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Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian



Timo Juhani Lindfors dijo [Sun, Mar 10, 2013 at 05:34:58PM +0200]:
> Hi,
> 
> I'd like to have each DPL candidate briefly discuss the challenges of
> getting new people to Debian.

Hi,

Riding on Timo Juhani's question (and not yet having read the two
answers that it has already): There was an interesting discussion
(sadly, in a private forum I cannot quote here, but the fact of having
had the discussion does not disclose private information, yada
yada...) that had as one of its interesting points the current age
distribution, based on the entered data in Debian's LDAP entries. It
shows the project as a whole is aging, and not only in the sense that
Moray describes in his platform, but in the sense that we developers
are getting older — When I joined the project I remember being happy
and proud to be slightly under the (perceived) average age (among
DebConf attendees). Today, I am 36 years old, and my age is... I don't
remember whether the mode or the average.

At the same time, now that I have started teaching at a university, we
have a once very active LUG (complete with a meeting laboratory and
all!), and it has gone almost deserted. My friends at the Faculty told
me we need a way to attract younger people into Free Software
development - It's not as easy to do it as it was ~10 years ago.

So, do you think this demographic shift towards older developers is
harmful to the project, or that it is just a fact and we should not
worry? How would you intend to attract more young, interested,
talented people? What do you think we, DDs spread all over the world,
mostly working on a professional setting (and not anymore mostly
students enjoying heaps of free time) should do to bring in more,
younger contributors?

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