Debian, a giant with a tiny voice

This talk will give an overview of
what the Debian publicity team does

and how they work and how you can
support them.

Please give a warm round of applause to
Cédric Boutillier and his talk

"Debian, a giant with a tiny voice"

[Applause]

I'm sorry, I have a kind of technical
problem.

I don't remember the shortcut to bring
full screen in okular.

Ctrl-Shift-P… ok, thank you.

This is my first DebConf, so I would like
to take this opportunity to present myself

I'm Cédric Boutillier, I'm known as boutil
on IRC and I'm a Debian member

since 2012 and a couple of years before
that, I started contributing to Debian

as a member of the ruby team.

I also joined the french localization team
and I started to translate

some announcements and that's how I became
part of the publicity team.

What I will talk about today is
the structure of the publicity team,

the various services we are handling in
the team and how you can in fact

get involved in the team and promote
Debian through the publicity team.

So, what is the structure of the team.

It's a bit complicated because in fact the
publicity in Debian is for the moment

two teams: the Press team and the
Publicity team.

The members of the Press team are
delegated by the DPL and

they can speak in the name of the project
when it's needed

to contact for example journalists.

They have a private mail alias
[e-mail] and they serve as a

contact point for journalists and the
outside world.

And there is the Debian Publicity team,
which is much larger, but…

not much larger, larger but not as well
structured as the Press team.

We have a public mailing list,
[e-mail]

and an IRC channel, #debian-publicity.

And we should also include in this team
all the people doing reviews,

essentially translating our broken english
into proper english − Hello Justin −

and all the translators doing the work to
translate

various announcements in various
languages.

We have also in this Publicity team the
maintainers of the Debian blog,

more on that later, that are also
delegated by the DPL.

And in fact, we should also include the
whole project, because publicity is

the duty of the whole project and
everyone should be concerned by this.

I will now review the various tools we can
have in the team.

First, there are the press announcements.

They are published on the website in the
News/ subsection.

They inform journalists and users of
important changes and they are prepared

by the Press team and the Publicity team

and also with various involved teams when
there are specific changes.

It includes the news for the new releases
and some times also

news that are published in coordination
with other companies or

other projects.

These announcements are a very
official way to communicate

about the project

and on the wiki, at the moment there is
some information about

how you could approach the team to propose
such an announcement.

There is another tool which is used
to publish communication about the project

in a less formal way.

It's the Debian blog, AKA bits.debian.org

It first lived as an unofficial service
under news.debian.net for two years

then it was reopened as an official
service in 2013.

Blogposts that are published there are
less formal,

we can have all kind of announcements
there

so every Debian member has a commit access
to the git repository

to draft an article which is then reviewed
before the final publishing.

Some teams already have published informal
reports to this blog and

it would be nice if it became something
usual that teams having sprints

publish informal reports in this blog.

We have also some Google Summer of Code
announcements and things like that.

Something I know quite well is the Debian
Project News.

This is a newsletter that at its creation was
supposed to be weekly released,

then after some break it was revived as a
bi-monthly newsletter

but at the moment we kind of lack manpower
so it's more or less released once a month.

So what's the structure.

It's available on the website under the
News/weekly/ section of the website.

It's also released as an e-mail on
debian-news and on localized versions

of this newsletter for translations.

It's also available as a RSS feed and
links to the newsletter are also

sent to Identica.

It's translated into various languages and
how do we create this newsletter?

We gather various information from mailing
lists, blog posts and

write some short paragraphs about this.

We have also recurrent sections in this
mailing list about

security announcements, interesting new
packages, during freeze time

we publish a summary of the RC statistics
and recently we added some information

about the reproducible builds statistics
too.

A new section that appeared from time to
time in the last issues is the

"Team, what do you do?" section which was
introduced by Donald Norwood.

The principle of this section is to
interview teams.

I think it's a nice way for users and
people interested in Debian in general

to discover the various teams,

not only teams doing packages but teams
doing like cross archive work or

work on other fields of the project.

If your team is invited to answer these
questions, please find some time

to answer to our e-mail and

if your team is interested in
participating in this initiative or

if you know a team that you would be
interested in knowing more about,

please tell us and we'll try to
contact them.

How can you help the Publicity team.

You should consider publicity as a way
way to advertise your work

so you can first join the publicity team
and work directly on

what we are producing: announcements
or this newsletter

by writing, reviewing or translating
articles like for the Debian Project News.

Debian is a very large project and it's
very difficult for us to monitor

all the mailing lists and all the IRC
channels and things like that

so if you can help and collect some
information about what happens

in the project, it's very good.

For example, if you are already a Debian
contributor and you did or you saw

something amazing in the Debian project

you could just send us an e-mail with just
a few lines and a couple of links

and we could include this into the
newsletter.

If you have a package that you are very
happy of,

you are very happy this package entered
the archive and you would like that

a lot of people use this package, you can
also tell us about it

and we will advertise it in the next
Debian Project Newsletter issue.