Running for DPL

I am running for Debian Project Leader, my official platform is published on the Debian website (currently looks a bit weird, but a fix is pending publication), with a more readable version available on my website as well as a plain-text version.

Shortly after I finished writing the first version of my platform page, I discovered an old talk from Ian Murdock at Microsoft Research where he said something that resonated well with me, and I think also my platform. Paraphrasing him:

You don’t want design by committee, but you want to tap in to the wisdom of the crowd. Lay out a vision for solving the problem, but be flexible enough to understand that you don’t have all the answers yourself, that other people are equally if not more intelligent than you are, and collectively, the crowd is the most intelligent of all.

– paraphrasing of Ian Murdock during a talk at Microsoft Research.

I’m feeling oddly calm about all of this and I like it. It has been a good exercise taking the time to read what everyone has said across all the mediums and trying to piece together all the pertinent parts and form a workable set of ideas.

I’m also glad that we have multiple candidates, I hope that it will inspire some thought, ideas and actions around the topics that occupy our collective head space.

The campaign period remains open until 2019-04-06. During this period, you can can ask me or any of the other candidates about how they envision their term as DPL.

There are 5 candidates in total, here’s the full list of candidates (in order of self-nomination with links to platforms as available):

• Joerg Jaspert
• Jonathan Carter
• Sam Hartman
• Martin Michlmayr
• Simon Richter