Re: Questions for Sruthi

Sruthi Chandran <[email protected]> Tue, 24 Mar 2026 18:36:04 +0100
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.vote
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On 19/03/26 11:07, Jonathan Carter wrote:
> Hi Sruthi
>
> Since you've held various leadership positions in Debian before, 
> including being on the DebConf Committee, being chief Orga for DC23, 
> being on the Outreach team, Application Manager and a Community Team 
> delegate, I'm sure you've seen your fair share of both all the great 
> things that Debian brings to the world, and also the more unpleasant 
> things that we sometimes have to deal with.
>
>
> Question 1:
>
> With all your years of experience, what are the biggest things that 
> you've observed that hold us back in terms of making Debian more 
> diverse? What are the biggest problems, and also the most urgent 
> issues that need addressing?
I would say nothing is holding us back, I believe that we are not able 
to reach the right people. With diversity, and outreach in general, we 
can just keep experimenting and something might work and most won't.

As far as I am aware, the two main things Debian as project does for 
diversity are Outreachy internships and special Diversity budget for 
DebConfs. I am not sure both of this are working. To know if these are 
working, there should be a study of retention ratio of contributors 
benefiting from these initiatives. This is one of the things I want to 
start with. We might have to completely restructure our efforts based on 
the output.

Even when I say I want to promote diversity, I do not have solutions to 
the problems. I want to explore the solutions with like-minded DDs.

By becoming a DPL, one thing I can certainly do is become an example for 
others.

>
>
> Question 2:
>
> If you could snap your fingers and bypass a GR and instantly change 
> anything in our constitution, what would that be?

The thing I most love about Debian is its Democratic structure and 
collective decision making (even with its numerous shortcomings). The 
fact that DPL's decision itself can be overridden by GR is something 
that makes Debian different from other distros. So, I do not want to do 
any change to the constitution by bypassing GR, but I might want to 
propose a GR instead.

"Defining a simpler decision making process than GR for simpler 
problems". My idea is that we can have GR as usual, but also something 
simpler to make decisions on day to day activities when we do not reach 
consensus through mailing list discussions.

>
>
> Question 3:
>
> In your platform you mention that Debian as a community is reluctant 
> to change most of the time, but my experience has been very different. 
> I see a large community that's very enthusiastic about change, but 
> often its difficult to figure out what the best way forward is, 
> especially when we have different camps that feel passionately about 
> their technical, social and ethical reasons for their stance. And I 
> see you referring to flamewars in your platform, these have been a 
> source of our biggest flamewars too.
>
> So I would like to know, when and how has Debian been reluctant to 
> change as a community? Do you have any examples? And how can we be 
> better?

When I say we as a community is reluctant to change, I meant that these 
different camps you mentioned being reluctant to adjust and as a result, 
the discussions go in circles and the final output is bike-shedding. So, 
even if everyone is enthusiastic to change, the end result is no change.

I can go into numerous bike-shedding instances, the simplest one would 
be the discussion on changing primary Debian communication/decision 
making channel from mailing lists to hybrid mail + decision making 
apps/forums.

My plan is to identify important areas where we need to change and drive 
conversations so that we reach some kind of consensus in at least a few 
of them.

>
>
> Question 4:
>
> The Debian Camp idea sounds really nice. How would you attract new 
> recruits to the camp? Is there some existing funnel/backlog of people 
> who are interested? Or is the plan to do some marketing in 
> universities and similar environments?

When Debian is launching its own mentoring program, I am sure there will 
be some discussions surrounding that in the FOSS circles. In addition to 
this general publicity, we can recruit our localgroups network to spread 
the word around. We can also ask help from the Debian Developers in the 
academic world to help us spread the word further.

All these plans are rudimentary and it would be feasible only if I can 
find a team of enthusiastic people.

>
>
> That's it for now, good luck!
Thanks :)
>
> -Jonathan
>
OpenPGP_signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 665 B)