zack's home page/ blog/ posts/ 2012/ 12/ bits from the DPL for November 2012

Just posted, bits from the DPL for November 2012.

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Dear Project Members, here is another (delayed) monthly report of DPL activities, this time for November 2012.

Highlights

  • In November, I've kept on helping the work of the debian-cloud initiative that I've announced last month. Some work went into setting up the usual infrastructure pieces (mailing list, pseudo-package in the BTS), some other into paperwork: on behalf of Debian, James Bromberger has opened an account on the Amazon Marketplace. That enabled us to deliver the first milestone: official Debian Squeeze images for Amazon EC2 (I keep it short here, but you can find more info in various places). More work is needed, and ongoing, to support other public clouds, better document Debian availability there, etc. You can help! Just show up on -cloud.

  • I've then spent quite some time in November getting up to speed with the status of DebConf13 organization. For the first time, this year we have implemented the "budget approval" process that I've introduced a couple of years ago. The budget I've reviewed looked good and it's balanced (meaning that the event should be self-sustained, at least that's the theory); so I've been happy to approve it. I'm looking forward, once again, to meet many of you in Switzerland this summer!

  • Together with Enrico Zini (with his DAM hat on) I've also helped Kevin Carrillo, a PhD student from New Zealand, to finalize and advertise a survey of newcomer experiences in Debian. The hope is to learn more about what works and what can be improved in our NM process, possibly learning from other FOSS projects that are also participating in the survey.

  • As a last highlight, the "dpl-helpers" initiative I've spam-ed you with several times is keep on going. We held 2 more IRC meetings during November and we have also worked on the infrastructure: we now have a mailing list and a Git repo associated to the "dpl" project on Alioth. To ease handing over pending tasks to the next DPL, I'm also working with DSA to set up some DPL related request tracker queues.

    BTW, this is my last-4 report as DPL, if you haven't yet thought at who you want as next DPL and started bothered him/her, you better hurry up!

Events

Assets

  • We have finally got the certificate from the Japan Patent Office, confirming that ownership of Debian trademark there has been transferred to SPI. Many thanks to Kenshi Muto for his help on this matter over the past several months.

  • We have also finally been transferred ownership of the debian.eu domain, from its previous owner (formally: the domain is now owned by FFIS, the Trusted Organization we rely upon the most in Europe).

  • We got our first "donation" from DuckDuckGo for revenue sharing over the past 3 months. It's about 150 USD, which answers the worries that excessive profit from this kind of deals might influence our judgement. The precondition is far from being satisfied.

  • I've been happy to approve the tentative budget for the forthcoming DebianMed sprint, for ~1400 EUR. Reminder: you can haz your sprint too, just read the fine manual.

That's all for now,
let's go back releasing Wheezy,
Cheers.

PS the day-to-day activity log for November 2012 is available at the usual place master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201211