Re: Q to all candidates: SWOT analysis
Hi Lucas
Thanks for the question!
On 2019/03/20 11:08, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> Note that if you prefer not to frame this in the context of SWOT
> analysis, you can also answer the following four questions, which should
> result in basically the same information:
>
> * What are the main 2-4 strengths of Debian today?
1. We are a large, highly functional, fully community driven organisation.
For me, this is by far our biggest strength, unpacking this positive
leads to a whole bunch of other sub-positives:
1.1. We are more sustainable: We won't disappear when our patron can't
afford us or when they change direction.
1.2. We are in a position to put our users first: Commercial projects
often have to make choices and/or sacrifices to the detriment of their
users in order to maximise profits, and even though it's possible that
we get it wrong every now and again, we put in a tremendous amount of
effort to make the right choices for the project for the maximum benefit
of our users.
1.3. Our size allows us to do things that smaller projects can't really
do on our scale: We have an annual developers conference, sprints
throughout the year, and a large amount of well-maintained
infrastructure (all the stuff hosted under *.debian.org).
I could go further on point 1, but I think I've made enough of a point
on that one.
2. We actually have great people.
People who only ever read mailing lists may find it strange that I say
this, because from those you can get the idea that Debianites are cold,
hard, impatient people. The fact is, every time I meet new Debian people
I'm just blown away at how skilled they are, and how they're willing to
give up some of their time for Debian. Not only that, but they're
genuinely nice people. There's a saying that goes "People don't care how
much you know until they know how much you care.", but in my experience
the typical Debianite does both and I love them for that.
3. We have some fantastic processes.
The NM process is really good. People who go through it will always wish
it can go faster. I know, I've been there! But I love how thorough and
kind it is, and how it finds weak spots in a developer candidate and
points them to how they can improve.
Our policy guide is also first class, there aren't many corporates who
have policy guides this comprehensive, concise and easy to reference.
I know this is not the place for the negatives, but I do wish more of
our processes could be as top notch as the above. Nonetheless, our good
process are shining beacons of what's possible, and we can aspire to
making that a normal thing across the project.
4. Reputation
While our reputation could be a lot better in some ways, people do tend
to trust Debian. We're often seen as a neutral party when big decisions
are made. That's why people care which major decisions Debian make even
if they're not a Debian user. If Debian as a project has something to
say, people listen.
> * What are the main 2-4 weaknesses of Debian today?
In no particular order:
1. Perception.
Firstly, we're total shit at singing our own gospel. If we were a choir,
people would pay us *not* to sing. What I find bizarre is the completely
weird misconceptions that exist about Debian out there. Often people
don't realise that I'm a Debian contributor and want to share factoids
about Debian with me, and it's not only that those end up untrue but
they're so out there that I can't even figure out where they could
possibly come from. I'm pretty sure many Debianites have come across
this. Debian has a huge image problem that should really be addressed.
That said (oops here comes a positive in the weakness section), this
morning on #debian-publicity I noticed larjona mentioning that there's
so many Debian posts coming up that she's not sure how to pace them so
that people can have enough time to disseminate each one (paraphrasing).
I didn't plan to mention any persons directly in this mail, but I'm
incredibly thankful for all the great work she's doing in Debian.
2. Diversity.
I feel like I should sigh and ask if I even really still need to explain
this one.
Sure, the world is messed up and women get the short end of the stick in
many ways, and Debian isn't in a position to fix the entire world. But,
there's surely a lot more we can do to attract more women to the project
that we're just not doing at the moment. It's nice that there are
diversity sessions at DebConf where some of these issues are discussed,
but discussion isn't enough, we need to step it up more than just a few
notches and start taking regular action to improve this.
3. Burnout.
Eep, I could write an email longer than this one just on burnout. We
install monitoring software everywhere to check the status of our
systems, but we do far to little to keep an eye out for our fellow
developers.
Often there are signs and indicators that things go wrong, like a
critical team with just one member that just went two weeks without
barely sleeping. Or someone getting increasingly dismayed at processes
while trying to move forward but just stays stuck in one place. We must
be better at finding ways to help each other, and there should be no
shame in saying things like "I really need a break right now" or "I need
help on this" or "I'm stuck and don't know how to proceed".
I think we should have a process to deal with burnout. Perhaps a
checklist of sort to help fix things. For example, in a scenario with a
team with just one developer a team that's responsible for this could
help with a call for contributors. Or such a team could help with
someone to stand in for a little bit or just otherwise help a person to
get back on a solid footing again.
4. Conflict Resolution.
Our conflict resolution leaves much to be desired. It's inevitable that
when you have several hundred active contributors, all very passionate
about the project, that you'll have instances where people disagree.
Disagreement in itself is fine, to the point where I would even
encourage it! Unfortunately, it can get ugly due to a few things:
* Not everyone has a high emotional quotient, and will be more prone
to jumping to the worst possible conclusion when confronted with an
ambiguous situation.
* We work a lot with text-only media, where feelings and intent aren't
very well conveyed. Many of us in the project are no stranger to
either misunderstanding someone's intentions, or to being
misunderstood ourselves.
* Things pile on quickly. When two people are having a disagreement,
it's easy for bystanders to get involved, often not even
understanding the problem properly nor the actual positions of
the people having a disagreement. This means that a simple
misunderstanding can very quickly grow out of control.
There have been troubled individuals in the project who have not been
dealt with in the best manner, which can be unfair to both all the
members in the project and to those individuals who misbehave. It's
really an area that needs improvement.
> * What are the main 2-4 external things happening in the world outside
> Debian, and that are "opportunities" for Debian?
1. RISC-V
This is a big one. Companies all over are going to extreme measures to
get their Intel-based hardware sanitized and running on the fewest
possible proprietary firmware as possible. As RISC-V becomes more
mature, stable and available, it's going to sell like hot cakes, and
people will want an operating system to match with that hardware. RISV-V
and Debian looks like a match made in heaven to me.
The Librem 5 phone is also worth paying some attention to.
2. Young people
For a while, it seemed like young people's interest in computer science
was dwindling. Perhaps it was the courses they were exposed to, perhaps
computer games were too good for a while and distracted them. Either
way, young people seem to be interested in programming at an
increasingly growing rate again, and the amount of new free software
projects that are being created is growing alongside that.
I think Debian can do more to be attractive and fun for younger people,
and we can certainly use their time and energy for the greater good.
> * What are the main 2-4 external things happening in the world outside
> Debian, and that are "threats" for Debian?
This question required the most thinking time before I could answer it.
To be honest, I think we have relatively few external threats and that
we're often our own worst enemy.
1. Fauxpen Source Software
"Fauxpen Source" is a portmanteau of "faux" (fake) and open source. It
refers to software that promotes itself as being free software or open
source, but really isn't at all.
I see more and more software projects that make big claims about how
benevolent and caring they are and how they are making the world and
humanity a better place, but then that ends up being a really far
stretch from the truth. When comparing these not-so-good projects with
Debian, it may appear to a casual user or observer that both projects
are equally good, or even that the more sinister software is even better.
2. There are distributions that outshine us in certain ways
This is a threat that I'm kind of happy with, competition is good. I
discovered Alpine linux a while back and they're an impressive project.
If I had the time I would get involved. They strip their packages to the
minimum, to the point where you can create a full minimal Alpine
container with as little as 9MB (for Debian it's around 155MB). I don't
think we have any methods in Debian to easily create
images/chroots/systems that small, it's probably not an area we'll be
able to compete on soon. Arch Linux is winning over the hackers, and
sure, Debian is a great distro for the hacker, but Arch shares some
positive traits with Debian and the combination of it also being a
rolling distro works well for skilled individuals. We certainly can't be
better than everyone in every way, I admire Debian's technical
excellence, but there are others who are doing great work and in some
ways we can't practically replicate it, which will some impact on our
user base.
3. Trolls
Yeah, it's a cute word but it's actually a big problem. I've been
speaking with a few Debianites about looking at creating Debian
instances of Peertube, Mastodob, Pixelfed, etc. One of the biggest
challenges in maintaining those are how we'll deal with moderation.
I have no idea how bad it would be once set up, and I sometimes fear
we'll need a small army to help keep that moderated, and fears like that
often keep us from doing things that would be otherwise great for the
project.
That concludes my SWOT analysis, to the three people who have probably
gotten this far, thanks for reading! :)
-Jonathan
--
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) <jcc>
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Debian Developer - https://wiki.debian.org/highvoltage
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋ https://debian.org | https://jonathancarter.org
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ Be Bold. Be brave. Debian has got your back.
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