What do you do when you have a technical question that you're embarrassed to ask?
The first Sunday of Debconf, I led a birds of a feather (BoF) session called
Debian for Shy People.
The conference team scheduled it on "Debian Day," a pre-conference day that was open to the public
and still had plenty of Debian Developers in attendance. I just uploaded the slides
to the "Penta" page for the talk.
I led it because of my own experience. In 2004 or so, I saw Debian as the cool kids' club,
that awesome project that I wished I could be a part of. By 2006, I managed to get over myself,
read the New Maintainer's Guide, and find a way to get involved. As of mid 2009, I am a full-blown
Debian Developer. I have
real ultimate power. But I sometimes do still feel
hesitation akin to "
Imposter Syndrome".
(A bunch of people at Debconf didn't really believe I'm "shy," since I asked a
lot of
questions at the conference. At core, I don't naturally believe that the things I say are
worth hearing, but I patch over this hesitation. Sometimes I speak too much, and then I feel
ashamed of burdening everyone. But anyway, this is about Debconf not, me -- so moving on....)
In the past year of being a Developer, one thing I've seen is that other contributors
ask me privately for help. Rather than blast the public lists like debian-mentors, they email
or IRC private-message me, or SMS me, or find me at a Linux Users Group event.
I'm lucky to know these people, and they're lucky to have me as a safe person to ask
questions of. Moreover, Debian is better because these people could move past their confusion to make
a technical contribution.
I began the BoF session by talking about when someone asked me for help.
Then I asked,
"How many of you have
someone you can ask embarrassing questions of?" Of the forty people crammed into Schapiro 414,
two people' raised their hands. One person put it plainly, "I don't know anyone else who does Debian."
It reminded me of a fact that
Karen discovered when she was doing
market research for us at
OpenHatch: the vast majority of free
software programmers know
zero other people who do free software. I had seen the figure;
we even used it in a talk to try and convince venture capitalists to fund OpenHatch last year. But I didn't
really
feel it until I heard it from a room full of Debian contributors.
I structured the BoF in two parts: First, I talked in front of some slides to set the
tone properly, and then we enjoyed open discussion. As I was preparing thoes slides,
Daniel Morais asked me, "What's the point
of having the session? Why not just come up with some ideas, implement them, and not bother
also
talking about it at the conference?" I had considered this; I decided I wasn't
self-confident enough to start implementing ideas without talking to people to make sure I
wasn't the only one who saw a problem. But I discovered another benefit of
giving the talk: people who want to make Debian more welcoming knew to reach out to me.
So here are some thoughts that came from our discussion (and later discussions during the
conference):
- We need better mentorship in Debian. Truly, mentorship is a personal relationship. Perhaps matching people up into one-on-one groups would be a good idea. KiBi said that doing so using OpenHatch (if we add mentorship-oriented features!) would be a reasonable way to do it.
- I've heard from quite a few people who would be willing to have more one-on-one relationships with mentees.
- Everyone (except Manoj) knows that Debian contributors are not born experts. It takes a process of learning and teaching to bring them up to speed.
I set up an
Etherpad document on
cjb's OpenEtherpad.org. This is what we learned together:
- "If your level of understanding might be low, but you want development help, then you might not know if #debian-devel is only for people who are already super involved and know everything and therefore you should feel embarrassed."
- People get anxious over their ability to speak English.
- Bikeshedding over patches can be a major detractor.
- "Asheesh talks too fast."
One idea I had before the BoF was to create a discussion area that was
safe
for all questions, even if they seem silly. We talked for a while about what name
that would take, if it were to become a new IRC channel. We reached something of a conclusion,
but in the conference that followed
Emmet Hickory offered to help make the debian-mentors IRC
channel friendlyer. I think that's the best direction to take things, so the next step is for him and me
to write up what we want and send a note to the debian-mentors email list explaining our vision.
In the Etherpad document, people discussed the idea of doing Debian discussion over XMPP (also known
as Google Talk, also known as Jabber). We weren't sure how such a place would get
critical mass; someone briefly mentioned the idea of an IRC/XMPP gateway. I actually
think this discussion is along a very reeasonable path, namely discovering
what discussion method(s) Debian contributors
want to use. (That might explain why
I'm now an admin on
forums.debian.net.)
We also briefly discussed the idea of an anonymous question-answering service. I realize
now that I'm not going to be able to have time to run that, but I still think it'd be a
really cool idea.
Biella would remind me that Debian is already successful at bringing in new contributors. I agree!
As a free software project, we have an enormous number of participants.
This is a really good thing, and we're clearly doing
something right. The purpose of this talk
was to figure out how to make contributing to Debian less stressful for those who participate.
Truly, a "Debian for Shy People" effort isn't about shy
people. It's about the moments
of self-doubt we
all have in which we don't know what to do and are too embarrassed
to ask. I think that if the project more friendly, we can find more participants, make better
use of our current ones, and see improvements to our
diversity.
Whew, that was long. What do you think of all this?
One forgotten "full 100%" in last publication: German.
Full stats are here
Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files):
After being noticed in 
It's been a couple of very interesting days. The 
Yes, this is about a movies based on a comic based on a movie
from the 50 s. And they did a wonderful job of conveying to comic
book feel and yet, though you could appreciate the abstract,
stylized presentation of the comic, most of the movie still came
straight from Herodotus. The training of the Spartans, the throwing
of the Persian emissaries into a pit and a well this cleaving to
the historic details was a pleasant surprise. The history channel
presentation is recommended for the perspective it brings to the
tale.
There were some poetic licenses the whole bit about a highly
placed Spartan traitor was made out of plain cloth; and the current
convention wisdom is that Leonidas went to Thermopylae because of
his religious beliefs, and conviction about the sacred prophecy of
the oracle at Delphi, not because he thought Persia would destroy
Greece (remember, Xerxes won, and sacked Athens). Indeed,
there was little concept of Greece at that point.
Indeed, the whole stick about the last stand at Thermopylae
saving democracy seems suspect the stand bloodied Persia s nose,
and delayed them by perhaps 5 days in an advance that took the
better part of a year that the Greeks knew about. No, it was the
combination of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, Plataea over the
course of half a century that ensure that the no name David of
the Greek city states survived against the Goliath of Persia. And,
then, of course, came the boy wonder out of Macedonia.
Highly recommended.
