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Debian/Society at DebConf11

For DebConf11—which, needless to say, I'll be attending—I've accepted to coordinate the Debian/Society track, together with dkg. As it's Daniel who has done most of the work up to now, let me pretend I'm catching up with a brief but very important call for papers.

The idea of the Debian/Society track is to collect talks and other events that explore two society-related aspects of Debian:

  1. Debian is a society in itself. It is a society formed by a group of people that are connected by relationships, share a (virtual) territory, and are subject to various kinds of self-imposed rules (technical, political, etc.)

  2. Debian relates with larger human societies and has an impact on them, mainly but not only through the Free Software artifacts that Debian produces and distributes.

Several talks and events that have already been submitted to DebConf11 do a very good job at presenting one or both of the above aspects. But we are looking for a few more. In particular, we would like to receive submissions of events about:

  • Governance models of other FOSS projects, possibly in a compare and contrast way with respect to how we do things in Debian.

    Are you a member of some FOSS project other than Debian and have given some thought about how well its governance mechanisms work in comparison to Debian's? Are you a geek about FOSS project management and have spent time thinking about how to improve Debian governance, transparency, or the like? We would like to hear from you!

  • Impact of Debian activities on the "real" (non-geek) world.

    Do you have a good story to tell about how Debian has changed your world, or even a small part of it? Are you involved in some Debian (sub-)project which has the ambition of making the world a better place? We would like to hear from you!

If you think you can host the event we are looking for, just head to penta and submit your event providing all associated information (event kind, title, abstract, etc.). Please e-mail me or dkg when you've done so. We're way past the general event submission deadline, but if your proposal is just what we need to fill out the track, we can lobby the Talks Team for its acceptance (we can't guarantee acceptance, though).

Daniel Kahn Gillmor
Stefano Zacchiroli