MiniDebConf Barcelona 2014

Wow, I cannot believe it has already been 2 weeks from MiniDebConf Barcelona.
It has been the first Debian event (and free software conference) that I have attended in person, and I took the opportunity to get more involved, giving a talk about translations together with Francesca Ciceri, and two lightning talks about two free software projects that I use and love and I’d like to see them packaged for Debian: Pump.io and GNU MediaGoblin (videos coming soon). I also somehow-promoted Keysigning during the conference (well, in fact, I just sent some two emails to the mailing list before, and printed stickers with “May I sign your key?” slogan so we could keysign easily in the freetime between talks).

The people

I’ve met some people in person, who I was following in the Debian mailing lists and identi.ca for long time (years, in some cases \o/). It has been amazing to meet Francesca Ciceri and Enrico Zini, since their blogposts and vision about Debian diversity skills have influenced very much in my involvement in Debian.

It has been very important to me to be able to say THANK YOU to Tiago from the Debian video team (sorry Holger, I couldn’t manage to meet you face to face), because I have learned so many things watching videos from Debconfs! Videos helped me to feel that I’m part of the community, even when I cannot attend to the events, by following the streaming and being able to recognize the faces of the people and the work they do in Debian.

I’ve met many Debian Women, of course. I’m so fan of all of them! I’m enjoying a welcoming and diverse community thanks to many of them that worked since many years ago to make Debian what it is now, and faced bitter moments too. I cannot say that I engaged in many deep conversations (well, maybe some 2 or 3, and me mostly listening), but the most important thing that I keep from them was simply “being there”, watching and listening, enjoying the voices of the experience like Ana and Miriam, and the freshness and joy of Tassia, Solveig and Elena, for example.

I’ve tried to be welcoming too, I’m not a newbie anymore… as new people come to the group 🙂

New projects (and renewing forces for other)

Debian contributors

I wanted to get more involved in the “Debian contributors” project and it has been a perfect opportunity to understand better all what I had read and watched about it before going to Barcelona.

My plan is, apart of doing promotion as with all the projects that I use and love, to try to get translator work credited via Debian Contributors. That means to hack the l10n bot that now gathers info from the mailing lists to build the coordination pages for translators. It shouldn’t be difficult to make it send that info to contributors.debian.org site, but I’ll try to understand how it works and propose an elegant patch. No idea about Perl, btw, but anyway, it’s a good excuse to start learning.

Mediagoblin and pump.io packaging

I’m not sure I can help on this, but I’ll keep an eye in the evolution of the Debian packaging of GNU MediaGoblin and the Pumpiverse software. I’ll give moral support, at least, to the people actually working on that 🙂

Website and Publicity team

After Solveig’s talk about bug triaging I’ve been thinking about some bugs that I reviewed in the Website and Publicity team, and I think I should make a new round on the pending bugs to close them if they don’t apply anymore, or to try to push a bit more towards a solution, if I can.

Tails website translation

Tails is a Debian derivative preconfigured to work out-of-the-box with privacy and anonymity features, since uses the Tor network for all the outgoing and ingoing connections.
Solveig proposed me to join the Spanish translators team at Tails. I just joined the translators mailing list, in order to help translating the Tails website into Spanish (the software is already translated, under the Tor Project). This is a new challenge from the translation point of view, since they work with PO files.

And now, what?

Well, first, I’ll try to clean a bit my TODO list, mainly about translations, and other things not related to Debian.

From now on until summer, I’ll keep an eye and a hand on all the projects in which I am involved, and also I’ll try to keep on engaging with the community via pump.io, the mailing lists, and IRC channels.

Next summer, if I can put in order my GPG keys (long story), I’ll try to join the Debian New Member process. If not, I’ll try to get new keys and some signs, and then I’ll apply.

OTOH, thanks to the end of Windows XP support, it seems that some people are willing to migrate to ‘any’ GNU/Linux distribution, and of course I’m recommending Debian. Expect some blog posts about these migrations (wow, I should migrate some servers that still run Squeeze too…) and my new role of Debian help desk at job, if finally some people decide to migrate. I have gathered Debian stickers to proudly give to anyone that installs Debian in their computer!