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Requesting DDs who want to help greet new contributors



Hi all Debianites,

I've been inspired by the "Developer Advisory Team" in another project [1], and so I want to create a similar team within Debian. In this email, first I'll summarize what the concept of Developer Advisory Team is, and second I'll request help.

The stated goals are:

* Reach out to new contributors, thank them for their work and get feedback.

* Reach out to people who might be ready to apply for upload rights and help them.

* Reach out to contributors that went inactive and get feedback from them and offer help.

The key concept here is that we use automated tools, based on the Ultimate Debian Database that already exists, to make it very easy to see who is newly contributing to the project, and commit as a team to reaching out to as many of them as we can in order to greet them. We'd try to reach out to them within a few days of them doing their first successful upload.

The people on the Developer Advisory Team would also use these tools to help track the progress of new prospective developers into the project. This way, when it seems that someone is ready to apply, the DAT members can realize that and ping them.

Generally, I believe it's useful to give people personal contacts within Debian, above and beyond their first package sponsor. (Lucas Nussbaum remarked to me that this is something like the MIA team, only it's to help people get *into* Debian, rather than to identify who is *absent*!)


Does any of that sound interesting to you?

* If anyone is interested in participating on that team, just reply on-list or off-list to me and I will loop you in (for example, if we create a mailing list for this team, will invite you) (simplest way to do so: reply off-list to me with the word "yes")

* If you have ideas for how to make this more feasible or useful, reply here on debian-devel. There's surely scope to revise the goals, if we want.

* If you want to reply saying, "This is a boring project and you should not waste your time," please refrain, since I am committed to doing something like this. (-:

* If you're on the MIA team or the QA team or some other team and think that this should just be a part of your existing team, that's fine by me! Preferably discuss here on debian-devel.


I'm interested in finding out how effective this is, so I intend to have the team work to measure our results. I'm also interested in bringing this idea to other large free software communities that want it!

David Lu (a GSoC student at OpenHatch) has been hacking with me this summer on some of the tooling [2], and we've been testing the UI with Paul Tagliamonte as a first member of the prospective team. Do you want to join in too? (-:

I know many of us in Debian are very busy with our existing commitments to the project, so no need to volunteer if you're unable to commit more time. paultag and I are interested in being part of this team initially, but naturally we'd love more volunteers.

-- Asheesh.

References:

1. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DeveloperAdvisoryTeam

2. https://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2013/07/msg00045.html


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