#debian-meeting revival

As part of my DPL campaign I suggested that we have more open community meetings, and also suggested that we have more generic open team meetings in a well-known public channel. Fortunately, that idea doesn’t really need a DPL to implement it, and on top of that our new DPL (Sam Hartman) supports the initiative. We do have a #debian-meeting IRC channel that’s been dormant for years, so we’re reviving that for these kind of meetings.

Today we had our first session, it was the first meeting on that channel since 2011 (almost 8 years!). The topic was “Meet the new DPL and ask him anything!”. It was announced on some of the Debian channels, most notably on Bits from Debian, I played it careful by not announcing too widely because we don’t yet have much in the way of moderation and I think if we had to deal with many trolls it would’ve been tough. This was also really early for people in the Americas (6am East Coast) so future sessions will be staggered across different times and days of the week. The session was a bit quieter than I expected, but Sam gave really nice answers and I learned a few new things so it all worked out ok, I would rather start small and build on it than it have been too chaotic and a mess. In 2017 I started a community channel called #debian-til (TIL standing for “Today I Learned”). The idea is that people share interesting Debian related things that they have learned, and it started with a hand full of people and took a year to grow to a hundred, but I’m very happy with how that worked out and how the culture of that channel has evolved, I’m hoping that #debian-meeting can also grow and evolve to be something useful and fun for our community, instead of only a channel to schedule meetings in.

You can view the full logs of the meeting stored by meetbot in html or plain text.

Upcoming meetings:

More details about both those meetings should be available soon. For the latest information, refer to the Debian Meeting wiki page. You can also subscribe to Bits from Debian (RSS/Atom) for the latest community news.

Anyone can schedule a meeting on the debian-meeting wiki page, so if you’re considering using it for a team meeting or any other kind of session idea, then please go ahead and do so!