Re: [Debconf-team] DebConf discussion: Purpose of DebConf
Moray Allan dijo [Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 11:57:02PM +0200]:
> Reward to contributors
>
> Many attendees see coming to DebConf as a nice reward from Debian for
> all their hard work. Personally I'm happy if they enjoy DebConf, but
> don't think we should view this as an explicit purpose of DebConf -- I
> don't think it would be sufficient reason in itself to justify us
> paying for someone to come, for example, if they just planned to treat
> DebConf as a sightseeing holiday.
I agree with your opinion - I think this year is the first time I have
seen this explicitly stated. And if, yes, I personally feel very lucky
to have Debian sponsor my two weeks of working vacation, that is not
what motivates me to go to DebConf, at all. And I do not think we
should lead people to think that while Debian does not pay us money,
it pays us with vacations - That would be a very incorrect statement.
> What other purposes does DebConf have, or what purposes should it have
> that we haven't focused on in the past?
I would add, as I have argued in several similar discussions (over IRC
or face-to-face IIRC) over the past years, that the motivation and
experience of having Debian come to town is an important
point. DebConf is about Debian, is about working on Debian and making
Debian better - but we are always happy to see we get locals involved,
and we do DebianDay so that locals will get a better feeling of what
we are up to, and to get them involved. It has happened several times
that after a DebConf (and I'd like to think that as a result of a
DebConf) more locals get involved and end up becoming developers. Or,
OTOH, we can argue this way about the experiment we had this time in
the USA - Having DebConf in the country with most DDs in the world,
and explicitly inviting them to attend (with explicit funding for
first-timers) given so many of them had never participated at DebConf
before, is in a sense getting the local community more involved (this
time, socially) in the project.
I agree, motivating the local community should not rank _that_ high,
but still it is one of the priorities of the organization team - At
least, the part of the organization team that is mentioned when I say
"me".
Reply to: