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Closer cooperation

hO: In your opinion, would it be a good thing if the bigger distros would work together more closely? Where do you see potential for cooperation?

SM: Absolutely, yes. In fact, we already do work together in quite a number of places. I can list a couple of easy examples here, The security teams of all the well-known distributions already share a lot of their efforts at the moment, including many of the patches that are used for security fixes. And there are developers working together across various of the distros, sharing ideas on how to package the increasing number of games that are appearing these days. There has been talk in a number of our teams of collaborating more closely, particularly joining upstream development teams to make software easier to package. There's a lot going on at the moment, more than I can possibly track!

hO: Debian has over a thousand developers. How are decisions made within the Debian project?

SM: The vast majority of the decisions in Debian are simply made by the people on the ground doing their work. This is an important principle that makes it possible for such a large number of people to work together effectively without bottlenecks; most of the day-to-day work is done by our developers without needing to consult other people.

When we do (rarely) need to make larger decisions, we can take things to an official vote, run by the secretary. These happen by PGP-signed email, using an advanced voting system called Condorcet. The most obvious of those votes is the annual election for the Project Leader, but there have also been some other high profile votes recently on contentious topics: choosing how to deal with some remaining non-free software in the archive, and how we should recognise our contributors better. vote.debian.org has more details about all of these.

hO: Could you tell us a little bit about the review of all teams within the project that you've been carrying out?

SM: I mailed out a survey to a lot of the teams in Debian way back last year, asking people to give me feedback on a number of things: how many teams they were on, how those teams were working, and where they were seeing problems. A large number of developers responded to the survey and gave me a huge amount of data to work through, and dealing with that data kept me busy for several weeks.

What I wanted to find out was the best places where I could step in and help, whether by resolving conflicts, or encouraging new people to join, or sending praise, or whatever. Several of our core teams were badly in need of more resources, and I worked with those teams to help them expand and spread their workload better. We've got a lot of fresh blood to help, and undoubtedly we are much better off for that.

I still haven't quite finished the teams review work, I must admit. There are still a couple of places remaining where I want to get involved. I've been hanging back a little so I didn't cause too much disruption before the Lenny release, but now that's happened we have more breathing space.

I'm expecting that in the future we will continue the review, asking people regularly for their opinions. It can be difficult otherwise to find out where people are actually encountering problems and getting demotivated. I want to fix those as much as possible and help people have fun doing their Debian work.

Next: Improved communications

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