Good afternoon everyone
So, Enrico is a guy with many hats in Debian and
I didn't expect it but he will talk about a new hat:
the "Debian contributor hat"
So, please welcome Enrico.
[applause]
Nobody expects Debian contributors.
Our chief weapons are Debian Developers.
Debian Developers and Debian Maintainers are our two weapons
Debian Developers and Debian Maintainers and Alioth accounts
are our three weapons
and Debian Developers, Debian Maintainers, Alioth accounts and bug reports
are our four amongst our weapons
amongst our weaponry
are such elements as Debian Developers, Debian Maintainers are... I'll come in again.
[comment about the Social Contract]
Nobody expects Debian contributors
amongst our weaponry
are such diverse elements as
Debian Developers, Debian Maintainers
Alioth accounts, bug reporters
and it miss contributors
There's more possible
We clearly need another hat
to make sense of all this.
Right?
so let's make a new hat
I would like to create a hat
of Debian contributors
so that we can say
Nobody expects Debian
our chief weapons are Debian contributors, full stop.
A hat for everyone that contributes to Debian.
Now, the details are here.
This is the file
with notes.
Is it readable at the end?
No?
You have much better eyesight that
No, sorry, I open in a different terminal.
[laughter]
Right.
This is a text file with notes about what I plan to do
I would like to go through it with you
and then
edit it together with you
and at the end of these 45 minutes
have a proposal that
I'll try to implement during DebConf
and fail unless somebody helps me, probably
but what we see how much of this
we want to do, how much of it
can be implemented during DebConf and
at the end of DebConf
I'll make another talk about what we changed in Debian.
So
This is probably a good time to
Ok, so
the problem we want to solve
the problem I want to solve
and you probably also want to solve
once you realise you have a problem
is... words wrapping.
[laughers] Now that we solved word wrapping.
Ok, so
in Debian, we have
lots of contributions that
we do not thank people for
in the sense that we do not acknowledge
that people that did
translations,
worked
we don't acknowledge somewhere people who did translations
or people who reported bugs
There is lots of contributions outside of Debian
but if we look
around package tracking system
Debian developer package overview
it's all package-based
because that's where we come from
and
and so we track uploads that are easy to track
and we acknowledge uploads mostly
but
there's so much more that we do not acknowledge at the moment
Also,
There is a need
Over the time, we created so many ways of contributing to Debian
outside being a Debian Developer
so
the head
of the Italian translations in Debian
is not a Debian Developer
Nobody knows
who she is
Well, I know who she is
Francesca told me
and at least two Debian Developers know who she is
I've no idea who's the head of the
Vietnamese translation
Raise your head if you know who is the head of the Vietnamese translation
in Debian.
[chat in the public]
[public] I know the French one
yeah, we all know who the French one is.
[laughter]
[claps]
But, we totally need a way to credit people
properly.
Debian is so much more than
uploads and Cheese and Wine BoFs
So, there's this idea of creating a hat
of Debian contributor which is
the ultimate do-ocracy hat
There is no bureaucracy involved
If you contribute to Debian
you are a Debian contributor
automatically: there is no new Debian contributor process
If you stop contributing to Debian, you stop being a Debian contributor
That's it.
When you are a Debian contributor
you get such
diverse privileges as
having your name on a list
of Debian contributors
[laughter]
and possibly, if you're not a Debian contributor anymore
then your name will be on a list of Debian contributors in 2012.
If we want to be a bit fancy, when you click
on a name on a list
you get a page about that person
that list what they've done
And that's about it.
That's all I had in mind
You report a bug
you become a Debian contributor
Then maybe everything you do for Debian is reporting a bug
on the 11th of August 2013
then you will be a Debian contributor
from the 11th of August 2013
to the 11th of August 2013
at least you're acknowledged
as that you've helped Debian
Mostly I've said all of this
In order to do this
there needs to be a way of collecting this information
There are data sources we can easily tap into
such as
package uploads
but we can see mailing list traffic, easily
We can get
bug tracking system activity hopefully easily
We can hook into
commit logs of Alioth
version control systems
[phone ring]
[phone's owner] Sorry
All right
At least I don't have to answer
And, this system, whenever
at any point of its usage
would be unfair
because there will always be some bit of Debian that
isn't yet providing data
for the list.
However, the point is that by having such a system in place
we create
a proper way of acknoledging people's work
and we give motivations for teams to contribute
contribution information to the list
Questions so far?
[Q] If you do this automatically
which we can here assume you want to
wouldn't that raise privacy concerns?
Sorry, I did not understand the second part
[Q] Wouldn't this raise privacy concerns?
Good question.
The question is,
if we collect this data automatically, wouldn't there be privacy concerns?
Yes, possibly
To be discussed.
All the information presented here
is already public
There is a public record of package uploads,
mailing lists are publicly archived
but
the BTS is fully in the open
commit logs on Alioth are public
I would only mine commit logs on Alioth are public
I would only mine
or get data from sources that are either public
or that people agree
to disclose
However, it's the usual issue of
the information is public but not presented in that way
for example
when
I collected information from Debian changelogs to
see the history of people's contribution in the process
I did not make that information publicly available
because it's a bit
I would like to have a discussion
whether we want to present that information in
collated in such a way
So yes
that is an issue
My general idea would be that
once the system goes public
there should be a way for people to opt-out
of having information about them displayed
Most of the privacy scenario...
so, generally people
I would understand the general...
The default would be that somebody likes
their work to be credited
However, there may be people
that
would have issues if some of their work is credited
Most things revolve around
job hunting like recruiters looking at the internet
and you either want to be found
or if you don't want to be found
you already have a problem when contributing to Debian.
I need to be careful about contributing with a different name or something.
But, yes
my assumption is that
It's not a big privacy issue to get it started
as long as
we give people the opportunity to opt-out
Does it seem reasonable?
[Q] Maybe with a opt-in
Maybe with a opt-in
By default it's not opt-in
I would be fine with opt-in
I wonder how many people would know
that they can opt-in and how to opt-in
At the moment
the current Debian infrastructure is not even opt-out
You can't say "Please don't show
the messages that I sent to Debian mailing lists"
I would see surprising that such a thing would be opt-in
because anything is already out by default
On the other hand
I could be convinced
about making it opt-in
It's seems to be
at the moment something that would
impact
the start of such project
So, before
somebody gets a useful list
I would need to go and bother a thousand people
to opt-in the system so that at least can get populated
Yes?
[Q] I think you should also look at legal
aspects, you are collecting personal information
as far... I don't know the law
by heart
but as far as I understand it
it would be illegal
in half of european countries
Then Debian is already illegal
No! Currently
you are not collecting this information
Yes, we are
You have it in different pieces
and at different places
and it start
The package tracking system would be illegal
No it's not illegal
You don't collect information there
collated about a person
There, you have it
to follow specifics purpose
and this is not illegal, but if you collect it
and collect all information for a specific
person or all persons
and collate it
this could possibly be illegal as far as I understand it
I would like
You said that you are not sure
I would like to talk with somebody who is sure
because we already have things
that
would potentially be illegal in that view
like the package tracking system
goes beyond
listing of some of the uploaders
because it collects information
about everything visible about the person, bugs and so on
[Q] Would it be
a preset that is useful to
structure this kind of things by, I mean
some
reasonable set of people
listed as contributors
You could start by assuming that
people who have said
"I would like to be a Debian Developer"
or "I would like to be a Debian member"
have implicitely given their authorisation
to be listed as Debian contributors.
It's a subset
that we might have to run up by a lawyer
but it seems a bit more reasonable than
??????
I was just gonna say I think
the legal thing should probably be a separated BoF
because
in the practical terms if you're only worried
from the legal point of view, you just need to
get someone who is in Debian in the US
to host a US server because the US
doesn't basically have this kind of laws
It is rather missing the point.
Exactly, the relevant question is I think
no about the legal thing it's a kind of ???
but about what we want to do and what we think is fair and so on
Well I keep thinking ??? something
much more lightweight than launchpad
is doing
Another point of, another way to mailing list would be to
do this automatism
without publishing the data but
with afterwards sending
about once a year or
even possibly less
a mail to every contributor if he wants to be listed
so we have an opt-in instead of an opt-out
If we do it seldomly enough
it would not even be so
stressing people
Yeah, that makes sense
You don't need to wait a year,
you can do it the first time you detect someone new
someone starts contributing
we can send "hello, you did something in Debian
we would like to credit you"
Wait for a month.
Wait for a month after the first contribution
if you get more, then
say "Do you want to be thanked?"
Makes sense
[Q] Even without waiting. We can do as the Linux kernel
you knows the stats about
which companies contribute to the Linux kernel?
It's like that, they check for new commits
and just send an email to ask affiliation
There's other systems that calculate karma
Those are illegal because
then they produce
information that could be used to rank people
from a job point of view
[from audience] there is Google
The other... yeah, well.
I'm not that concerned with that regard at the moment
[Q] Would that credit
only be for
persons, or also for organisations or companies?
I'm
interested about
entities
directly contributing to Debian
So, if
there's some email and GPG key
which belongs to an entity called
FooBar ltd
then FooBar ltd will be credited
I'm not interested
that there is a real person behind this
and not interested
that's the real name of a person
It's just whatever
is chosen for contribution
that we only check identities
when we have to
which is when we give people upload rights
because we want to know where they live
and go there to tickle them
[laughter]
I think that
the main index would be the e-mail
Even behind the scenes... But the main index would be the email?
That is one issue
That is an issue
because depending on the data sources
the index could be an email
in the BTS for example
an Alioth
account
for commits
in Alioth
or
Debian Developer login name
for sponsoring uploads
so
possibly, that
that could be some
need of mixing things at some point
which is a bit of a separate problem
I don't mind starting
with that not being perfect
or being fixed by hand
And if we evolve at some point
there may be a way for people
to log in and prove that
they control that GPG key
or that e-mail address or that Alioth account
you know, sending e-mail challenge saying "that's my e-mail"
but ok, it is
yes, ok, then I merge
the two sets of contributions
possibly for next year
because it starts being a bit heavy weight
but there's a problem of doing this collation
it is a wider something that
greatly help the MIA team
So this
in the end can be something
used to detect when people
are not contributing anymore
I would also
want to make it so that
if you are a Debian Developer
you are not automatically
a Debian contributor
[laughter]
If you are not a Debian Developer
you are not automatically a Debian contributor
you are a Debian contributor only
if you contribute to Debian
If you are a Debian Developer that
does not contribute to Debian
then you are not on that list
You keep being a Debian Developer
There's the usual
I'm not interested in changing the rules
for
getting removed from
Debian keyring
I think what we have is fine.
But
it's perfectly right if
if I'm not active in Debian for a year
but I still care about the project
involved, and follow things
but I don't contribute anymore
then I'm perfectly happy that I'm not listed
among the contributors for that year
There was a hand?
[Q] Yes, I'm relaying a comment from IRC
Wouldn't
recognising every small thing like
just one bug report
dillute the
the weight
of a Debian contributor
that so
are there Debian contributors like
the head of a translation team
be equal to
one bug report
That's the comment, I'm not saying that I agree
The way I see it
again, we can
you can tell me if you don't like this
but the way I see it, they are the same
They are Debian contributors
maybe one has been a Debian contributor
for much longer than the other
so the time span
of the contribution is the only extra
bit. Or you can click on a
a person and list their contributions
But, I don't want to
calculate a number
of how much one is a contributor
I don't see
why one would want to
rank people
by contribution
I'm not interested in that
I think it creates a kind of
community where I don't want to be in
personally, I mean, that would be my personal feeling
But I would be able to
say "thank you" even if
a person reports a bug
It takes time to report a bug
There was an idea
talking about this
informally earlier
of
having some data sources used
only to compute
the time span but not
the status of contributors
for example mailing list traffic
Maybe people don't like the idea
that if you send a e-mail to
a mailing list you are Debian contributors
There's indeed many people
who send lots of e-mails to Debian
mailing lists
but do not contribute
[Laughter] to Debian
at all
However, if somebody
is a contributor for some other reason
then it makes sense to
look at mailing list involvement
say: "Well, you reported a bug today
but you've been active in mailing lists
for a year"
so you are a Debian contributor because
you reported a bug
and you've been a Debian contributor for a year
because
you've been into Debian for a long time
so splitting
the...
I think some data sources
are only useful computing the time
and not the status
I would like to add something about
the issue with detecting the people
because we had some experiences in the team maintenance thing
and, in UDD you have
this Carnivore database
which is based on the
key fingerprint
and we even have
for these people
somebody with five
different names
names spellings and so on
people are using different e-mail addresses so
I really really really doubt
you can manage this for
say, more than 500 people
because it's
manual work and we tried it
it's hard to cope with this
No no, I don't want to do manual work
Yeah but, ok
Good luck with automatic detection
No, I don't want to do
that much automatic detection either
I would
like
things to be fixed as much as possible
and
at lower level of data sources
When that is not possible
I would like to offer people a way to
fix the data for themselves
There's that
unpronounceable and
evil web site that tracks
free software developers
that in my opinion should be illegal but isn't
it starts with "o", ohlo?
"O-l-o-h-o" something like that
I actually had an argument with
their CEO, saying
I've asked to opt out
of their system and they told me to fuck off
So
talking about privacy of these things
I guess if they can do what they do
I think we don't have a problem to say "thank you"
to a bunch of people
They do of
they have a mess, their dataset is a
a mess
but people still like them
I'm listed about
twenty times in their system
and if I really care about
contributing them my identity for free
for them to send it out
then I
can log in and
merge these identities for them
I guess
that's something we can offer
and
and that can improve things
like carnivore and so on
and possibly we can have
personal homepage...
for contributors
[Q] Where they actively
contribute to their identities?
At least we've done
all we can to thank them
but
Well, you know, if I tell you "thank you"
I don't expect you to say
"You didn't thank me in a an appropriate way"
Right?
On the other hand
I'm ok if people say
"Well, I'm also that person
you don't need to thank me so many times"
and that
that's fine, but, on the other hand
I'm perfectly happy if
people want
to use multiple identities
for contributing to Debian
Somebody in Debian science
may want to contribute to Debian games under a different name
For similar reasons, I don't want to trunk
the time frame of contributions
below the month level
I don't want
to say
"You have contributed to Debian games
between
10am to 11:30am on a Thursday
when you were at a meeting
[laughter]
Right?
So, it's
I want it to be coarse
It really needs to be mostly about thank you
and about building reputation
Reputation is also what we can reward people with
which is kind of the point of the exercise
and that reputation is nice to acknowledge
and at the same time it's nice
that we can
look up someone's reputation
at least
as a Debian account manager and Front Desk member
if I can see what's somebody's reputation and have a
reasonable look
then I can make the process much swifter for them
and especially for non uploading DDs
it's currently very hard
because
I can go and look at package changelogs
to see that they have been active for ten years in the project
and
if somebody is a non uploading DD
that has done translations at the moment
I have very hard time seeing
what they've done
possibly I don't understand the language
So, well
and that makes
makes it easier and
that another
outcome that I would really want to see
out of this is that
we start to actually see
in front of us
that Debian is not just
about technical development
There's a lot more
but if people still perceive
"Oh, I'd like to contribute to Debian but
but I'm not a technical person."
and
many of us may have
difficulty in pointing out places
but one can go and have a look at
such a list of people and say: "hey, look
there's people over there that do also other stuff
it could be indexed by
topic of contribution
as well
Again
uploading, these are contributors that do uploading
these are contributors that do translations
That may be introduced at some point
so that we
we can turn on a spotlight
in several aspects of
Debian that we usually don't look into
we just take it for granted
[Q] I have a lot of questions
Yeah?
I'm more concerned, more than anything
If this...
I mean, some
One thing that you said at the beginning is that
maybe some people would be quite interested
in this for collaborate research, for work
for creating a curriculum
[A] Yes
[Q] and
if it's as easy as to filing a bug which
can be very hard to do
depending on the bug or very easy to do
depending on how much you put in it,
wouldn't be able to
to calling people to put this
random stuff or easy stuff there
for just being in the list
Yes, well
at that point they're really bad job recruiters
Say that if there's a recruiter that just
does random google search
and contacts whoever comes out
like Google recruiters
I keep being contacted for things like managing clusters
If anyone's had a look at what I do
I don't manage clusters, right?
So, if there's recruiters like that
there's nothing you can do
If people care to actually go in and to look
at what a person has done
then
there's a way to find out
what contributions actually were
from just linking to
the usual Debian mailing list
archives or uploads or
commit logs and so on
[Q] So, if I understand correctly, you are ready to
use the BTS as a source
for the contributors, and you could have
a lot of nicknames there
It could be "the Pope" or "Bill Gates", or
the name of a serial killer or whatever
Are you ready to use that?
Maybe there could be some issue with
people that would be falsely
credited
[A] We try and see what happens
It could be that for the bug tracking system
we need to have
some extra intelligence built in to avoid crediting
China manufacturing corporations
or viagra supplies for cheap
mailing list archives are being spammed
somehow
but again
then, maybe
maybe there's lots of noise
and we want to set a threshold that one
contribution to the bug tracking system is not good to be enough
or maybe we can look if that bug was closed
because we close spam bugs
anyway
If there's cruft, if there's noise
that we can filter somehow
maybe we'll loose some contributions
but at least it wasn't for lack of trying
I mean
I don't want to go out of my way to thank someone
If I need to
find out where you live
to come to your home and say thank you
because I don't see you anymore
or because I met you in a crowded
square and you gave me directions
but I didn't take down your phone number
then, it's unfair
you won't be thanked
when I finally reach my destination, but
that's life
So
then maybe it takes
ten e-mails to the BTS
with different content
to be acknowledged
It's possibly something to be
I would leave freedom to the people doing an import
thing, something that gets data out of the bug tracking system
give that area freedom to work it out
and I don't want anyone to be perfect
The system is not going to be perfect
if
somebody would really like to be credited but
isn't in the list
and what they do is report bugs
I would be surprised because if
if somebody wants to be credited on reporting one bug
I'm going to say " Well, just upload some more"
I'm not sure I want to have people
in Debian
that contribute
in order to be credited
If
If contributing some more is
a way to get credited, then
yeah, we don't need to be perfect
just ask people to contribute some more
or if people contribute
the problem is when people contribute a lot
but they're not credited
then maybe we need to figure out how to import
data from another part of Debian that
we currently don't track so well
I'm totally not looking for perfection here
[Q] Have you thought about other ways to use mailing lists
archive because you said
we don't always want to use it as
source of contribution but more
to track the length of contribution
but there are some lists, for example
l10n translation lists
where I guess most people who contribute are real contributors
and sometimes they
also use
some code
I mean, the e-mail could be detecting
like "Request for review"
and stuff like this so you can add some hints on the
type of contribution more precise that
just "sent a mail to the mailing list"
and maybe also for a user mailing list
not tracking the question but only answers
or sort like that...
because, well, asking a question is not a real
contribution to Debian, but helping someone else to
use the Debian system is
a Debian contribution
and one of the most important one to start with I guess
[A] Decoding mailing lists patterns
fairly is not
easy as far as I understand
but I guess it changes from list to list
but
that could be solved by
adding a general mailing list
source that only looks at time frame
and having the translation team saying
"In our mailing list
there's more semantic information that can be
extracted"
so make
an extra import if
importer for my team that decodes
things and put there properly
as long as you can have
many things dumping data into a bucket
then that works
I currently have no idea
well, only vague ideas on
how...
what's the protocol to collect this data
I would
from the central bit
I wouldn't go much further than
having a list of urls from where I download something
on a regular basis
because that's the simplest
protocol to identify instead of
submits and whatnot
and what's in the file that gets downloaded
could be identity, initial time and final time
and then each datasource
makes a file available somewhere
I was thinking of something
super simple minded like that but then it's not enough
because then if you want to look
to make a link
showing the contributions then
well I need something
about how to
how to make this data available for collection
at the central point I'm only
I want it as simple minded
as possible, I don't want
the core of this to be about data collection
about mining
it should just be about collecting what as been mied
One last question?
[Q] Just a thought on what you said there is a
Google Summer of Code project
on Fedmsg
which is a ??? maybe to
have a bus
collecting lots of information from
various sources of information
among those, there's already
mentors.debian.net
and I guess the BTS would be
[A] main source? [Q] it's a source
???
yeah but I guess it could have enough metadata
like ???
the software is fedmsg
F-E-D-M-S-G
it's from Fedora and
the summer of code student is trying to adapt it for Debian
just a software bus
where you get lots of events from various sources
maybe it could be
assuming it goes further than this summer
it could be an interesting use of this project
Ok
[Chairman] As the mentor of this project, I agree
[laughter]
Ah, let's talk
and I think the student is arriving today, so
[laughter]
So, we're out of time
so, thank you Enrico
[Enrico] We can talk about this, I plan to work on it during the DebConf
shortly, that should be Martin Ferrari coming who was also
intending to work on a site, similar to this
and I get we should all get together
I can think of something
and feel free to stop me to talk about this and
offer help or
that's the main thing I want to do a DebConf
and I want to get something land before
the end of DebConf so we can
present it properly
[applause]