Hello, world!
One of the things that's been on my mind for a while now -- since reading
Andreas Schuldei's platform last year [0] at the very least -- has been
getting more meetings happening.
There have been a few Debian get-togethers in addition to DebConf 6 over
the past year, including an in-person review of the DebConf 7 candidate
sites [1], a visit to Cuba to promote Debian to the free software folks
there [2], a get together for the German and Austrian publicity folks
[3], a pretty productive QA meeting in Extremadura [4], and miniconfs
in Colombia [5], Venezuela [6] and Australia [7].
So Andreas and I have been talking over the past few months about how we
might be able to give those sort of get-togethers a bit of a boost and
maybe make them a little bit easier to organise. We've come to pretty
much the following conclusion:
1) We'll create a contact point for people to talk to if they
would like to hold a meeting, and for people who are able to
offer support for meetings, such as a venue, accommodation, or
travel support. That's Andreas Schuldei, contactable as "andreas
_at_ debian.org".
2) To help make sure this is a reality, we'll make between $2,000
and $4,000 USD available from SPI funds to support "meetings"
each month, so that if there isn't anyone who can help with a
venue or accommodation, we can at least help people get together
by booking a backpackers and paying train fares.
3) If there's more proposed meetings than we have resources to support,
we prioritise them on what:
a) provides the most practical improvements to Debian
b) teaches Debian skills and promotes Debian to the locals best
c) improves the skills and knowledge of the people travelling to
the meeting the most
The idea would be to prioritise them in that order, though a huge
benefit for (b) might outweigh a small benefit for (a), etc.
4) After the meeting's done, we'd expect a brief summary of what went on
be posted to debian-devel-announce or similar.
Andreas has done a lot of work over the years helping organise meetings
from the size of DebConf to much smaller meetings, and also has a lot
of experience helping sponsors contribute to Debian in useful ways,
so I think this should have every chance of being pretty effective.
If you'd like some help getting a meeting together, please be detailed in
your proposal, and I'd encourage you to consider Cc'ing it to a public
list (probably -project if there isn't a more specific list that's
appropriate) so other people can suggest other ways of helping.
There are, aiui, already some tentative plans for a release team meeting
to discuss lenny's launch underway, and there have also been some
requests for support for things like travelling to conferences to run
a Debian stand, and I suspect there are more things that could probably
be helped by some higher interpersonal bandwidth being made available.
Obviously, if you can be just as effective working over email and irc
as in person that's brilliant, and you shouldn't waste your time on
trains or planes for no benefit, and likewise if you're already planning
a miniconf or meeting and don't need any help, that's great too, and
please just keep doing it.
Since the DPL elections aren't far away, it's probably best to consider
this to be a trial of two or three rounds, and reconsider it when the
next DPL term starts.
Cheers,
aj
[0] http://www.debian.org/vote/2006/platforms/andreas
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/07/msg00001.html
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/08/msg00010.html
[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-publicity/2006/08/msg00080.html
[4] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianQAExtremadura2006
[5] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/08/msg00002.html
[6] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/09/msg00019.html
[7] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/11/msg00008.html
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