Tomorrow, I am joining the Debian crowd at Caceres, Spain for Debconf9. The last few days were quite nice in Munich so the projected 35-40 degrees will hopefully not be too much of a shock for me now (even more so now that I just got my brand new summer haircut!).

Apart from looking forward to meet a lot of good friends, I mostly have two Talk-BoFs scheduled (besides the debian-science round-table). They are both rather non-technical, but about topics which I consider important (at least to myself), so I am hoping a lot people attend and (more importantly) participate in the discussions.

Non-English IRC Support

on Day 2, 2009-07-25, 13:00 in the lower talkroom

This session will be about Debian IRC support in general and support for people who do not speak english in particular.

While #debian is working rather well (we think) these days, it is unclear what happens to the people who have to be redirected to language-specific channels because they do not speak english.

I would like to start a discussion about what we should do to make sure those users get helped in those channels and maybe discuss shared guidelines for some channels.

So if you are already doing Debian support in a non-english channel, or interested in making Debian support in general or IRC support in particular better, please come around and discuss/voice your opinions!

(edit: oh, and if somebody wants to discuss #debian itself, we can do that as well, of course, should time permit)

The debian-devel List

on Day 5, 2009-07-28, 10:00 in the lower talkroom

I believe the athmosphere on the main Debian development mailing list has become somewhat better over the last year or so, but there is certainly room for improvement!

So in this session I would like to present some small research I have recently done about other distribution's/major project's mailing lists and how they approach possible issues like flamewars, disruptive persons, off-topic posts etc.

If you are interested in making debian-devel a better place and/or know about particularly good (or bad) examples of development mailing list handling in other projects you think might be applicable (or should be ruled out), join the BoF and its discussion.