Enrico Zini

The role of Debian Account Managers has become the last resort for community issues that do not resolve themselves and I believe this is not healthy for Debian and for Debian Account Managers. I will attempt to deconstruct the expectations and responsibilities that have been piling up on the DAM hat over the years, and figure out how many of them necessarily belong to DAM, and how many could be shared with more, or all, of our community.

In this session, we will host a panel of people who hold (or who have held) leadership positions within Debian. We'll go through a few questions for the panel and then continue with open questions and discussion.

Other people: Jonathan Carter Bdale Garbee Elana Hashman Margarita Manterola Bruce Perens Steve McIntyre

Our thoughts about cooperation aspects of doing things together. Sometimes in Debian we do work together with others, and sometimes we are a number of people who work alone, and happen to all upload their work in the same place. In times when we have needed to take important decisions together, this distinction has become crucial, and some of us might have found that we were not as good at cooperation as we would have thought. This talk is intended for everyone who is part of a larger community. We will show concepts and tools that we think could help understand and shape cooperation.

Other people: Ulrike Uhlig

Debian Account Managers, New Member Front Desk members, Application Managers, Applicants and everyone interested can join in a discussion about how the New Member process works and how it can be made better

Other people: Jonathan Wiltshire Jonathan McDowell Tobias Frost

During the "Ignoring negativity" talk there was no time for Q&A, and in later discussions it has become clear that there is much more conversation to be had in this area. We'd like a second session to allow more people to participate. This is intended to be purely Q&A and a discussion between the people in the BOF.

This is a talk for everyone. Starting from Debian, I have been for a long time part of various groups where diversity is accepted and valued, and it has been an invaluable supply of inspiration, allowing my identity to grow with unexpected freedom. During the last year, I have been thinking passionately about things such as diversity, gender identity, sexual orientation, neurodiversity, and preserving identity in a group. I would like to share some of those thoughts, and some of that passion.

I have been setting up contributors.debian.org and nm.debian.org to deploy new versions to production once Continuous Integration tests succeed on salsa. I would like to discuss what I did and see how to make it easy to have a similar workflow for other projects, and if possible, share the code for doing so.

Projects like Debian can only exist in a connected world, but the immense increase in communication capability of the Internet also has a dark side. The same capabilities that enable intense technical collaboration across immense distances also make it possible for negative voices to be amplified. This session will be a panel discussion featuring some well-known, long-time contributors to Debian who are willing to share their experiences and advice on how to remain focused on what's important. Criticism is vitally important to Debian, but developers need to be able to extract the constructive elements from public discussions. Hopefully, the content of this session will help!

Other people: Chris Lamb Bdale Garbee Steve McIntyre

Gathering to discuss the New Member Process, its current status, what works and what doesn't, the vision for its future. Some Debian Account Managers and Front Desk members will be present, and everyone is welcome.

Other people: Jonathan McDowell

At DebConf Heidelberg I talked about how Free Software has a lot to do about consensually doing things together. Is that always true, at least in Debian? I'd like to explore what motivates one to start a project and what motivates one to keep maintaining it. What are the energy levels required to manage bits of Debian as the project keeps growing. How easy it is to say no. Whether we have roles in Debian that require irreplaceable heroes to keep them going. What could be done to make life easier for heroes, easy enough that mere mortals can help, or take their place. Unhappy is the community that needs heroes, and unhappy is the community that needs martyrs. I'd like to try and make sure that now, or in the very near future, Debian is not such an unhappy community.

There is a new hat in Debian, bearing the flattering title of "Debian Contributor". Everyone who contributes to Debian is entitled to have it, and gets it automatically. It is a way to give due credit to all manners of contributions to the project. It is a way to make all the energy that is poured into Debian visible. I will show the reasons behind the idea, and how contributors.debian.org works. I will show how it may change the way we perceive Debian, and very much for the better.

I have just finished redesigning the Debtags website, consolidating a 9 years long history of bringing categories to a large and complex distribution like Debian. There is more to Debtags than meets the eye: interesting library science concepts, anonymous submissions, an efficient review workflow, a fully automated tagging engine, dynamically generated tagging hints, fancy tag search algorithms. On top of that, there is not much that is Debian-specific in the new codebase, so if you are interested in implementing categories on your distribution of choice, this could give you quite a head start.

At the [AppInstaller2011](http://distributions.freedesktop.org/wiki/Meetings/AppInstaller2011) meeting I started writing [Distromatch](http://www.enricozini.org/2011/debian/distromatch/) which is able to map binary package names across different distribution using a wide set of euristics. Distromatch has the potential of being a radical change in cross-distro cooperation, enabling exchange of package screenshots, categories, ratings, reviews and many other interesting kinds of metadata. Since distromatch has existed for almost a year and (afaik) so far none of this has happened, I am taking advantage of the cross-distro room to show how it works and discuss how to move on from here.