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.
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 document 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 the 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.
??? 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 ??? 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 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 noone 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 usually use ???
And that's why volunteering ???
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]