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 press@debian.org 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, debian-publicity@lists.debian.org
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.