Re: An agenda going forward for Debian-IN

Dear Jaldhar,

I am closely following the activities , increasing contribution , outreach events around Debian in India for some point of time because of my personal interest on FOSS communities and community structures. I share most of your concerns and sharing my opinions in some of them

On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 1:50 PM, Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar@debian.org> wrote:

I've been meaning to write this for some time but only now have got around to it. Some things I say might sound critical but rest assured the intent is not hurt anyones feelings but to help Debian progress further and further which is what we all want right?

I am pleased to see the number of events organized by our community is increasing. However there are some concerns.

1. Debian-In is not a legally recognized entity. This means receiving any kind of monetary donations, goods, services etc (which will be essential for growth). is playing with fire. Our first of business should be to get it organized as a duly constituated NGO, charitable society or whatever status makes sense under Indian law. This organization could also formally invite foreigners to events (a need which I unexpectedly experienced recently.)

Most of the Indian foss communities may have thought about this at some point of time . Indian Python Community setup their non-profit society and working well with outreach focus (Thanks to Kenneth's efforts ) . Swathanthra Malayalam Computing setup our non-profit society in 2010 and focusing on complementary actions to developer communities such as policy efforts, government interactions, partnerships, acting as a conservancy to various Indian language foss projects etc.(Disclosure: I am present secretary of SMC) . Gnu Khata setup a private trust Digital Freedom Foundation and operating using that .

Main Organizational challenges in this area is we need dedicated people to work on regulatory and legal compliance side like 12 A approval and 80G , regular annual audits and FCMA/FCRA approval for foreign contribution receiving . It is a long way to go for a non-profit and in SMC we are still in first step . Being a mentoring organization in google summer of code we cant even accept summer of code project money (because it is foreign currency and organizations need FCRA/FCMA approval for receiving this )

The search for a way leaded us in depending a conservancy , Software in Public Interest (http://spi-inc.org) , same organization that provides Organizational support for Debian to process our google summer of code mentor fee and travel support. Now we are a SPI-associate just like Debian . Community depends Indian organizational support for activities in india and SPI for supports outside India . By looking at this conservancy model we felt this is the model we need to follow in India , to support various free software initiatives within India. We initially offered this support to Indian language projects alone , as an umbrella organization. We recently supported savepoddery.com campaign for processng indian language donations. If Debian india wants to use this conservancy facility , SMC may be happy to offer it ( I am proposing this in personal capacity , and need to discuss with board) Any of the support services as in http://www.spi-inc.org/projects/associated-project-howto/ is not difficult for an organization who already handling such legal issues .

I can tell you we can forget about hosting Debconf in India any time soon with out this step.

2. Debian content. The principal aim should be to increase awareness of and participation in the Debian project. While we do intersect with other Free Software/Open Source projects to lesser or greater degrees, Debian has a unique viewpoint. It is not clear to me that this always gets articulated. Take the recent minidebconf/debutsav flap for instance. Frankly I don't see why there has to be any non-Debian content in a Deb* but if there is it should only a minor amount and still have a Debian "angle" in some way.

In my personal opinion , adding a Debian packaging of any ideas are not much difficult task . For eg . Privacy and surveillance discussion surrounded minidebconf was actually easy to cover , if we done it in context of Privacy packages , cryptoparty and Freedombox. That may be a way to follow

3. Speaking of 2. Do we have some metrics on how many people are brought into the Debian world in these events? (Not just DD/DM path but installing Debian etc.) This should be required as part of the post-mortem of any event.

4. The current focus seems to be on college campuses. This makes sense because the infrastructure is there and IT students are the most natural audience but I would like to see more effort to branch out to the public at large. Who is to say the next Indian DD might not be a housewife or some government clerk? And the chronically short-staffed i18n efforts could surely benefit from the literary communities of our various languages. Politicians and bureaucrats need to hear the Debian viewpoint before they make laws that could impact the shape of computing in the future. You get the idea. This relates to speakers too. You don't need to be "famous" or even formally associated with the Debian project in order to give a talk at a Debian event just passionate about the project in some way.

Partnering with debian focuses companies and non-profits to conduct events is another possibility

5. I have already said, as some of you know, how geographically we are missing coverage of the entire Northern and Eastern parts of the country. Either we should try and find organizers to set up events there or ensure there is a generous travel budget (back to point 1) so that interested people from those locales can attend existing events.

This is a common problem for most of the free software community efforts . Kolkata seems to be the boundary .

6. Publicity. I am worried that the Debian community at large is not aware of all the good things going on in Debian-IN. I saw some reports on Debutsav in Debian News which is good but bloggers should also make sure their posts show up on Debian Planet. As soon as event dates are somewhat firmly set, there should be frequent updates on debian-project and maybe even debian-devel-announce mailing lists. One can go even further and inform non-Debian outlets such as Linux Weekly News or Linux For You. A fortunate side-effect of this is that Debian people who might be visiting India for other reason might also be able to attend.