Re: Questions for Sruthi

Sruthi Chandran dijo [Tue, Mar 24, 2026 at 06:36:04PM +0100]:
>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.

Please count me in for this! I would be quite interested in sitting
together with you (even with the diameter of our planet between us) and try
to crunch data on how many people have come via Outreachy internships and
Diversity budgets and stayed to become a regular contributor, how many
might have not joined Debian but perhaps some related free software
project, and how many might have dropped from our sight. I think this can
be point to important data to judge whether our efforts are worth it, and
how to best tune them for improvement.

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

Yes, and I must say, it's one of the things that I am most happy about of
having you as our next DPL.

>>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.

I have often said that we should not fear GRs — we should try to make them
manageable. Having a GR on any given topic should not be seen as stressful
as it is seen, and should not prompt dozens of news sites to look greedily
at Debian knowing a large flamefest is coming. In my opinion, a GR should
be usable even to gauge the project's opinion on any given topic, without
making it necessary for it to be a huge discussion.

Of course, neither our culture nor our processes nor our tools help us. GRs
are heavy, they have long defined discussion and voting periods (even if
they are more manageable since https://www.debian.org/vote/2021/vote_003 )

Do you have any improvements to this process that could help making
mini-GRs more manageable?

Thanks for your answers!


 — Gunnar.

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