wiki.d.o/Teams to the rescue

About 3 years ago (too bad I've actually missed the 3-year anniversary by a few days!), Raphael set up http://wiki.debian.org/Teams.

In my recent encounters and contacts with people interested in contributing to Debian, I've found that page to be of invaluable help. In particular, people find it very useful in understanding the macro-structures of Debian and in understanding where they can start to contribute. Approaching a team is most likely "less scary" than contacting a larger forum, and that page offers a good service of team indexing.

Of course, the usefulness of wiki.d.o/Teams is directly proportional to how much complete it is and to how much individual team pages are current. So, in case you didn't know about the page or that you just remembered that years ago you set up a page there and then forgot about it, this is probably a good moment to add or update your team information there.

To eat my own dog food, I've recently set up Teams/DPL, which is probably not terribly useful, but it contains interesting stuff such as where the daily activity bits are stored. (Yes: I'm just a one-person-team, but given the index is useful to document Debian "parts" in general, I believe we should allow for a slightly semantic abuse of the name.)

Incidentally, that shows another way in which wiki team pages can come to the rescue: improve the documentation of our processes. For instance, we are grown accustomed to the fact that d-d-a is an authoritative information source. Well, of course it is, but when you need to find out a 4-year old d-d-a post of some core team, since it is the only documentation of some still current (is it?) procedure, let's be fair and acknowledge that a mailing list archive it's not that handy. So, summarizing relevant d-d-a posts in team pages (with references to the originals) is another way, accessible to everybody, to help in keeping docs current. I've been doing that recently for a handful of teams, and people seem to appreciate (of course it's your responsibility to check that they do appreciate).