Just join. Be happy. We have a mailing list on alias, which you can just subscribe. Was that a question? OK. We have a mailing list, which you can also subscribe to on the alias system. As said, we have press at Debian org, which is a private alias, if you have something, which you would not like to be immediately known. Because one small problem we have is that the public mailing list is also read by some journalists. It also happens that, say, kind of fish announcement we are drafting on the publicity list and based their own articles on an old draft. Please? Yeah. Andrea said, stupid Germans. The case I am referring to was indeed by a German newspaper. So if you have something, which you would not like to be known just in time, just mail to the press alias. Or while you're sitting here, tomorrow at 1600, we have a BoF session. You can easily remember the date. It's tomorrow in parallel to the multi-arc session. But on the other hand, who wants to see what multi-arc is? So just remember, we have an IRC channel. We have a public list. We have a private email alias that you can contact us. So, but what are we doing, actually? Well, one thing is that we have an official Debian account on Identica. Just a small question. Who in this audience knows what Identica is? Thank you, you should put your hand up. OK, who who hasn't raised his hand wants to know what Identica is? OK, who who just raised his hand knows what Twitter is? OK, so I can't say that Identica is a better Twitter. OK, Identica is just some kind of platform where people, institutions, organizations can communicate with a whole lot of people in short messages. For example, they can tell everyone we just released or we are about to introduce multi-arc to tell everyone in an instance that you can participate in this conference by using a specific URL on the web site on the web site. So it's very easy to communicate with other people. Let's give it a chance. We are on Identica. And what we published on Identica is also synchronized on various, well, proprietary web services. I also mentioned Twitter. I think it's also synchronized to the unofficial Facebook account of Debian. Now Raphael went away. Well, I think it is. Oh, it is. OK, it's a list of people who can write to that. Identica account, it's Zeg, it's Raphael, it's Francesca, it's Maike, who is actually preparing her on talk right now. And it's me. And, well, we'll get to the topic how to propose dance later. The other thing is the Debian project news. The Debian project news are more or less regular newsletters. We try to send it out bi-weekly. If you look at your inbox, you will probably notice that we just sent out one today. It's a previous, I think, exactly one month ago. So we sometimes miss our own deadline. And that's a sure sign that that's something you can help very easily. Just for completeness, our newsletter is available in various formats. For example, as an email sent to an mailing list, it's also available on a simple website. There's an RSS feed for that. And if we don't forget it, we also announce that on Identica. And, of course, it's also translated in various languages. For example, into French and into Italian. We have a wiki page about that with more details about that. Well, I can show you a little bit more about that later. And there are press announcements. Well, there are press announcements, so they should inform journalists and our users about important changes when we release, when we change our fingerprints on the FTP master servers, when we are available on important fares, exhibitions. When DebConf is about to start, when the call for papers for DebConf starts, all the things. Well, they're just sent when things are happening, so there's no regular schedule. They're also published in different media. And then to one of two lists. For historic reasons, we have two mailing lists. A news mailing list and an announce mailing list. Back then, the idea was that some people would only like to know about the most important changes, new releases, basically. And some people would like to also know about what's going on in the community. We are a newsletter. So back then we separated those two lists. Today we more or less decide by the importance of the announcement should it be sent to Debian News or to the announce mailing list. It's more or less a rule of thumb and, well, or gut feeling, if you like. Where to send. Of course, they are also translated. And we usually draft them in the publicity team's subversion repository. That's why journals can pick them up. So when to prevent that, sometimes we have embargoed announcements, which are put into the version repository quite late, just more or less so that translators can pick them up or try to, and release on a specific date. But, on the other hand, sometimes we leak announcement previously to a hand of journalists so they can prepare their own texts, ask residents kind of that. We try that on a best effort basis. In the past, we often did not a very good job with that, but I think we are getting better in working cooperatively with some journalists. And, well, there's also a wiki page about that. So other work we are doing, we are acting as contact point for journalists when they have specific questions. And, well, we kind of act as a contact point for nearly everyone else. Many mails we receive at the press, at Debian org, alias, are just people who didn't find the right point of contact. So a lot of work we do is just point them to the correct mailing lists, web pages, and, well, connecting people, so to speak. And what we try to do is also to, well, network with other journalists to keep them informed that Debian is still alive, that we are doing great things, that we are about to release in a couple of months, that it's not a joke, that it will actually happen, all those kind of things that usually happens in, well, more or less personal contacts at exhibitions and fairs. Yeah, as I said, I'm pretty sure I missed some things. For example, the meetings Francesca organizes, or all the nice organization like Valacio does with his artwork and with his celebrations for Debian's birthday. You might remember last year on the 17th birthday is a Zeng's Debian webpage, which, well, is kind of a publicity thing, which is kind of, well, other work we are doing. Or some people who joins the publicity team does. So, how can you help us? It's the most important point. How can you propose a dent for a tweet or an activity update on Facebook? Well, that's very easy. You join the publicity channel, you write dent, colon, and your actual text. Try to have it not longer than 130 characters. Wait a little bit for feedback and someone to actually acknowledge it. Our current policy is that if one or two people have acknowledged it, it is sent out. Someone of the people who have write-assessed, don't worry about that. And, well, that's it. You can propose any dent. For example, Ice Weasel 5, uploaded to Debian Unstable, Linux Kernel 3, uploaded to Debian Unstable. Debian will be present at a conference in Guernalupur, whatever. If it has something to do with Debian, we can dent about it. If it's a nice discussion on a mailing list where some feedback from our users might be needed, we can dent about it. Just tell us. So that's quite easy. How do you help with the Debian project news? Well, that's also not very complicated. There are four major tasks which need to be done. Someone needs to propose an article or a topic for an article. Someone needs to write it. It has to be reviewed. As you might have noticed by now, many members of the publicity team are not native English speakers. At least so I've been told. Thanks. So we have a couple of native speakers just as a hobby. We review the text. We write, be it in Italian-style English, be it in French-style English, or be it in Girmish. So it needs to be reviewed. And of course, it needs to be translated. Not everyone speaks English. So the nice thing is that the Debian project news are just drafted in our subversion repository before they are actually added to the website. And every Debian developer has already write access to this repository. So hands up, who is the Debian developer in this room? Okay. In theory, every one of you, thank you, a Debian developer too. So in theory, every one of you can already contribute to the Debian project news. Even if you are not aware of it. Everyone who is not a Debian developer needs to join a project on alias, our collaboration platform within Debian. It's usually not a big problem. You just request access on the website. And as soon as some of us, some one of us is awake, you get it granted. And no big fuss about it. We also have a small template, so you actually can't do anything wrong by contributing. You just need to lead a little bit of knowledge about HTML, opening and paragraph, closing and paragraph, maybe how to create a link, and that's it. And even if you do something wrong, you are not very familiar with HTML. Don't worry, it's in its subversion. If you do something wrong, we can either fix it or just revert it, revert it or similar cells. It just works. And if you even don't like to contribute directly, as I said, we have a mailing list. Just mail us. As a matter of fact, there are a whole lot of things happening in the Debian universe, and we just don't notice it. There are too many mailing lists, forums, dance, identical stuff, tweets, whatever. We can't monitor everything. So if you notice something which might be worse to be mentioned in the Debian project news, some institution moving to Debian or a nice product based on Debian being released right now or something like that, edit or at least mail us. So then we have the announcements. As I said, Debian is doing great stuff. Just ask Zach. But other people often don't notice it. I mean, we are the biggest distribution which is there. We have ports to all kinds of architectures, to different kernels. We have user interfaces. Other distributions dream of. We have all those nice ideas like removing dependency packages. If you actually remove the leave package, all that kind of stuff which Debian invented but nobody in the outside noticed. So contact us well in advance if you're going to announce something. If you reached an important milestone or if you implemented a cool feature, please contact us. Ideally contact us before you blog about that in your own, in your private blog. Even if it is also synced on Planet Debian or something like that. Please contact us. We might help you to find a better phrase formulation for something like that. We have review teams. We have translators. We can help you get some stuff known. We just need to know it in advance. It doesn't help us if you send us an email saying, well, I just logged about systems that feature I thought you might know. If you do that, by the time the information reaches us, everybody actually knows it. Well said, we can help you draft announcements, review them, translate them, getting your things known. So what are the open issues or problems we are facing? Well, Debian is an open community. All our mailing lists are public. Everything we do is done in the public. Everything we blog is done in public. So people outside of Debian face a problem that there is no distinction between internal communication, which is more about telling other developers about it, and external communication, which is actually written and targeting other people. For example, during the Lenny release cycle, I think it was, one Debian developer blocked on PlanetDebian.org that he doesn't think that the deadline, as it's a targeted release date, can be reached. He actually showed a nice graph showing the release critical bugs, draw a line, and then estimated that, I think it was Lenny, will be released about half a year later than expected. That was shown on PlanetDebian and was, of course, picked up by a lot of journalists, because they thought, well, it's on PlanetDebian. It is written by a Debian developer, or why would it else be on PlanetDebian? So he must know what he is writing about. While, in fact, he was just referring to the fact that he thinks we need to fix release critical bugs faster, the media thought, well, Debian is getting delayed again. It was not easy to ask journalists to, well, kind of reformulate the articles. But it was, well, from our point of view, from the publicity team's view, it was a disaster. An understandable disaster. Well, so if you write something on a mailing list, if you plug something, please keep in mind that whatever you write might also be read by a journalist. And think what the journalist will take from that. So, well, the open issues are not really sorted. The next issue is that the press team can trigger a partial rebuild of the website, but only in English. So if we add an announcement, it will only appear in English. And the translations, many thanks for them, will appear later with the next regular website rebuild. I know the web team is aware of the issue and would like to fix it, but it just needs someone with pearl knowledge, with make knowledge, with VML knowledge to actually do the thing. So another point is that there's no easy way for us to, well, know about major version updates. You know, if a Linux kernel 3.0 is uploaded to unstable or available in testing, it would be nice to mention it in the project news or maybe even dent about it. But there are a lot of important packages. And it's often difficult to find out, well, if it is worse to be mentioned, because it's a huge amount of data. So I'm speaking about upgraded packages, not about new packages. For example, if OpenOffice, sorry, if LibreOffice is updated from 3.3 to 3.4, it might be noteworthy, but we have no means to find that out. Another point is that the RSS feed for the Debian project news is, well, we don't have a feed showing the historic releases or the past releases. We just have one feed which contains one issue. It's not very suitable for many needs to be included automatically on Identica, for example, something like that. Something we might get fixed when Sobel is finished playing with his handy that we have two mailing lists and the moderation of these mailing lists works by sharing a password. This doesn't really scale. We are trying to get the moderation based on GBG keys. If you might notice that about six months ago there was an announcement and soon after our announcement there was an unsubscribed message on the mailing list. Some people giggle, they remember. That was the first attempt to test the GBG-based moderation of the list. So we are working on that. And I mentioned there are two mailing lists, a news mailing list and an announce mailing list and some users are not aware of that. Only subscribe to one and wondering why they don't... I knew one person, a colleague who was subscribed to the news mailing list and was surprised by the fact that when Squeeze was released because the Squeeze release was only mentioned on the announce mailing list. I have no real idea how to fix this problem if it is an actual problem. I don't think it's suitable to just merge them, something like that, or to actually tell everyone that there are two mailing lists. I have no idea how to do that. Another issue is similar to blogging. Sometimes stuff gets sent to the DB and devil announce mailing list which would actually be nice to be a proper announcement. I think two years ago during a DEP conf we had the idea that it would be nice if there was some kind of delayed moderation of the mailing list so that if you send a mail to the DB and devil announce mailing list, first the press team or the publicity team gets notified and may say, oh, well, that's okay. Just let that mail through. Or, well, may delay the delivery of that mail to get in contact with the sender. It is a nice idea, but, well, it needs someone to implement it. First step to solve that problem, better cooperation with the developers, with the community. As you are here, you're obviously interested in cooperating with us. Maybe we can work better, find a way to work better with you in the future. So if there are any ideas what the publicity team can do to be more open, more inviting for current reviewers, for developers, I'm here, just tell me. One other important point is the Debian project, the press team, the publicity team, can currently, well, release press announcement. And that's about it. If there's something happening where we would like to officially comment on it, there currently no means to do that. For example, a couple of months ago, I think there was a great fuss in the German media about, oh, what's the English word? A cease and desist letter, as I called it? Thanks. Well, it was mostly a German thing, I think. But it caused a great fuss in the media because someone got such a kind of lawyer letter because he was distributing Debian. We felt that it was needed to comment on that, to tell the people, well, yes, there is this letter, but actually, to the best of our knowledge, there's no problem with distributing Debian. We felt that there's a need to calm the community down a little bit. But the press announcement was, well, the German phrase is, mit Kanun auf Spazenschießen. Well, it was just overkill for that kind of thing. But we didn't have no other means, so we released the press announcement. There are other examples where it would be useful for the press team to comment on something without telling all journalists. And I love to tell you that the solution is inside. I rumor has it that soon we will have something called Block Debian Arc. That's for you. Block Debian Arc is currently in development. So there are some technical issues which still needs to be solved. We need to come up with a policy, what content may be published there. The basic idea is to have a platform where all developers can propose to, well, write some text, and, well, a few moderators who can say, well, that's okay, we publish that. A little bit similar to the identity casting. People propose it, others moderate it and publish it. That would be very cool for the scenario I just described, to have some way to write an official comment. I mean, even if I, as official Debian press officer, write something in my private block, it is still in my private block. It's nothing which is an official point of view from Debian. So Block Debian Arc, when it's available, will fill that need. So that are some of the open issues I remembered. I'm sure there are more. I have a small collection of links which are useful for Debian computer contributors. Our mailing list, the wiki page describing our team, the wiki page describing how to contribute to the Debian project news, and the URL of our subversion repository, which, as said, I repeated again, is open for every Debian developer to write it. Yeah, fixed yesterday night. And, of course, for our users, some useful things, some useful links, our Identica page. Either way, if you don't know what Identica is, you can just open that URL and just look around. You don't need any client or anything like that. Just open that URL and you can see what we are doing there. And our two mailing lists. As said, please subscribe to both of them to be informed. And how to contact us again. IRC channel, mailing list, private mailing hours, or our BoF session. And with that slide, I'm finished. Thanks for your patience. Thanks for showing up. Thanks for helping us in the future. And, well, if there are any questions, if you search one, please, I didn't understand the question. Here's another one. Please repeat the question. What happened to the Debian package of the day? Was it something which was done from the publicity team? Definitely. The question was, there used to be a service called Debian package of the day, which described on a more or less daily basis a nice package. To the best of my knowledge, the service discontinued because there were not enough people proposing new packages. And while the Debian system has over 30,000 packages, no one actually uses every package available. So you just know a couple of packages you use daily. So you need more input. And, well, is there enough input, enough proposals about new packages? I surely think that service can be resurrected. Does that answer your question? Okay. My name is Andreas Titter. I have a question. In the beginning you were asking or saying, you are not really sure who is the publicity team. I had the same question for other teams, and you might remember that there are this list statistic, who is posting when to the mailing list, and we have a Google Summer of Code project, which also investigates and who is committing to the S4N and who is uploading packages and whatever. So from this statistics, we know who is member of the team by counting the commits and all the things he posted. There's even a talk on Friday, I think, here. Okay. Thanks. More than a question, it's actually stressing one of the points which Alexander made. So when you speak as a Debian developer with journalists in general, when you make a statement, when you post on your blog something, journalists and press in general really want to take your position as an official position of the Debian project. This is the case whether you like it or not. So of course we are free to post whatever we want on our blogs, but please keep in mind that some people might pick that up as an official statement for the Debian project. So even in my case, when they ask me something, I try to make a distinction when I speak on a personal basis and when I speak on the Alpha for Debian project, of course difficult, because they're always something that people say, okay, that's anyhow the voice of Debian, but they try to do that with anyone who can show some sort of strict affiliation to the Debian project. So keep on posting what you want, but please keep in mind that people might pick it up as something more official than what you want it to be. Anybody else? That's it. Hey, thanks.