Hi everyone, So, the website is nearing mostly-completion (don't worry, I promise to let everyone know when I finally finish!), and I was thinking a few things.. Before we can begin on larger projects (working with schools, children, etc.) we need to get a strong infrastructure going. Part of this is acclimating the women here with Debian and getting them more involved. Many of the people here, as far as I know, are at varying levels of expertise with the system. I thought Pia's idea that we maintain packages with our name attached was a very interesting idea. If I'm extrapolating correctly, the idea is to have something like a co-maintenance team. Many large packages (or large groups of packages) within Debian are maintained by teams of people. An example, in my case, is LyX which I co-maintain with one other person (Hi Rob!). Larger examples are the Gnome team, whose project is hosted on alioth. Since our website is hosted on alioth already, we would have another mailing list available for use if we wanted to maintain packages under a Debian Women umbrella. We also have this mailing list available, but if we were to do something like this, bug reports would be sent to the list (a la debian-boot@lists.debian.org). While this may be cool for a few reasons, depending on what happens, it could also potentially cause unwanted list traffic for some subscribers. For people just learning the way things work, co- or team-maintenance can teach you quite a lot and give you time to become comfortable with your skills. Indeed, this is the preferred method for many people, and it helps you get to know other developers and wannabe developers, as well as giving you the opportunity to figure out who you work best with and which projects are more interesting to you. In order to do this, we may need to cover some basics. Some of these include manipulation of the Debian bug tracking system (BTS), packaging techniques, what ITP's, ITA's, RFA's, RFH's are, and things of that nature. Also, if there will be co-maintenance happening, some people will need to learn about revision control systems, which are used in many distributed projects in order to keep track of changes. There are a lot of them out there and they tend to be sort of involved, but they are essential for working in groups. Documentation techniques should probably be covered as well, for those of you who wish to go down that path. Likewise for translations. I personally tend to learn better when people explain to me, rather than reading long documents, so I'm generally in favor of tutorials where you can ask questions. I don't know if the list or IRC is better suited for this kind of thing -- presumably they could operate in tandem. I'd not want list members to miss out on IRC discussions, though, and not everyone has the time or inclination to spend hours on IRC. :) Thoughts? -- off the chain like a rebellious guanine nucleotide http://double-helix.org
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