The Debian project is happy to announce a donation of 10,000 € to help Framasoft reach the fourth stretch-goal of its Peertube v3 crowdfunding campaign -- Live Streaming.

This year's iteration of the Debian annual conference, DebConf20, had to be held online, and while being a resounding success, it made clear to the project our need to have a permanent live streaming infrastructure for small events held by local Debian groups. As such, Peertube, a FLOSS video hosting platform, seems to be the perfect solution for us.

We hope this unconventional gesture from the Debian project will help us make this year somewhat less terrible and give us, and thus humanity, better Free Software tooling to approach the future.

Debian thanks the commitment of numerous Debian donors and DebConf sponsors, particularly all those that contributed to DebConf20 online's success (volunteers, speakers and sponsors). Our project also thanks Framasoft and the PeerTube community for developing PeerTube as a free and decentralized video platform.

The Framasoft association warmly thanks the Debian Project for its contribution, from its own funds, towards making PeerTube happen.

This contribution has a twofold impact. Firstly, it's a strong sign of recognition from an international project - one of the pillars of the Free Software world - towards a small French association which offers tools to liberate users from the clutches of the web's giant monopolies. Secondly, it's a substantial amount of help in these difficult times, supporting the development of a tool which equally belongs to and is useful to everyone.

The strength of Debian's gesture proves, once again, that solidarity, mutual aid and collaboration are values which allow our communities to create tools to help us strive towards Utopia.

Salsa CI aims at improving the Debian packaging lifecycle by delivering Continuous Integration fully compatible with Debian packaging. The main Salsa CI's project is the pipeline, that builds packages and run different tests after every git push to Salsa. The pipeline makes it possible to have a quick and early feedback about any issues the new changes may have created or solved, without the need to upload to the archive.

All of the pipeline jobs run on amd64 architecture, but the Salsa CI Team has recently added support to build packages also on i386 architecture. This work started during the Salsa CI Sprint at DebConf20 after the "Where is Salsa CI right now" talk, and required different changes at the core of pipeline to make it possible. For more details, this is the related merge request: https://salsa.debian.org/salsa-ci-team/pipeline/-/merge_requests/256

If you have any questions, you can contact the Salsa CI Team at the #salsaci channel on irc.oftc.net

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Chirayu Desai
• Shayan Doust
• Arnaud Ferraris
• Fritz Reichwald
• Kartik Kulkarni
• François Mazen
• Patrick Franz
• Francisco Vilmar Cardoso Ruviaro
• Octavio Alvarez
• Nick Black

Congratulations!

There are a number of large and very successful Debian Local Groups (Debian France, Debian Brazil and Debian Taiwan, just to name a few), but what can we do to help support upcoming local groups or help spark interest in more parts of the world?

There has been a session about Debian Local Teams at Debconf20 and it generated quite a bit of constructive discussion in the live stream (recording available at https://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2020/DebConf20/), in the session's Etherpad and in the IRC channel (#debian-localgroups). This article is an attempt at summarizing the key points that were raised during that discussion, as well as the plans for the future actions to support new or existent Debian Local Groups and the possibility of setting up a local group support team.

Pandemic situation

During a pandemic it may seem strange to discuss offline meetings, but this is a good time to be planning things for the future. At the same time, the current situation makes it more important than before to encourage local interaction.

Reasoning for local groups

Debian can seem scary for those outside. Already having a connection to Debian - especially to people directly involved in it - seems to be the way through which most contributors arrive. But if one doesn't have a connection, it is not that easy; Local Groups facilitate that by improving networking.

Local groups are incredibly important to the success of Debian since they often help with translations, making us more diverse, support, setting up local bug squashing sprints, establishing a local DebConf team along with miniDebConfs, getting sponsors for the project and much more.

Existence of a Local Groups would also facilitate access to "swag" like stickers and mugs, since people not always have the time to deal with the process of finding a supplier to actually get those made. The activity of local groups might facilitate that by organizing related logistics.

How to deal with local groups, how to define a local group

Debian gathers the information about Local Groups in its Local Groups wiki page (and subpages). Other organisations also have their own schemes, some of them featuring a map, blogs, or clear rules about what constitutes a local group. In the case of Debian there is not a predefined set of "rules", even about the group name. That is perfectly fine, we assume that certain local groups may be very small, or temporary (created around a certain time when they plan several activities, and then become silent). However, the way the groups are named and how they are listed on the wiki page sets expectations with regards to what kinds of activities they involve.

For this reason, we encourage all the Debian Local Groups to review their entries in the Debian wiki, keep it current (e.g. add a line "Status: Active (2020)), and we encourage informal groups of Debian contributors that somehow "meet", to create a new entry in the wiki page, too.

What can Debian do to support Local Groups

Having a centralized database of groups is good (if up-to-date), but not enough. We'll explore other ways of propagation and increasing visibility, like organising the logistics of printing/sending swag and facilitate access to funding for Debian-related events.

Continuation of efforts

Efforts shall continue regarding Local Groups. Regular meetings are happening every two or three weeks; interested people are encouraged to explore some other relevant DebConf20 talks (Introducing Debian Brasil, Debian Academy: Another way to share knowledge about Debian, An Experience creating a local community on a small town), websites like Debian flyers (including other printed material as cube, stickers), visit the events section of the Debian website and the Debian Locations wiki page, and participate in the IRC channel #debian-localgroups at OFTC.

On Saturday 29 August 2020, the annual Debian Developers and Contributors Conference came to a close.

DebConf20 has been held online for the first time, due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) disease pandemic.

All of the sessions have been streamed, with a variety of ways of participating: via IRC messaging, online collaborative text documents, and video conferencing meeting rooms.

With more than 850 attendees from 80 different countries and a total of over 100 event talks, discussion sessions, Birds of a Feather (BoF) gatherings and other activities, DebConf20 was a large success.

When it became clear that DebConf20 was going to be an online-only event, the DebConf video team spent much time over the next months to adapt, improve, and in some cases write from scratch, technology that would be required to make an online DebConf possible. After lessons learned from the MiniDebConfOnline in late May, some adjustments were made, and then eventually we came up with a setup involving Jitsi, OBS, Voctomix, SReview, nginx, Etherpad, and a newly written web-based frontend for voctomix as the various elements of the stack.

All components of the video infrastructure are free software, and the whole setup is configured through their public ansible repository.

The DebConf20 schedule included two tracks in other languages than English: the Spanish language MiniConf, with eight talks in two days, and the Malayalam language MiniConf, with nine talks in three days. Ad-hoc activities, introduced by attendees over the course of the entire conference, have been possible too, streamed and recorded. There have also been several team gatherings to sprint on certain Debian development areas.

Between talks, the video stream has been showing the usual sponsors on the loop, but also some additional clips including photos from previous DebConfs, fun facts about Debian and short shout-out videos sent by attendees to communicate with their Debian friends.

For those who were not able to participate, most of the talks and sessions are already available through the Debian meetings archive website, and the remaining ones will appear in the following days.

The DebConf20 website will remain active for archival purposes and will continue to offer links to the presentations and videos of talks and events.

Next year, DebConf21 is planned to be held in Haifa, Israel, in August or September.

DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all participants. During the conference, several teams (Front Desk, Welcome team and Community team) have been available to help so participants get their best experience in the conference, and find solutions to any issue that may arise. See the web page about the Code of Conduct in DebConf20 website for more details on this.

Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf20, particularly our Platinum Sponsors: Lenovo, Infomaniak, Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

About Debian

The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating system.

About DebConf

DebConf is the Debian Project's developer conference. In addition to a full schedule of technical, social and policy talks, DebConf provides an opportunity for developers, contributors and other interested people to meet in person and work together more closely. It has taken place annually since 2000 in locations as varied as Scotland, Argentina, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. More information about DebConf is available from https://debconf.org/.

About Lenovo

As a global technology leader manufacturing a wide portfolio of connected products, including smartphones, tablets, PCs and workstations as well as AR/VR devices, smart home/office and data center solutions, Lenovo understands how critical open systems and platforms are to a connected world.

About Infomaniak

Infomaniak is Switzerland's largest web-hosting company, also offering backup and storage services, solutions for event organizers, live-streaming and video on demand services. It wholly owns its datacenters and all elements critical to the functioning of the services and products provided by the company (both software and hardware).

About Google

Google is one of the largest technology companies in the world, providing a wide range of Internet-related services and products such as online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware.

Google has been supporting Debian by sponsoring DebConf for more than ten years, and is also a Debian partner sponsoring parts of Salsa's continuous integration infrastructure within Google Cloud Platform.

About Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platforms, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally (in 77 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions). AWS customers include the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises and leading government agencies.

Contact Information

For further information, please visit the DebConf20 web page at https://debconf20.debconf.org/ or send mail to press@debian.org.