Debian News

Google Code-in, Google’s contest to introduce pre-university students of ages between 13 and 18, to the many kinds of contributions that make open source software development possible, is starting on November 22, 2010 and Debian is one of the 20 organizations selected to take part.

If you are student interested in contributing to Debian, you can find more information in the wiki page http://wiki.debian.org/GoogleCodeIn2010.
A list of tasks is available at http://wiki.debian.org/GoogleCodeIn2010/Tasks and if you a Debian Developer, you still can add tasks by filling the template provided in the top of that wiki page.

You can join the IRC channel #debian-soc (on irc.debian.org) and the Debian GSOC mailing list to talk about your ideas and applications or if you have any question.

The following developers got their Debian accounts in the last month:

• Jeffrey Ratcliffe (jjr)
• Deepak Tripathi (deepak)
• Michael Schutte (michi)
• Ansgar Burchardt (ansgar)
• Salvatore Bonaccorso (carnil)

Congratulations!

The following developers got their Debian accounts in the last 2 months:

• Luke Faraone (lfaraone)

Congratulations!

The Debian Women project aims to get more women to participate in Debian, as packagers, bug reporters, technical documentation writers, bug fixers, translators, artists and in any other area that helps the development of Debian. These goals are achieved through IRC tutorials, a mentoring program, a mailing list and an IRC channel.

The Mentoring Program, allows men and women that want to contribute to Debian but aren’t sure where or how to start, to get some help with their first steps.

There have been at least 38 women that have contributed in packaging software for Debian, and there are currently 11 female Debian Developers and 1 Debian Maintainer. We’d like to raise those numbers to 50 packagers by the end of 2011, and 20 Debian Developers by the end of 2012.

There are some other interesting statistics about the current female participation in Debian.

We are also interested in getting more women to file and fix bugs, translate debconf templates or package descriptions, contribute to the release notes, as well as participate in any other areas of the Debian project. In order to do this, we will be holding some IRC training sessions in the near future, to help people get started. We are currently making the list of subjects and trainers, we’ll publish more news about this once the first sessions are scheduled.

For more information you can join the IRC channel #debian-women on irc.oftc.net, or subscribe to the debian-women mailing list. If you are a Spanish speaker, you can also join the IRC channel #debian-mujeres on irc.oftc.net.

Contributed by: Margarita Manterola

Image made by Valessio Brito (sources), with some elements taken from the Open Clip Art Library.

You also can thank your favorite Debian team, maintainer or tell how much you like Debian at
http://thank.debian.net/.

The following developers got their Debian accounts in the last month:

• Adrian Perez (blackxored)
• Georges Khaznadar (georgesk)
• Felipe Sateler (fsateler)
• Thomas Goirand (zigo)

Congratulations!

The following developers got their Debian accounts in the last month:

• Scott Kitterman (kitterman)
• Dominique Belhachemi (domibel)
• Sylvain Beucler (beuc)
• Alessio Treglia (alessio)
• Giovanni Mascellani (gio)
• Ulises Vitulli (dererk)
• Tommi Vainikainen (tvainika)
• Serafeim Zanikolas (sez)
• Hideki Yamane (henrich)
• Obey Arthur Liu (arthurliu)
• Thierry Soloniaina Randrianiriana (thierry)
• Thomas Weber (tweber)
• Mikhail Gusarov (dottedmag)
• Ritesh Sarraf (rrs)
• Kanru Chen (koster)

Congratulations!

The following developer got his Debian account in the last month:

• Tzafrir Cohen (tzafrir)

Congratulations!

Debian has been selected as a mentor organization for the Google Summer of Code 2010.

Whether your are a Debian Developer or a Student, this might be a good time to:

• add and review project ideas and personal proposals on the Ideas page
• come join us on IRC (#debian-soc on irc.debian.org) and on our mailing list to talk about your ideas and applications

Remember that the sooner we get project ideas and personal proposals, the longer we can work on them to make them into great summer projects!

You can read more about the Google Summer of Code in their website. Also, if you are interested in participating, it is very important checking the program time line.

Contributed by: Obey Arthur Liu

The nomination period for the Debian Project Leader Elections 2010 is over and we have 4 candidates this year:

1. Stefano Zacchiroli [nomination mail]
2. Wouter Verhelst [nomination mail]
3. Charles Plessy [nomination mail]
4. Margarita Manterola [nomination mail]

For the next 3 weeks, you can ask your questions and follow the debate in the debian-vote mailing list.