% Talks
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%% Copyright 2013 Your name
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\section{Talks}
\person{Gunnar Wolf}

What makes a DebConf happen?

Yes, DebConf is about making Debian better. It is also a
great social opportunity. We get to meet face-to-face the
people we work with online every day throughout the year. We
get the time to develop non-technical relationships that
often grow into long term, deep friendships. But before
anything else, DebConf is a conference: an academic
gathering structured around a set of peer-submitted,
peer-selected talks.

Our procedures for talk selection are much more informal
than at most academic gatherings. DebConf is about
\textit{sharing with} peers rather than \textit{rating}
them.  Thus, we do not reject talk proposals, and have a
very small set of plenary talks. There is, however, a selection
team for talks. A group of volunteers goes over talks submitted
before the deadline, rates them, and prepares the preliminary
schedule.

Talks are rated according to three main criteria:

\begin{description}
\item[Relevance] {\em How important is this talk to the Debian project?}
  In 2013, we deprioritized several talks which were attractive and technically
  interesting, but less relevant to
  Debian's growth and development.
\item[Novelty] {\em Does this talk present new developments
  in Debian rather than existing technologies?}  While it is
  important to increase awareness of existing technologies,
  the Debian community---as a direct consequence of its
  geographic dispersion---is good both at documenting tools
  and at educating itself using this documentation. DebConf
  can be seen as the best moment to present new analysis,
  developments and ideas.
\item[Interest] {\em How will a specific talk be received by
  the Debian community?} This final criterion is somewhat
  subjective; it requires the Talks Team members to be
  intimately familiar with the direction and level of
  discussions within the Debian Project.  The reason for
  this criterion is not to create an artificial
  \textit{feel-good} set of talks. To the contrary, we try
  to favor topics that will spark interesting discussions
  and that can push important discussions forward in this
  high-bandwidth face-to-face setting.
\end{description}

A defining characteristic of DebConf is that the Talks Team
does not formally approve or reject talks. Instead, we
select talks that fill the tentative schedule, while taking
care to leave enough space for people to propose other talks
that were initially submitted, or even for last-minute
ideas. The only requisite for talk schedule changes is to
inform the Video Team enough in advance that they can plan
and cover the sessions. Thus, the DebConf talks schedule is
only truly finalized when the conference is over.  Every
year we have interesting \textit{ad-hoc} talks.

The DebConf talks range over the entire Debian development
spectrum. For 2013, we defined the following tracks:

\begin{description}
\item[Debian For The Cloud] The operating system we produce
  is among the most popular server systems. In the server
  space, consolidation and cloud computing is the rage. We
  had a interesting mix of talks about such topics as Debian
  systems integration with the main commercial cloud
  providers and using Debian as the infrastructure
  upon which to build private clouds.
\item[Building and Porting] A couple of years ago, the
  direction of computing seemed to show an inevitable trend
  towards homogeneity. While Debian took pride in being
  the most diverse distribution, most of the historical
  hardware architectures for Unix workstations had faded
  away. The future seemed to be dominated by the
  x86-derived instruction set.

  In the last few years low-power CPUs, particularly ARM and
  MIPS, gained traction from their use in mobile devices,
  and now seem to be making inroads in the desktop and
  server spaces as well. Cross-compilation and
  multi-architecture systems have once again become not only
  relevant but strategic.

  There are exciting developments in building and porting
  Debian on the software side as well. Linux development has
  historically been identified with the use of the GNU
  Compiler Collection (GCC). However, other free compilers
  have reached the maturity and feature-richness to be
  considered as serious alternatives, with LLVM/Clang
  leading the pack. Several talks discussed the issues here.
\item[Community Outreach] Debian is more than a technical
  project---it also includes a vital social component.  The
  Community Outreach track included talks on such topics as:
  how Debian can grow socially to be more inclusive, diverse
  and rewarding; how to lower the entrance barrier, making
  it easier to become involved; how Debian can better be
  integrated into the larger Free Software ecosystem; and
  how Debian and its sub-projects (such as DebConf itself!)
  should be governed.
\item[Real-Time Communications] Recently, Free Software
  seemed to have lost the race to bring voice and video
  conferencing solutions to the end users. Several recent
  developments have again sparked interest in this area;
  there is fresh new interest in reliable, secure and
  user-friendly mechanisms for person-to-person synchronous
  communication.
\item[Debian Blends and Derivatives] Our project seeds
  literally hundreds of derived Linux distributions, as well
  as many \textit{pure blends} (derived distributions
  developed wholly within Debian). This track is one of our
  constant fixtures, presenting some of the most interesting
  cases.
\item[Quality Assurance] When facing a project as large as
  Debian, automating archive-wide quality checks is always a
  hot topic. There are many Continuous Integration suites
  that are being integrated into various Debian processes,
  as well as many QA tools specifically developed for our
  workflows and needs.
\item[Debian Boot] The reality of computing changes: what
  was clear and sufficient yesterday will not be enough
  tomorrow. For the last few years, developments both inside
  the Linux kernel and in the general use of computer
  systems have shown that our traditional initialization
  system, derived from \textit{Unix System V}, is no longer
  enough. One of the toughest decisions the Debian project
  faces for our mid-term development is selecting an
  alternative.  An interesting track of talks was sparked by
  this topic.
\item[Debian Teams] Debian is to a large degree structured
  around team-based package maintenance. Most areas of the
  project's social life are also managed in a team-based
  fashion. DebConf is the natural place for those groups to
  get work done together, but also to hold specific
  meetings, inviting the rest of the project to understand
  their status and challenges. Many of the sessions in this
  track are repeated year after year, and allow us to get
  the pulse of Debian.
\item[Debian's 20th Birthday] Finally, during DebConf13 we
  celebrated Debian's 20th Birthday. As part of the
  celebration, we had a set of talks meant for the general
  public. These talks showed many of the ways in which
  people can get involved, and highlighted interesting
  projects where Debian is one of the players.
\end{description}

Not all of the talks were part of a track. Of the 112
scheduled sessions we scheduled, 41 were presented
out-of-track.

On a more personal note, I have personally always tried to
be a part of the Talks Team, and have always considered
participation a privilege and a honor. As I was unable to
travel to Switzerland, being involved in planning the set of
talks we would host at least allowed me to play an important
role in the most formally important part of our conference.

Finally, I would like to thank the \textit{Talks Scheduling
  Team}. Just having a list of talks to present is not
enough. Scheduling the talks to minimize the number of
sessions an attendee has to miss due to conflict between
talks that they want to hear, and having a general conducting
thread between sessions, is difficult to achieve. Tássia,
Tiago and Andreas managed to prepare a great schedule!
