Re: Young people and computers

[Ben Pfaff <blp@cs.stanford.edu>]

Moray Allan <moray@sermisy.org> writes:

> There's been some discussion elsewhere about how young people's
> experience of computers has changed over the years, and how this might
> interact with our success in recruiting young people into Debian.  I
> would estimate that the conversation focused on 16-20 year-olds, as it
> started after someone pointed to the graph of developers' claimed ages
> at
> http://people.debian.org/~spaillard/developers-age-histogramm/devs-age-histo.2013-01-01.png

I joined Debian when I was a teenager, half a lifetime ago for
me.  Then, it was easy: you generated a PGP key (gnupg did not
yet exist) and emailed it to Bruce Perens, and he gave you an
account.  Now, it seems to be a long and comparatively difficult
process that involves demonstrating a relatively high level of
technical competence.  I wonder whether young people find this
intimidating.

(I didn't see the other discussion, so I don't know whether this
point has been raised before.  Apologies if I'm rehashing a
point.)