Hello, Freexian is looking to work part-time with a member of the Debian community to help manage at least two projects/initiative: 1/ We need help to turn our "Debian project funding" initiative into a success: https://salsa.debian.org/freexian-team/project-funding This includes identifying and formalizing useful projects to fund, finding people willing to implement them for money, reviewing the work and the progress, validating the result, and so on. There are no precise rules defining how you can achieve all of the aboves. Everything is open to discussion. 2/ We need help to coordinate the team of paid LTS contributors (those who are providing security updates for old Debian releases, see https://wiki.debian.org/LTS). We call that role "LTS coordinator", see below for a relatively exhaustive list of the expectations. All this work happens remotely. You must be able to bill Freexian for the hours that you have spent doing the above activities. We expect that you will spend between 20 and 40 hours per month on those activities. It can possibly go higher at the start due to the significant backlog of funding that we have. You need good social skills and good knowledge of the Debian community as interacting with other members of the community is a large part of the work. If you are interested, please reply to me at raphael@freexian.com with some explanation of why you are interested and why you think that you could do a good job with the above roles. Please also include some history of your Debian involvment (if any). More contextual information is available in the following document: https://raphaelhertzog.com/files/2021/03/Challenging-times-for-Freexian.pdf (we're looking for the "project manager" role mainly, the developer one has been filled in the mean time) Expectations for the LTS coordinator role ========================================= This document tries to summarize the various responsibilities related to the “LTS coordinator” role. Somehow it could have been named “LTS leader” too, because it's really the job of leading the LTS team except that it doesn't have (much) decision-making power: the coordinator must build a shared understanding of our goals and can ask other paid contributors to spend (paid) time to help reach those goals. 1. Duties --------- Those are the high level responsibilities. * Ensure that we meet the expectations of the customers - In particular for ELTS with its peculiarities * Ensure that have a good relationship with the Debian community in general and with the Debian security team in particular * Ensure that the LTS team remains a pleasant place to work and that interpersonal relationships within the team are healthy * Ensure that the processes of the LTS team are efficient and resilient to individual failures 2. Responsibilities / goals --------------------------- To ensure we meet our duties, we have already identified a certain number of concrete responsibilities and goals. 2.1 Monitoring public interactions ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ It is expected that the LTS coordinator reads debian-lts@lists.debian.org on a daily basis: - to participate to discussions regarding the organization and internal working of the LTS team - to ensure that queries of LTS sponsors are handled in a timely fashion - to ensure that newcomers in the community are welcomed - to ensure that we deal properly with requests from the Debian security team and from fellow Debian contributors - to ensure LTS team members remain civil between them and generally respect the Debian code of conduct - etc. Ideally, and for the same reasons, the LTS coordinator is also monitoring #debian-lts and #debian-elts on irc.debian.org (OFTC). Instant notifications and replies are not required but one should read the scrollback on a daily basis. 2.2 Monitoring the security state ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ We want to ensure that all security issues are properly handled in a timely fashion (and doubly so in the context of ELTS where we try to provide a guaranty that all their packages are covered). To make us confident, it would be nice to have metrics whose evolution we can follow. We probably also need workflows and tools to identify possible updates that have been left unattended for too long. We want to regularly check packages which have special rules (like the kernel in ELTS which should be regularly backported from the next release). 2.3 Managing the team ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ * When the number of paid LTS contributors is not sufficient to cope with the workload, the LTS coordinator should try to recruit new LTS contributors. * Paid LTS contributors are humans, they have sometimes different expectations, make mistakes, and become annoyed about the work or behaviour of other contributors. The LTS coordinator should help to defuse problematic situations before they become unmanageable. They can act as mediator or as trusted party when someone needs to vent about something. Sometimes they can arbiter a specific question if an external decision is sufficient to please the involved parties. 2.4 Manage the workload ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The number of security issues to fix is varying each month and so does the number of hours that are funded by sponsors. We need to ensure that priorities are set correctly when we have to make choices and that we have useful tasks to do when no updates are left. The role of the LTS coordinator is to ensure that we have actionable tasks in the lts-extra-tasks repository. Those tasks should be not too big so that contributors can do them in a couple of hours. Bigger tasks should be split. Those tasks should contribute to the improvement of any security related workflow in Debian or to the improvement of the security state of Debian packages. 3. Administrative tasks ----------------------- The LTS coordinator assumes some administrative tasks as well: * They dispatch the hours to paid contributors on the first day of the month. * They prepare the monthly report that is published by Freexian (including chasing indidivual contributors that have not submitted their report spontaneously). * They organize a monthly meeting among the team of paid LTS contributors, this meeting is used to discuss current issues and plan future work, it should also help build a more cohesive team. * They might do other administrative tasks that have been agreed upon by the team of paid contributors (checking updates that have been assigned for too long, checking if one accumulated too many open items, checking if all DLA have a corresponding webpage, etc.). Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog
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