Debian, a giant with a tiny voice

Talk given by Cédric Boutillier during DebConf15 about the Publicity team

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 for doing
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: there is 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,

especially 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.

Blog posts 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

could 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 identi.ca.

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 bugs 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 value of various teams,

not only teams doing packaging 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.

Working in the Publicity team is also a
good entry point

for people interested in Debian but who
are not contributors yet.

It's a way where people can learn more
about the Debian project.

So, if you are interested in Debian and
you don't know exactly where to start,

it could be a good starting point.

What is the workflow we are using.

Recently, during DebCamp, we migrated
from SVN to Git

so now, all the documents we are handling
are kept in Git repositories.

The Debian Project News, the announcements
and the blog have their own Git repository

Every Debian Member has directly commit
access to these Git repositories

and others can easily get write access by
joining the Publicity team project on Alioth.

Coordination to produce these documents,
annoucements and the DPN,

is usually done through the mailing list
or the IRC channel

and once the announcement or the DPN is
finished

then some calls for review or translation
are sent to translation and localization

mailing lists.

There is more information on the wiki.

There is an other way to publish news
about your work, which is

the Misc Developer News.

It's a wiki page at this address.

This page contains a template you can use
and you can edit the wiki page.

If you are the person adding the fifth
news to this wiki page,

you win the right to collect these five
news and send an e-mail

to debian-devel-announce mailing list
with the five news.

It's quite a light way to send news about
the project,

especially if you are not the fifth one.

Debian is also present on various social
networks.

We have an official identi.ca account

which is represented here.

We're also present on GNU Social, Twitter
and Google+.

There was a special event this year, the
release of Jessie and

we did some live denting on identi.ca and
some messages were sent to Twitter

during the whole weekend, non stop.

We sent like 150 messages.

So if you want to propose a DENT, you can
go directly to

the #debian-publicity IRC channel and send
a proposition with a DENT: prefix

and when this proposition is acknowledged
by someone of the team,

this message will appear on the social
network.

You can also e-mail your proposition to
Debian Publicity.

For example, if you want to publish
messages about DebConf,

you are welcome to do so.

Last tool we have in the Debian Publicity
team is the Debian timeline.

It was created by Chris Lamb and now
maintained by the Publicity team.

It's a web page showing a timeline with
various events related to Debian.

You have the history of all the releases
and various events like sprints,

bug squashing parties, various transitions
and things like that.

All the source code of Debian timeline is
maintained in a Git repository.

So every Debian member can commit to this
timeline and then a publicity member

can push to the server the changes to
update the timeline.

You can look at this timeline and if you
see that some event is missing,

either directly commit to Git or send us
an e-mail to the Debian Publicity team

so we can add this event.

We have also a lot of projects but
currently have no time

to implement them.

Examples of this would be to revive the
"debaday" website

which was presenting a new Debian package
everyday.

We could also try to revive the audio
interviews which are known

under the name of "This Week in Debian",

or subtitle the existing audio interviews
in english

and translate these subtitles into other
languages.

We are also open to new ideas for
recurrent sections

in the Debian Project News.

We could also try to gather some
statistics and

track mentions of Debian on external
websites

to see how Debian is doing from another
point of view.

You're welcome to propose your own idea.

We'll have a BOF this afternoon and you
are welcome to come and

discuss with us your own ideas on that.

Here are some useful links.

For Debian contributors, you have the
mailing and various wiki pages

about the workflow of the team and

for users, these are the mailing list and
social network

where we publish some information.

This is our contact information if you
want to get in touch with us

and please come to the BOF this
afternoon in Amsterdam room at 15:00

We will be happy to discuss with you
everything related to publicity.

Thank you.

[Applause]

[Talk master] Thank you very much.

Are there questions from the audience at
this point?

That doesn't seem to be the case.

[Q] Less a question and more a comment,
really.

Just of highlighting some of
the feedback

we got around the release.

Both the release team and basically
everyone around was

really really impressed with the live
denting and the live tweeting

of the release.

It's something that makes it really
visible for Debian and

when we release things and we're able to
produce that publicity

then it makes Debian a really big thing

so just a huge thanks, really for helping
with that.

I definitely encourage everyone to get
involved with the Publicity team.

It's also a really easy way for people to
get involved,

so if you know anyone who says

"Oh, I'd like help Debian but I'm not very
good at packaging things"

A bit like me as I haven't done anyone in
about 5 years or something.

Getting involved in the Publicity team and
helping out is something that

I definitely really encourage.

It's a really good team, it really needs
help and we can do so much more with it.

[Q] At some point there was a project to
collect a box which could be used

at the exhibits, when Debian goes out and
exhibit.

What is the status now of that?

Did it progress any or do we have a box?
Like in European states where we could

easily distribute to a local party to go,
to bring at the conference

and what it would constitute, I wonder.

Do we have resources for, well…

Many people disagree that "Oh, we
shouldn't have stickers"

or something like that.

I think it's already a visibility, right?

If we have really nice giveaways like all
those stickers we have on our laptops.

Of course we could buy them, right?

But when we go to the conference and
the cost of those

if we print them in bulk, it's
ridiculously small.

I think it would be beneficial if we have
a box, which we could bring

to a conference and has really nice
banners, some nice giveaways.

Maybe not just to throw them around, but
even just for good visitors,

to give a sticker, I think it's nice.

And that's what we do for NeuroDebian
as well.

For those close to us, we give those nice
stickers for the laptop,

they are happy, we are happy.

We have nice exhibit table usually
I think.

So, what is the status there and what
should we do about it?

[A] I think it was handled by the Event
team, but this Event team

doesn't exist anymore, so…

[Maulkin] I think that's the sound
of someone volunteering.

[laughter]

So, more seriously, I think it was Martin
Zobel wanted a banner and said

"Oh, we should have a banner.
Can we spend the money?"

and I said "Yes, carry on."

He said "But I haven't told you how much
it cost yet."

"Carry on, it's not gonna be like ₤5000,
so just go, make a banner."

But he couldn't get anyone to make the
artwork for him or do anything like that

so he sent out some requests and no one
really was able to do that.

So, if you want to put a box together and
you think we should make stickers,

do that, that sounds good.

[Mr Let's do a box] Banner, we usually use
Ben Armstrong's banner.

And as for volunteering I am
exhibiting

at least twice a year.

So I'm there already.

But box, we have already some box with
some hardware

and if we could reuse it, I wonder,
that would be more efficient.

Do we have any interesting hardware we
should go present as well

that would be nice in that box.

Ok, volunteering. Got it.

[laughter]

[] If you need help with artwork,
just call Valessio.

[Talk master] Ok. Thank you very much.

Let's give the presenter another round
of applause.

[Applause]