More than 6months since I am Debian Developer and I’m learning new things every day… and trying to organize my time better to accomplish all the things I would like to do.
In September I became publicity delegate (and we joined Press+Publicity into the Publicity team). We continued discussing how the team works, and hopefully revitalizing it.
I became more active in the IRC channel, installed quassel in my home server and then I could read all the backlog too.
I’ve tried to contribute more to Debian Project News (less than I’d like), to bits.debian.org and to the social networks (Pump.io and GNU Social).
Since November I’ve been failing to call for meeting but finally on 2016/02/29 we had it. I hope to resume semi-regular meetings each 1-2 months.
At the beginning of the year I helped to handle all the news and announcements about the loss of Ian Murdock. It has been hard work but I feel that I could turn some of the sadness into something useful for others. There is still work to be done: parse the condolence emails and setup a website to publish them.
About bits.debian.org, DPN and announcements, I’ve learned how to perform the parts of the work that require membership permissions (building the blog, actually publishing the announcement, sending the DPN/announcement mail to the corresponding lists). Not without mistakes, but I guess no matter how much you care, sometimes things happen, and then you learn and then things get better and you too.
Some things I discovered
- Installing quassel server and clients and getting addicted to IRC… It’s not that I chat so much, but I read the backlog of the channels where I am, and it’s hard for me to leave a channel once I join, even if I joined just to ask something and they already answered.
- Writing (correct) English is harder for me than what I imagined. Not here or by mail or in IRC, but when I have to ‘create’ some news for DPN or bits, it takes much time and I doubt in many cases. I trust in the reviews by debian-l10n-english team, and thank them very much, but I also feel a bit ashamed of my broken English. OTOH, note that we have few native English speakers in the Publicity (and website) team. Please consider joining (Publicity or L10n-English) and helping with the reviews! That helps not only to get good quality content in Debian, that also helps non-English speakers to contribute more ideas or paragraphs, because we can trust in somebody reviewing our work.
- It’s hard for me to call for meetings, proposing dates/times. We are very dispersed geographically so I usually come up with long tables with lots of days and times proposed, and I think it does not help. OTOH setting a fixed time can systematically leave out people from certain timezones, and I feel that’s very sad. I suppose I need to try to offer few options and if I see no agreements, then extend.
Some clarifications
- I’ve written “hard” word 4 times in this post (well, 5 now!) but that does not mean I don’t want to do those tasks. I feel going out of my comfort zone and that’s ok, needed to learn and experience. I’m having a good time in Debian in the last months, as always!
- We’re 4 people delegated and more team members and contributors, so anybody could think: “Publicity is well covered, let’s go to do other things in Debian”. It’s perfectly ok if you want to do other things in Debian, but please consider combining your contributions with some minutes for the publicity team. Aiming to be the universal operating system, our community and target audience is big and diverse and we’d like to show that diversity to the world. The more we are, the merrier!
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The bright side 