text stringlengths 0 2.46k |
|---|
**Jerod Santo:** It seems like one or two years is what most people are doing. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Jonathan Carter:** One or two years is I think as long as a normal person can hold out. |
**Jerod Santo:** It's a lot of work, or why? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is it one year at a time, or is it two years? When you get elected, is it one single year? |
**Jonathan Carter:** One year. One term is one year. But I want to return to technical stuff. I've so many ideas, and so many -- well, relatively small projects, but that has a big impact. Next year I want to focus on that. I have so many ideas to make the installer stuff better, to make it easy to find the \[unintelli... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It is pretty challenging, I can attest to that. |
**Jonathan Carter:** There's still so many low-hanging fruits that -- well, anyone else could do too, but that I have an itch to scratch, that I want to make better... And the DPL role is so time-intensive; there's so much to do, it's kind of mind-blowing. What I do like about the previous DPLs is each previous DPL fro... |
So at least that's some load that I'm taking off of future DPLs... Yeah, also something that will continue getting better over time. And maybe we won't even have a DPL in the future. Maybe we'll have a small board. This is all stuff that's continuing to evolve, and hopefully we can make it better and easier on everyone... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** This position you hold is a fully volunteer position? |
**Jonathan Carter:** Yeah, that's right. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So what's your day job? |
**Jonathan Carter:** \[01:17:51.15\] At my day job, I work at a university. We use Debian there as well. We do maths and science, we get mathematicians from all over Africa together and get them on PhD level. And all our classes run on Debian, all the servers run on Debian. They do all these AI courses, and math and sc... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's cool. Does your full time job then kind of support the fact that you're the DPL for Debian? Do they give you hours? Do they sort of subsidize some of your employment to focus on Debian? |
**Jonathan Carter:** We don't have a very formal agreement, but they know I'm working on Debian in worktime, and even after worktime. And when I go to DebConf, I still get my salary for that time, so it's not like I have to take holiday or unpaid time off to go do Debian stuff... Which helps a lot. If it wasn't for tha... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Very cool. The last term as DPL... Do you think you'll get the organization -- so what are some of your items that you plan to make sure you get done before you call it mic drop on DPL? |
**Jonathan Carter:** These two things we discussed, and two other things at least are very high on my list. Getting the - whatever we call it, the diversity... I forgot what we want to call it. The outreach delegation. That's what we're calling it. The Debian Outreach Project, where we can give micro-grants to people w... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How many TOs do you have throughout the world? Is it hundreds, a small handful? How many TOs are there for you all? |
**Jonathan Carter:** It's SPI in the US, and there's Debian Switzerland in Switzerland, and Debian France. So it's just the three. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's cool. |
**Jonathan Carter:** But we've had more organizations who wanted to come on board, and we just didn't have the structure to do that properly. So for small tiers like Debian France and Debian Switzerland it's easy, because they were specifically founded to be TOs for Debian. But there's so many others, like the Software... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So if there's somebody listening to this that can support you in that effort, what kind of support could you need from the public? From just those out there who care about Debian, and can in some way, shape or form either make a contact for you, or help you with a connection, or leverage their netwo... |
**Jonathan Carter:** For that point - unfortunately it's something we just have to do. But if someone has lots of legal experience in this area and they'd like to get in touch, I'd be happy to listen to some advice. |
**Jerod Santo:** Jonathan, before we let you go, I did want to ask about this section in the detailed history... I know you didn't write this document, but chapter four of the history of the Debian project - it lists out all of the releases, and then it also has important events. And this is a very interesting section,... |
**Jonathan Carter:** \[01:22:05.03\] Yeah, it's tough, because we're over 1,000 people... And also, as DPL, if someone gets cancer, if someone gets divorced, if someone's going through any kind of tough time, they get in touch with you. So you get to know -- statistically, out of 1000 active developers, you're going to... |
So yeah, we work together every day... Even though we don't work for the same company, we see each other at Debian events. So you get to know people over a period of many years, and you think of them as family and friends. So the human connection is definitely very strong. So some of us don't even know where the other ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. That's the sense that I got when I read this. I thought "Who puts together a history of their project?" A lot of times it's like milestones: this many users, some big deal happened, a big release... And it's like "Here's our history", and it's a listing of people who were Debian contributors, who... |
**Jonathan Carter:** It's a huge mess, because we have so many communication platforms... So we use IRC a lot, we use mailing lists a lot... Lots of other unofficial channels that we use to communicate. Some Debian people use Telegram and Signal a lot these days, although those are not officially sanctioned, in the sen... |
Our in-person events is really the thing that really glues together. Without that we really struggle. When we had COVID and we had to do everything remotely, initially it actually worked really well, because we know each other personally, and it was fun seeing each other on our computer screens, which we oddly never di... |
Once we were able to get back together in person again, things improved drastically. If you look at the Debian 12 release, it had the shortest release cycle of any Debian release. Before, typically we tried to release about every two years, and sometimes it goes up to 25 or 26 months. This time it was, I think -- I don... |
\[01:26:02.29\] I know you want to wrap up, but another thing that was part of my DPL platform was to establish a more formal framework for local groups. So local groups are groups of just Debian users who get together and do Debian stuff. So for example, in Brazil and in other parts of the world they just have like a ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** One thing we did before was we had Zach Latta on a while back, talking about Hack Club. Not Hat, if I mispronounced... It's hackclub.com. So I would suggest that you check out that episode... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Because hey, why not promote our back catalog? But at the same time, just pay attention to what they're doing, because they did a lot of stuff in-person, but Zack talks specifically about this online presence, and a lot of the things you're talking about that really revived the Debian community, but... |
**Jerod Santo:** Probably... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Hack clubbers is what they say online. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So there's some things I think you can check out that they're doing well, and if you want an intro to Zack, I'd be happy to connect you, because he's a great dude, and has a lot of great ideas, and obviously has done well with Hack Club. It's a 501(C)3, it's a nonprofit organization, and it thrives ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Especially locally, yeah. |
**Jonathan Carter:** Yeah, I'd love to speak to him. I see on their website they are here in Cape Town as well, so maybe I can take out the local instance of Hack Club locally. |
**Jerod Santo:** There you go. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, absolutely. |
**Jonathan Carter:** Excellent. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, very cool. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yes. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Thank you so much for taking us on this Debian journey, these 30 years... |
**Jerod Santo:** 30 years. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...this year being your fourth year of service; as you said, your last year of service, and you have some goals that you have in mind for it... Really a big fan of Debian. Thanks so much for just sharing the journey here with us, and all your effort to make it what it is today and what it will be to... |
**Jonathan Carter:** Yeah, man. Thank you for having me and helping us share some Debian thoughts with the world out there. |
• Filippo Valsorda's transition to full-time open source maintainer |
• The sustainability of open source maintainers' livelihoods |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.