Post-DebConf Woes

After getting back from DebConf and the 1-week trip afterwards, it took me a full week to get out of most of the chaos travelling usually leaves behind. I still haven’t unpacked all stuff from the suitcase, but at least managed to wash the dirty clothes. Oh, and I’ve signed all keys from the KSP - including madduck’s, he showed me his proper German ID card when I asked what this funny Transnational Republic was. (Oh, and if you were listed at the KSP, didn’t show up, but I’ve signed your key anyway, that’s because we met before and you have a new UID, in case you are wondering.) The pictures I took are still scatered over several home dirs on different hosts, I’ll try to sort/rotate/rename them over the next days. (Oh, and DebConf was great, the trip afterwards likewise - I’ll try to write a separate blog post on that later…)

At the moment I'm slowly starting to get into frontdesk work. I have some notes from Neil's and Enrico's AM BoF and the discussion BoF round around my "NM process future" proposal that I still have to write down once I'm finished with answering my own NMs' mails. Both BoFs went pretty well, the major outcome being that we should discuss much more among AMs on -newmaint and IRC, have older AM reports available for reference by other AMs, and have some sort of "AM report template" that lists the points the DAMs want to see in the report. About the propsal, my feeling is that we shouldn't implement any major NM changes (like the DM idea) until we really understand what the problem with the current process is. (It takes too long, but that can be fixed by throwing out the not-ready applicants more aggressively.) Thanks to all the people who provided very valuable feedback during the BoFs and in the private conversations afterwards.

So far, I've assigned a few applicants to AMs, added comments to the database on the level of prior contribution of the new applicants, and worked a bit on the web pages. The major visible change is that the NM graphs are now included on nm.d.o. The 'big' thing I'd like to implement next is to let the applicants write some application email where they list what they've done for Debian so far before the AM assignment, so we can match NM-AM better, and also improve our judgement of the level of prior contribution. Also, we will probably require 2 advocates per applicant in the future, to make sure people have worked with more than a single DD before. Of course, all this must not get excessive, we don't want to make joining Debian harder than it already is.

Then there's also the usual 2k+ message backlog waiting in the Debian mailbox...

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