Attracting and retaining Debian contributors
Many projects struggle with attracting and retaining contributors; Debian is no different in that regard. At DebConf24, Carlos Henrique Lima Melara and Lucas Kanashiro gave a presentation about efforts that the Brazilian Debian community has made to increase participation. Their ideas and the lessons learned can be applied more widely, both for other Debian communities and for other projects.
Kanashiro introduced himself as a software engineer, Debian developer since 2016, and an Ubuntu core developer working on Ubuntu Server at Canonical. Melara said that "everybody calls me Charles", and that is his name within Debian; he is a computer engineer interested in security and operating systems, working on embedded systems at Toradex. He has recently become a Debian developer.
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Brazil now has an engaged and active community of Debian contributors. He showed a picture of attendees at the MiniDebConf Belo Horizonte that was held in April; there were around 225 participants, Kanashiro said. He also showed a picture of all of the Brazilian attendees at last year's DebConf in Kochi, India; there were 14 people in the picture. The Brazilian Debian community likes to promote what it is doing, by showing up and participating in events like those, but it is also interested in improvement and in helping other communities to improve as well.
To that end, Melara asked the audience how many were Debian developers (lots) and maintainers (two); then he asked how many "have a thriving local community where you are living?" There were a few hands raised, which is "nice", he said, but is indicative of the problem that they have been trying to solve, both in the city of Brasília and in the whole country of Brazil.
There are two things that they think are important to overcome in order to create and build a new local community. The first is to lower the barriers for newcomers to contribute. But once you have attracted a newcomer and gotten them to contribute, how can they be retained so that they become long-term contributors or even become Debian maintainers and developers? The main goal of the talk, he said, is to relate what the Brazilian community has done "to make those two things a reality".