[Debconf-discuss] My personal (and longish) report from DebConf (Was: DebConf13 Final Report - We need you)

[Andreas Tille <tille@debian.org>]

On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 04:07:19PM +0200, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> as you might know, the DebConf Team produces a Final Report after every 
> DebConf. It would be a really nice contribution to the conclusion of 
> this DebConf and the success of the next one to use the time of your 
> trip back [0] to write an article (or two) for the Final Report.
> 
>         https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf13/FinalReport
> 
> You can either claim a specific topic or write an article about your 
> experience at DebConf;

I might strip some parts of my long report for the Wiki but I had the
feeling that putting down my memories into text would be the right thing
to do - so here it comes:


Hi,

I'm beginning my DebConf report in an unofficial "Scenic Hacklab"[1]
right at the edge of the lake in Yverdon.  This is the right place to
memorise the last days.  When I started from this place cycling to Le
Camp 12 days ago I was full of great expectations and what should I say
- the reality has even beaten these.

Once it comes about comparing DebConfs even if it is an unfair
comparison due all the differences my secret long term favourite was
Helsinki very closely followed by Argentina and also very closely
followed by all the other great DebConfs I joined (and I joined all in
Europe).  Would Le Camp be able to beat it?  The short answer is: Yes,
it is now my favourite DebConf while I think I do not suffer from the
last-Debconf-was-the-best-DebConf-syndrome (and I realised there are
others thinking the same[*]).

As you might probably know I'm a bit addicted to swimming.  While
Helsinki had admittedly the better conditions I was at least able to fix
the distance issue using my bicycle. (Hey, those Le Camp photographers
did a great job in hiding the fact that you can not actually touch the
lake right from the meadow of Le Camp.)  Being able to have my bicycle
at DebConf scored some extra points.  However, the really great view of
the lake, the inspiring "Scenic Hacklab" which was my favourite place
has bumped DebConf13 at first place in my personal ranking.

So it comes quite natural to say: "Kudos to the great organisation
team!"  They did a Swiss-like precise work and perfectly succeeded in
hiding any problems (I assume there were some as always) from the
attendees so everything went smooth, nice and shiny for the attendees.
The local team was even precise in setting up great weather conditions
for DebConf.

While saying thanks to the local team I would like to also explicitly
thank Luca Capello who has quite some share that this DebConf was
possible at all (while I have to decrease my DebConf score one point
because he was not really there - Luca to bad that you were not able to
come full time!)  Also thanks to Gunnar and Gannef who helped remotely
(another score down because I were missing them this year as well).

Even if it was my favourite DebConf I was not able to work down my todo
list fully - but that's probably a general feature of todo lists anyway.
One item was definitely done: Doing my daily swimming BoF.  I actually
was able to do the other parts of the triathlon which was skipped by
Christian and have done in summary about 150km cycling with 3500m
elevation and estimated 7-8km swimming (0m elevation ;-)).  Considering
the great view at sunrise over the lake[3] I was not hating my "Senile
bed escape" disease too much (I was every day waking up at sunset) - it
was simply a great experience.  I will never forget seeing water drips
glimmering like gold inside the morning sun while seeing the Alps
panorama in the distant.  I hope I was able to help all interested
swimmers with the DebConf Beach Map[2] which was just a by-product of my
activities in DebCamp.

Speaking about OSM: I was astonished that the area was way less covered
than I expected.  Thanks to several DebConf attendees the situation
became better and the map does not only show random trees in the wild
but also the tracks leading to these.  (Remark: It was no DebConf
attendee who is responsible for plastering the map with single trees.)
While I had my mapping focus basically close to the edge of the lake I
was also able to even map "my very own street"[4]. :-)

I clearly remember one specific mapping tour when I was invited by the
DPL:  He convinced me to join him on a bicycle tour and since I was
afraid to get fired I joined him instead to keep on hacking.  Also
Sorina was brave enough to join us on the tour and she did quite well.
(Sorina, do you remember the agreement about your work on the installer?
;-))  Lucas described the tour as: going uphill on only asphalted roads.
Sorina and me were witnessing the mighty DPL powers when we left the
wood around Le Camp to reach the described road:  The asphalt was just
put onto the road - no doubt that it was done on the immediate demand of
mighty DPL. :-)

DebCamp time was flying like nose dive and a lot of known (and unknown)
faces arrived at Le Camp.  What I really liked a lot this year was that
several really young children has pulled down the average age of DebConf
attendees.  I clearly remember all the discussion one year ago what to
do about children.  As always the issue was solved in a typical Debian
way:  Just do it and bring your children - they had obviously a great
time as well.  I think the youngest child was 2 months and the oldest
"child" above 20. ;-)  Actually Baptiste Perrier did great in making the
C&W party a success and had obviously a nice time.  (I wished my son
would have been able to come as well but he needs to write his
bachelor’s thesis in physics. :-()

It was nice to see the kids using all playing facilities and
communicating with geeks.  Also I would like to point out that even the
very young attendees had their share at the success of DebConf:  Just
think of the three "bell ringing assistants" who helped me ringing the
bells for lunch and dinner.  I've got this cool job from Didier in the
beginning of DebCamp.  I must say having some real bells ringing is by
far nicer than just the "lunch / dinner starts in 10 minutes" from IRC
bot.  The only thing I did not understand was that people did not
considered ringing the bells at 8:00 for breakfast as a good idea.

Regarding the food in general I would also like to send kudos to the
kitchen:  It was tasty, freshly prepared, regional food with a good
change rate.  I really liked this.  Extra points for having the chance
to sit outside when eating.

But lets have a look into the conference programme.  I'd really
recommend watching the videos of the talks "Bits from the DPL"[5] and
"Debian Cosmology"[6].  I considered both talks as entertaining and
interesting.  I also really hope that the effort Enrico Zini started
in "Debian Contributors"[7] will be successful.

I had some talks and BoFs myself starting with "Why running a Blend"[8]
and I admit that (as usual) the number of attendees was quite low even
if I think there is some proof (see below) that it is interesting for
way more people who should consider working more "blendish" in their
team.  Do you know how to recruit one developer per year and relax the
man power problem in your team?  Feel free to watch the video[9].  We
have confirmation that ten DDs of our team have considered to join
Debian only because Debian Med exists.  Admittedly biology and medicine
are really leaf topics inside the Debian universe.  So if even this
topic that has a very tiny share of the Debian users is able to attract
this level of attention - how many more people could we win for
multimedia, games, GIS and others?

So if you feel you are quite overworked with your packaging and you have
no time this is most probably wrong.  The amount of time is basically a
matter of priorities you set for your tasks.  Try to put some higher
priority onto using the just existing Blends tools I explained in my
talk to attract more users and developers to your team and by doing so
spread the workload over more people.  It works, the prove was given
in[8].  So before *you* start working on a specific package you should
wonder who else could have an even stronger interest to get this work
done and provide him with some additional motivation and help to get the
common goal done.

The interesting thing is that my BoF about "How to attract new
developers for your team"[10] - which was a simple report about some
by-product of the Blends work - made it into the main talk room and got
way more attention.  For me this is the proof that the Blends concept
itself is probably badly perceived as something like "a few outsiders are
doing damn specific stuff which is not really interesting for anybody
else" instead of what is really is:  Smoothing the way from specific
upstream applications to the end user via Debian.

Once you see the video of this BoF[11] you can observe how my friend
Asheesh Laroia became more and more excited about the Blends concept and
admitted what I said above:  We should have more Blends for different
fields.  Funnily enough Asheesh asked me in his excitement to talk more
about Blends.  This would have been a really good suggestion ten years
ago.  At DebConf 3 in Oslo I had my very first talk about Blends[12] (at
this time under the name "Debian Internal Projects").  I continuously
kept on talking about this[13] and every new year I try different ways
to communicate the idea to my fellow Debianistas.  I'm wondering how I
could invent a title + abstract avoiding the term Blends, put "Git",
"release" and "systemd versus upstart" in and being able to inform about
Blends reasonably by not becoming to off topic with the abstract.

I also registered the Debian Science round table[14].  I admit we were
lacking some input from remote via IRC which used to be quite helpful in
the past.  The attendees agreed upon the handling of citations in
debian/upstream files which was invented by Debian Med team to create
even stronger bounds to our upstream developers by giving their work
extra reward and providing users with even better documentation (see my
summary in Wiki[15]).  As usual I suggested to create some Debian
Science offsprings like "Debian Astronomy", "Debian Electronics",
"Debian Mathematics", "Debian Physics" etc. who could perfectly leave
the Debian Science umbrella to get a more fine grained structure and a
more focused team to enhance the contact to our users.  Unfortunately
there is nobody who volunteers to take over the lead for such Blends.  I
have given a short summary about this BoF on the Debian Science mailing
list[16].

In the Debian Med meeting[17] I have given some status report.  No other
long term team members were attending DebConf and so I gave some kind of
introduction for newcomers and interested people.  I touched also the
DebiChem topic which maintains some packages that are used by biologists
frequently and so we have a good connection to this team.

Finally I had registered three BoFs in Blends I'm actually not (or not
yet) active part of.  My motivation was to turn the ideas I have
explained in my main talk[8] into specific application inside these
teams and helping them to implement the Blends framework.

In the first BoF about Debian GIS I have shown the usual team metrics
graphs to demonstrate, that the one packaging team Pkg-OSM is in danger
to become MIA.  There are only three persons doing actual uploads.  Two
of them were at DebConf but did not joined the BoF because they do not
consider their contribution to Pkg-OSM as a major part of their general
Debian work.  I will contact the main contributor David Paleino about
his opinion to move the packages step by step into maintenance of Debian
GIS packaging team to try to overcome the split of two teams that are
sharing a good amount of interest.  At least if I might become an
Uploader for one of the packages currently maintained by Pkg-OSM I will
move this to pkg-grass-devel (which is the name of the packaging team of
Debian GIS for historical reasons).  The attendees of the BoF have
considered this plan as sensible.

Moreover I talked about my experiences with OSGeo Live[18] - an Ubuntu
derivative that tries to provide a full tool chain to work on GIS and
OSM problems ... basically the same goal as Debian GIS has just provided
by the OSGeo project.  I'm lurking on OSGeo mailing list when I asked
explicitly I've got the answer that they are working together with
Debian GIS and are using common repository (which is IMHO the optimal
way of cooperation).  However, it seems that several protagonists of
OSGeo Live are underestimating the resources provided by Debian.  For
instance there was a question about Java packaging issues but people
were not aware about the existence of the debian-java mailing list.  I
was able to give an example how the Debian Med team managed to
strengthen its ties to BioLinux[19] which is also an Ubuntu derivative
for biologists.  At our first Debian Med sprint in 2011 we invited
developers from BioLinux and reached a state where they are using the
very same VCS on Alioth where we are maintaining our packages.  At
DebConf I was able to upload two packages where BioLinux developers did
certain changes for enhancing the user experience.  My "work" was just
bumping the version number in changelog and so we did profit from the
work of the BioLinux developers as well as they are profiting from our
work.  I plan to dive a bit more into Debian GIS and try to strengthen
the connection to OSGeo Live a bit.

The next BoF was the Debian Multimedia meeting.  It was nice that a
member of Ubuntu Studio[20] joined the meeting (unfortunately I forgot
the name - does anybody remember??).  When I was explaining my ideas
about cooperation with derivatives I repeated my detailed explanation
about the relation with BioLinux.  It seems every topic you could cover
inside Debian has its related derivative.  So to me it seems to be quite
natural to work together with the developers of the derivative to join
forces.  I actually consider a Blend a derivative done the right way =
inside Debian.  The final work for the derivers that might be left for
them is doing some shiny customising of backgrounds or something like
this - but all the hard work could and should be done in common with the
relevant Debian team.  My dream is to raise such relevant teams inside
Debian ... the Blends.

Finally the last BoF of this series was the Debian Games meeting.  As
always I presented the team metrics graphs and the Debian Games team
members who attended the BoF were quite interested.  So it seems to be
some unknown fact that team metrics are done for several teams in side
Debian and so I repeat the link to it[21] for those who are not yet
aware of it.  As a result of the BoF Debian Games team members agreed to
put some more effort into maintaining their Blends tasks.  Moreover
Miriam Ruiz wants to put some effort into reviving Debian Jr.  Regarding
Debian Jr. there was another interesting talk about DouDouLinux[22] - in
case you might want to watch the video I'd recommend watching the last
10min with the live demo.  There was also an ad hoc BoF about Debian Jr
scheduled to bring together all people interested into this cute project
and Per Anderson volunteered to take over the lead.  I have given some
summary about this specific BoF at the Debian Jr list[23].

For some other talks that I'd regard as remarkable for some reasons: I'd
regard the talk "Debian-LAN" by Andreas Mundt[24] as some hidden pearl
because it did not got a lot of attention but after having seen the
video I was quite impressed - specifically because it is also relevant
for the Blends topic.

I also liked "Paths into Debian"[25] by Moray Allan (and I was only able
to enjoy [24] and [25] thanks to the great work of the video team!)
because it also scratched the same topic I was concerned about in my
mentoring talk[11].  Related to this was in my opinion also "Women in
Debian 2013"[26] were we tried to find out reasons for the lack of woman
compared to other projects and how to overcome this issue.

Besides the talks I will probably never forget two specific moments that
make DebConf so special.  One of these moments is recorded on an image
that clearly needs no words - just see Geert hovering over the
grass[27].

Another strong moment in my personal record was in the DebConf Newbies
BoF "First time at DebConf"[28] that unfortunately was not recorded but
at least for this statement it would have been very great if we would
have some reference better than personal memory.  Aarsh Shah a GSoC
student from India suddenly raised up and said: "Four months ago I was
not even aware that Free Software exists.  Now I'm here with so many
people who are totally equal.  If I will tell my mother at home that I
was standing in the same queue where the Debian Project Leader was
queuing up for food she will never believe me."  He was totally excited
about things we are regarding as normal.  IMHO we should memorise
moments like this that might be part of the key to success in cultures,
where Debian is widely unknown and very rarely in use.

Amongst these not scheduled great moments the scheduled day trip was also
a great thing.  I had a really hard time to decide what tour I might
join but ended up in the "long distance walking (or should I say
running) group".  Inspired by the "running Bubulle" who was flashing
between the walking groups we went uphill with 5.4km/h which was a nice
exercise.  Our destination the large cliff was an exciting landscape and
I guess we all enjoyed the dinner organised by the "Trout cabal". ;-)

So I had a hard time to leave Le Camp and tried hard to make sure my
memories will remain as long as possible.  Keeping some signs attached
to my bicycle[29], conserving the "Scenic Hacklab" sign for my private
hacklab@home[30] was one part.  I also have cut some branches of the
Buxus sempervirens in Le Camp and have put them in my garden at home
(where I create some hedgerow from places where I spent some great
time).  These will probably build a great part of the hedgerow ...

Thanks for reading this longish report.

Looking forward to see you all in Germany 2015 (or earlier)

      Andreas.

[People mentioned in this report are explicitly in CC]

[1]  https://gallery.debconf.org/main.php?g2_itemId=61157
[2]  http://fam-tille.de/debconf/beach.html
[3]  https://gallery.debconf.org/main.php?g2_itemId=60914
[4]  https://gallery.debconf.org/main.php?g2_itemId=60905
[5]  https://penta.debconf.org/dc13_schedule/events/972.en.html
[6]  https://penta.debconf.org/dc13_schedule/events/976.en.html
[7]  https://penta.debconf.org/dc13_schedule/events/993.en.html
[8]  https://penta.debconf.org/dc13_schedule/events/986.en.html
[9]  http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2013/debconf13/high/986_Why_running_a_Blend.ogv
[10] https://penta.debconf.org/dc13_schedule/events/987.en.html
[11] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2013/debconf13/high/987_How_to_attract_new_developers_for_your_team.ogv
[12] http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/200307_oslo_int/
[13] MiniDebConf Peking 2005: http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/200503_peking_cdd/
     DebConf  5: http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/200507_debconf5-cdd/
     DebConf  7: http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/200706_debconf7_cdd/
     DebConf  8: http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/200808_cdd/
     DebConf  9: http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/200907b_blends-udd/index.html
     MiniDebConf Paris 2010: http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/201010_paris/
     DebConf 11: http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/20110728_blends/
     ... and these are only (Mini)DebConfs my talks page
     http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/
     is full of this topic.
[14] https://penta.debconf.org/dc13_schedule/events/989.en.html
[15] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience/Citations
[16] https://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2013/08/msg00016.html
[17] https://penta.debconf.org/dc13_schedule/events/988.en.html
[18] http://live.osgeo.org/en/index.html
[19] http://nebc.nerc.ac.uk/nebc/tools/bio-linux
[20] http://ubuntustudio.org/
[21] http://blends.debian.net/liststats/
[22] https://penta.debconf.org/dc13_schedule/events/1033.en.html
[23] https://lists.debian.org/debian-jr/2013/08/msg00001.html
[24] https://penta.debconf.org/dc13_schedule/events/962.en.html
[25] https://penta.debconf.org/dc13_schedule/events/999.en.html
[26] https://penta.debconf.org/dc13_schedule/events/1012.en.html
[27] https://gallery.debconf.org/main.php?g2_itemId=59996
[28] https://penta.debconf.org/dc13_schedule/events/1062.en.html
[29] https://gallery.debconf.org/main.php?g2_itemId=61145
[30] https://gallery.debconf.org/main.php?g2_itemId=61235
[*]  http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/best_DebConf_ever/

-- 
http://fam-tille.de