Communication

Since every DPL for the last few years has failed to communicate regularly despite their best goodwill, do you think you'd do better? If so, how and why?


Ted Walther

I think Debian's leaders have had great communication in the past. If people have questions, they can email them in. Providing regular reports is the secretaries job. I think Manoj deserves a raise, because he has done a great job as project secretary. Also, Martin Schulze Debian Weekly News has filled in any communications gap that a DPL would otherwise fill. No need to reinvent the wheel when Martin Schulze is doing such a good job.


Bill Allombert

I think I will do better because I will have someone acting as "secretary" making sure I do reports. Also I will report what I am doing instead of what I have done.

I don't think tbm failed to communicate, at least during his first term.


Anthony Towns

Communicating regularly is very difficult, and not something that should be underestimated. For me (eg, as release manager), the biggest problem is finding something that I think is worth saying, because "No, we're not ready to release yet for the same reasons as last time" isn't very fun, or very motivating. I think the DPL has similar problems -- it's great to make posts when exciting things get done, but when you're trying to solve difficult ongoing problems, you often don't get that regularly. . So my main answer is twofold: first, that thanks to the wonders of blogging, there's plenty of opportunity to talk about things in a fun interesting way even when they're not finished, or not important enough to warrant a mailing list post; and second, I think communication should be something the entire project does, so I'd rather focus on encouraging other developers to post interesting tidbits regularly than worry about the DPL repeating DWN's job.


Jeroen van Wolffelaar

I will definitely do better. If elected, I'll reserve a fixed minimum amount of time each week for DPL tasks, which include maintaining an agenda, and amongst others outwards communication. After all, that's a main point of my platform.

Also, I'll be working together with a team of good communicators, who I'll happily lend opportunities to speak about DPL-related issues whereever possible. They could offload some of the more 'easy' tasks too, at times.

Additionally, the review moments are meant to be 4 points where there'll be a summary report of all DPL ongoing issues, supplementing the per-issue reports.


AndreasSchuldei

Yes, I am quite sure I will do better. My team and i already started the *open* work in a public IRC channel and we intent to have regular meetings in the open, dealing with questions and issues that will come up.

I do hope that this new transparency and openness will help the project to understand the office of DPL better and also give us much more traction within the project when we need to initiate change.

Again it prooved very valueable to see last years communication attempts and how they worked out ... or failed to do so, in order to be able to make the right adjustments to the way we work.


steveMcIntyre

Communication from the DPL has been a bugbear for several years. Several DPLs have faithfully promised to improve this, and true to form the candidates this year have done the same. I believe I can do better, but then of course I _would_ say that :-) I have a track record of keeping status reports going once I commit to them, e.g. the monthly treasurer reports for debian-uk. There are 2 keys: finding the time and being prepared to admit nothing has visibly happened. I believe I can do both.


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