Hi Lucas Thanks for the question!
On 2019/03/20 11:08, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: > Note that if you prefer not to frame this in the context of SWOT > analysis, you can also answer the following four questions, which should > result in basically the same information: > > * What are the main 2-4 strengths of Debian today? 1. We are a large, highly functional, fully community driven organisation. For me, this is by far our biggest strength, unpacking this positive leads to a whole bunch of other sub-positives: 1.1. We are more sustainable: We won't disappear when our patron can't afford us or when they change direction. 1.2. We are in a position to put our users first: Commercial projects often have to make choices and/or sacrifices to the detriment of their users in order to maximise profits, and even though it's possible that we get it wrong every now and again, we put in a tremendous amount of effort to make the right choices for the project for the maximum benefit of our users. 1.3. Our size allows us to do things that smaller projects can't really do on our scale: We have an annual developers conference, sprints throughout the year, and a large amount of well-maintained infrastructure (all the stuff hosted under *.debian.org). I could go further on point 1, but I think I've made enough of a point on that one. 2. We actually have great people. People who only ever read mailing lists may find it strange that I say this, because from those you can get the idea that Debianites are cold, hard, impatient people. The fact is, every time I meet new Debian people I'm just blown away at how skilled they are, and how they're willing to give up some of their time for Debian. Not only that, but they're genuinely nice people. There's a saying that goes "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.", but in my experience the typical Debianite does both and I love them for that. 3. We have some fantastic processes. The NM process is really good. People who go through it will always wish it can go faster. I know, I've been there! But I love how thorough and kind it is, and how it finds weak spots in a developer candidate and points them to how they can improve. Our policy guide is also first class, there aren't many corporates who have policy guides this comprehensive, concise and easy to reference. I know this is not the place for the negatives, but I do wish more of our processes could be as top notch as the above. Nonetheless, our good process are shining beacons of what's possible, and we can aspire to making that a normal thing across the project. 4. Reputation While our reputation could be a lot better in some ways, people do tend to trust Debian. We're often seen as a neutral party when big decisions are made. That's why people care which major decisions Debian make even if they're not a Debian user. If Debian as a project has something to say, people listen. > * What are the main 2-4 weaknesses of Debian today? In no particular order: 1. Perception. Firstly, we're total shit at singing our own gospel. If we were a choir, people would pay us *not* to sing. What I find bizarre is the completely weird misconceptions that exist about Debian out there. Often people don't realise that I'm a Debian contributor and want to share factoids about Debian with me, and it's not only that those end up untrue but they're so out there that I can't even figure out where they could possibly come from. I'm pretty sure many Debianites have come across this. Debian has a huge image problem that should really be addressed. That said (oops here comes a positive in the weakness section), this morning on #debian-publicity I noticed larjona mentioning that there's so many Debian posts coming up that she's not sure how to pace them so that people can have enough time to disseminate each one (paraphrasing). I didn't plan to mention any persons directly in this mail, but I'm incredibly thankful for all the great work she's doing in Debian. 2. Diversity. I feel like I should sigh and ask if I even really still need to explain this one. Sure, the world is messed up and women get the short end of the stick in many ways, and Debian isn't in a position to fix the entire world. But, there's surely a lot more we can do to attract more women to the project that we're just not doing at the moment. It's nice that there are diversity sessions at DebConf where some of these issues are discussed, but discussion isn't enough, we need to step it up more than just a few notches and start taking regular action to improve this. 3. Burnout. Eep, I could write an email longer than this one just on burnout. We install monitoring software everywhere to check the status of our systems, but we do far to little to keep an eye out for our fellow developers. Often there are signs and indicators that things go wrong, like a critical team with just one member that just went two weeks without barely sleeping. Or someone getting increasingly dismayed at processes while trying to move forward but just stays stuck in one place. We must be better at finding ways to help each other, and there should be no shame in saying things like "I really need a break right now" or "I need help on this" or "I'm stuck and don't know how to proceed". I think we should have a process to deal with burnout. Perhaps a checklist of sort to help fix things. For example, in a scenario with a team with just one developer a team that's responsible for this could help with a call for contributors. Or such a team could help with someone to stand in for a little bit or just otherwise help a person to get back on a solid footing again. 4. Conflict Resolution. Our conflict resolution leaves much to be desired. It's inevitable that when you have several hundred active contributors, all very passionate about the project, that you'll have instances where people disagree. Disagreement in itself is fine, to the point where I would even encourage it! Unfortunately, it can get ugly due to a few things: * Not everyone has a high emotional quotient, and will be more prone to jumping to the worst possible conclusion when confronted with an ambiguous situation. * We work a lot with text-only media, where feelings and intent aren't very well conveyed. Many of us in the project are no stranger to either misunderstanding someone's intentions, or to being misunderstood ourselves. * Things pile on quickly. When two people are having a disagreement, it's easy for bystanders to get involved, often not even understanding the problem properly nor the actual positions of the people having a disagreement. This means that a simple misunderstanding can very quickly grow out of control. There have been troubled individuals in the project who have not been dealt with in the best manner, which can be unfair to both all the members in the project and to those individuals who misbehave. It's really an area that needs improvement. > * What are the main 2-4 external things happening in the world outside > Debian, and that are "opportunities" for Debian? 1. RISC-V This is a big one. Companies all over are going to extreme measures to get their Intel-based hardware sanitized and running on the fewest possible proprietary firmware as possible. As RISC-V becomes more mature, stable and available, it's going to sell like hot cakes, and people will want an operating system to match with that hardware. RISV-V and Debian looks like a match made in heaven to me. The Librem 5 phone is also worth paying some attention to. 2. Young people For a while, it seemed like young people's interest in computer science was dwindling. Perhaps it was the courses they were exposed to, perhaps computer games were too good for a while and distracted them. Either way, young people seem to be interested in programming at an increasingly growing rate again, and the amount of new free software projects that are being created is growing alongside that. I think Debian can do more to be attractive and fun for younger people, and we can certainly use their time and energy for the greater good. > * What are the main 2-4 external things happening in the world outside > Debian, and that are "threats" for Debian? This question required the most thinking time before I could answer it. To be honest, I think we have relatively few external threats and that we're often our own worst enemy. 1. Fauxpen Source Software "Fauxpen Source" is a portmanteau of "faux" (fake) and open source. It refers to software that promotes itself as being free software or open source, but really isn't at all. I see more and more software projects that make big claims about how benevolent and caring they are and how they are making the world and humanity a better place, but then that ends up being a really far stretch from the truth. When comparing these not-so-good projects with Debian, it may appear to a casual user or observer that both projects are equally good, or even that the more sinister software is even better. 2. There are distributions that outshine us in certain ways This is a threat that I'm kind of happy with, competition is good. I discovered Alpine linux a while back and they're an impressive project. If I had the time I would get involved. They strip their packages to the minimum, to the point where you can create a full minimal Alpine container with as little as 9MB (for Debian it's around 155MB). I don't think we have any methods in Debian to easily create images/chroots/systems that small, it's probably not an area we'll be able to compete on soon. Arch Linux is winning over the hackers, and sure, Debian is a great distro for the hacker, but Arch shares some positive traits with Debian and the combination of it also being a rolling distro works well for skilled individuals. We certainly can't be better than everyone in every way, I admire Debian's technical excellence, but there are others who are doing great work and in some ways we can't practically replicate it, which will some impact on our user base. 3. Trolls Yeah, it's a cute word but it's actually a big problem. I've been speaking with a few Debianites about looking at creating Debian instances of Peertube, Mastodob, Pixelfed, etc. One of the biggest challenges in maintaining those are how we'll deal with moderation. I have no idea how bad it would be once set up, and I sometimes fear we'll need a small army to help keep that moderated, and fears like that often keep us from doing things that would be otherwise great for the project. That concludes my SWOT analysis, to the three people who have probably gotten this far, thanks for reading! :) -Jonathan -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) <jcc> ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Debian Developer - https://wiki.debian.org/highvoltage ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋ https://debian.org | https://jonathancarter.org ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ Be Bold. Be brave. Debian has got your back.
