On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 8:52 PM, Brenda J. Butler <bjb@sourcerer.ca> wrote:
Hello Yehuda,
> <http://www.korotkin.co.il/>
On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 10:17:22AM +0300, Yehuda Korotkin wrote:
> Hello Debian Women,
>
> My name is Yehuda Korotkin and I teach technologies in one of leading
> colleges for women in Israel.
>
> I thought about the possibility of introduce Debian and the Debian
> community to the girls that i teach.
>
> Our girls will install Debian Linux for the first time in their lives next
> week. I would like to take them on a journey in the Debian world (from
> installation to community behind code). And give them a feeling of welcome
> and belonging to Debian.
>
> I think would be fun and interesting to make a video conference call with
> community and give them a general explanation about Debian, introduce them
> to the community and get them welcome to the world of Debian
>
> We could allocate up to 45 minutes for this conference.
> The study hours are GMT+2 (Jerusalem Time) between Sun-Thu 10:00-19:00.
>
> I hope that in a soon will be more active profiles on
> https://www.debian.org/women/profiles/
>
>
> So, What do you say ?
> Pros?
> Cons?
>
> >>> Your opinion is important to me, tell me what you think
>
> --
>
> Regards,
> Yehuda Korotkin
>
---end quoted text---
Great that you are introducing your students to Debian!
I'm not a big part of Debian aside from being a devoted user, but I'd
like to let you know about how Debian works in terms of
communications.
Having a video conference like this is extremely unusual for the
Debian organization. Mostly the users and developers use email, irc
and other non-synchronous means for virtually all communication. Once
in a while, there is a conference and some Debian people will meet in
person. Mainly, the communications are not about introducing Debian -
the people communicating are already using Debian. There is very
little in the way of introductions/recruitment aside from the
web pages that describe Debian (www.debian.org and the wiki).
I can see the value in making the introduction to the students more
interactive than the usual Debian communications though. A lot of
people, esp. young people today (everywhere), are just not interested
in typing to write programs or communicate.
You have contacted a very good group in terms of getting a response
for talking to women (debian-women).
In addition, there are some groups among Debian that support "events".
These people go to non-Debian conferences (that are willing to have
them) and promote Debian there.
I think it might be worth sending an email to those lists (usually
called debian-events-???, like debian-events-na, etc). These people
are used to receiving requests similar to what you want and are
experienced in this kind of communication. Since you are willing to
do a video conference, then probably anyone anywhere in the world can
help you - they don't have to be in your region. It would help the
person who will be introducing Debian to know a bit about the
background of their audience.
In terms of making the talk interesting to your students, these
groups can also get some items like stickers or t-shirts to sell
or give to the students. Normally they bring them to the event;
I'm not sure if it will be possible to ship stuff like that to
another country. Debian has pretty much no marketing budget.
So I hope this helps! You can see a list of Debian mailing lists
here:
https://www.debian.org/MailingLists/subscribe
and here is the list of mailing lists with "events" in the name:
debian-events-eu europe
debian-events-ha hispanic america
debian-events-na north america
debian-events-nl netherlands
I see also the lists with "dug" in the name (Debian user group,
maybe) help to coordinate events in their regions:
debian-dug-by Belarus
debian-dug-ie ireland
debian-dug-in india
debian-dug-mx mexico
debian-dug-quebec quebec
You can also connect with the #debian irc chat on oftc. It would
be closer to the kind of communications that Debian users are
accustomed to. See https://www.debian.org/support and search for
"On-line Real Time Help Using IRC" for more info.
However, that channel is not really for social chitchat or general
introductions. It is more for solving specific problems that you
might run into while installing or using Debian. You can get
almost-real-time help from there. So it might be useful while your
students are actually doing their install.
Does anyone else have anything to add?
So I hope I haven't misrepresented Debian ... I have copied this
email to debian-events-na where I know there are some people
who might respond.
bjb