This mail will try to summarize what I learned, discovered, shared, etc. during my stay at the Mangalore edition of India mini DebConfs 2011 [1]. This miniDebConf is the third one scheduled this year in India. The first one in Kuttipuram, Kerala, back in April 2011 had about 25 attendees, while the second one, in Pune, in August 2011 had up to 150 registered attendees. That followed another miniDebConf organized in 2010, in Pune [2]. This edition was organized at the NMAMIT (Nitte MahaLinga Adyanthaya Memorial Institute of Technology) [3], about 50 kilometers north of the coastal city of Mangalore, in the state of Karnataka, in south-west India ([4] and [5]). Organisation was lead by Vasudev Kamath and a very efficient and active team of Computer Science students from the college. This college, overall, has about 4000 students. Organization got full support from the college staff, including the college principal, Dr. S. Y. Kulakarni, who presided the conference inaugural session. My own travel to India was funded by the Debian project assets, with approval of our respected DPL, Stefano Zacchiroli. Hosting and accomodation for invited guests were taken care of by the organizers in the college guest house (that covered about 15 guests as far as I have witnessed). I gave the opening talk, after the formal inauguration ceremony (where I had the great honor of being presented as "chief guest", which then included addressing the 150-people audience during the opening ceremony [6]), with a 3-part topic : - introduction to Debian, - contributing to Debiand - Debian internationalization and localization. The first part was largely borrowed from Stefano's slides from talks he gave this year, as I have been impressed by the very clear way he can give a good picture of our project, even for newcomers. Newcomers were here, indeed the target, at least from start, as this talk (and all talks of the first day) was attended by a very high number of students. I tried thus to do my best to give a good picture of the project, without going far into technical details, but by insisting on aspects that make Debian special (in our opinion) among other FLOSS projects: - culture of technical excellence, - promotion of the culture of free software, - independence, - decision making systems (do-ocracy, democracy...). A short parenthesis was made about derivatives and Debian relevance (making reference to Ubuntu, which is clearly the most widely used Linux-based system on our attendees' own machines). The second part about Debian contribution was an adaptation of a talk I already gave a few times, trying to demythify the difficulty of becoming a DD or even "only" a Debian contributor. I insisted on that part as my feeling over the years I worked with the Debian community in India is that people often hesitate to invest themselves in the project, by some fear of not being "able enough". Finally, as localization can be a very good entry point for newcomers (several of our regular contributors in the region started indeed by working on localization). I made an overview of the various aspects of Debian l10n/i18n. I also focused more specifically on localization for languages in the country as we currently support several of them in Debian Installer, and made a comparison between languages of India. My slides for this talk are available on my talks page at [7] (warning, 90's web style ahead!). Later on, Jonas Smedegaard (as part of his "Debian Pure Blends trip to Asia"[8]) lead a talk about Debian Pure Blends, focusing on how "derivatives" can work inside Debian instead of outside of it. This (and later discussions) lead to interesting exchanges with representatives of CDAC (Center for Development of Advanced Computing), a government agency that, among many, develops and maintains BOSSLinux, a Debian-based distribution deployed very widely over India on thousands, if not millions, of machines. Jonas will probably develop this aspect on his own, but I found it very positive to see such exchanges, particularly when one knows that exchanges between CDAC/BOSSLinux and the local FLOSS community in India, have sometimes been quite difficult. Such live meetings (as well as those Jonas had in Hyderabad and others he will have in Bangalore) will certainly improve the connection and exchanges between BOSSLinux developers and their upstream, namely Debian. Later on, we planned sessions about internationalization and packaging. Unfortunately, local Internet access conditions, after severe storms that affected the neighbourhood, prevented the planned "live" work session on DDTP Kannada translations to happen (Kannada is the official language of the state of Karnataka). Instead, I could improvise a general session about localization. During the second day of the conference, attention was focused on contribution to Debian, introduced by a talk by Kartik Mistry about "how to become a Debian developer"and followed by sessions about packaging. We also handled a session about GPG key handling followed by a mini keysigning session. Here again, the packaging session was somehow difficult to organize because of Internet connection problems (once again, not because of the college itself but more an infortunate consequence of weather hazards). It has to be noted that the event made its way into one of the major newspapers in India, namely "The Hindu", in its Karnataka edition, where a 4-column, 1/3 height article with a photo about "College near Mangalore hosts three-day Debian meet" was published on Sunday October 30th, in page 6, widely published in a 70-million inhabitants state [9]. As a conclusion, I would like to enhance the big success of this miniDebConf, thanks to the support it received from the NMAMIT college as well as the precise and detailed organization of the team lead by Vasudev Kamath. These miniDebConf in India are vital to keep the community linked. Indian contributors can often hardly participate to general events such as DebConf, because visa delivery is often very complicated for them, and travel costs are very high. We should do our best to always have some of them sponsored to attend DebConf, but also do our best to encourage local miniDebConf there. My own participation was, I think, a success, along with that of Jonas Smedegaard. Having the participation of "international" contributors in these events is something that brings more attention on them and is really highly appreciated by the local community. The care taken by the local team to organize all aspects of our stay in Nitte clearly shows that. Links: [1] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianIndia/MiniDebConf2011/MangaloreEdition [2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianIndia [3] http://www.nitte.ac.in/nmamit/ [4] http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=12.815&lon=74.91&zoom=10&layers=M [5] http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=13.18297&lon=74.93477&zoom=17&layers=M [6] http://www.perrier.eu.org/debian/talks/mangalore-minidebconf-2011/address.txt [7] http://www.perrier.eu.org/debian/talks [8] http://wiki.jones.dk/DebianAsia2011 [9] http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-karnataka/article2581633.ece --
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