You don't need to be an expert! A hitchhiker's guide to non-specialist Free Software contributions

So, welcome everyone. Um I hope you enjoy it. It's for those of you who are not developers or if you are, maybe you want to introduce some non-developers to Debian. So, Debian is a free software, but free software doesn't need any software. There is there are many, many things to do and we'll uh do a quick overview overview. So, uh I'm Solveig. That's my contact. Uh I did I do some Debian here and there since a long time and also I contributed to Tails for a long time. Not that much nowadays, but still some. Is that Yeah, you hear. Okay. Uh the theme of the talk is jokes about from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that some of you might know or not. So, uh the It's easy if you are developer, you already know you can do plenty of things in Debian. And if you're not, you don't necessarily know how to get in. There are The the path in uh are might be unclear. So, the first thing if you're not a native English speaker, you uh might want to do trans- it put translation for Yeah, I did I wrote traduction because I'm French. Um So, maybe you want to help your friends use Debian or maybe you yourself do not like to have your system in English. So, there sometimes you change the language of your computer and it doesn't it still shows up in English. That's the problem. So, uh some software are specific to Debian and you can translate them in Debian. That's the case for APT, the installer, the debconf templates. But, uh that's not a lot of things. Um if So, in the a lot of languages those are already translated and well translated, but maybe your language is less translated in Debian, so that might still be useful. So, the first step for that is to join to to take this uh page where you can find the link to your specific uh translation team in your language if it already exists or maybe get some help in how to get uh team started for your specific language. Because translation cannot really be a one-person effort. It needs multiple people to uh translate together and review each other's translations. So, you need to join a team or create a team. But, as I said, there's not that much to translate inside of Debian. Most software in Debian comes from what's called upstream. So, some people make software and then maintainers package those software to bring them into Debian. And to translate them, you have to go to the upstream. So, you find the package you think the translation is missing or bad. So, my example here is KDiamond, which is an awesome little game. Uh so, you find it on the Debian package tracker. So, I had I had my uh Firefox open at the same time, but it doesn't seem to work well, so. Yeah. I I don't think I can Maybe. No. Okay. So, you'll just have to follow the links on your computer. So, on the tracker.debian.org, then you find your package. In this case, it's KDiamond. And then, on the right part of the screen, there's links and homepage. And homepage is always a link to the upstream. In this case, uh it's like the name shows, it's uh KDE. Uh and then, the thing is, the next part depends on the upstream, and each upstream is different. So, then there's a treasure hunt where you find where their translation files are, how they like to translate, who to contact for each upstream. Often, with a virtual hand. And then, once you translated and they taken your translation and they done something with it, you can uh the next time the Debian maintainer updates his package, then your translation is going to be in. But, some maintainers don't update very often if there's no reason for for it. So, maybe you can uh do a bug report that says there's a new upstream version with translations. So, that's the translation part. Another way you can contribute uh is by writing documentation because it's great to have an awesome software, but if people don't know how to use it, it's kind of useless. So, we need documentations. So, that's a link to how to contribute to the Debian website itself. So, the website that the front page to enter Debian. And the website team are nice people, so don't hesitate to join them and ask them what you can do with them because they'll help. Uh another part where you can contribute documentation is on the Debian Wiki. So, the Wiki is huge. There's many pages with lots of how to do anything, but a lot of it is outdated or just wrong or duplicated or whatever. So, if you're searching for information about anything and you see an out-of-date page, please feel confident and free to modify the page. It's a wiki. Nothing is ever lost. If you click somewhere wrong, it's not lost. There's a history, so you can add new information, remove whatever is wrong, modify, add details. Uh there's also the publicity team. So, they're all so nice. I've interacted with a few of them and they're doing an awesome job, but that's another way to do. It's So, here's the link where they're towards their team, where you can find multiple ways to contact them by email or IRC or whatever your favorite blog is. And they're They do different things like they might do talking to the press or publishing news or They do a lot of different things, so it might be interesting for you. And also sometimes they also need translations, so they're another entry way into Debian. So, another one is bug triaging. So, Debian has software. Software has bugs, always. And some Some of them accumulate more bugs than can ever be solved and some teams are really overwhelmed with how many bugs they have. So, they welcome help. But, not everybody welcomes help. So, don't triage random bugs. The good thing is to join to find a team that you want to work with. So, I've recommend the games team or the pearl team because they're awesome people and they welcome help. I've asked them I've interacted with them. They're nice. And they have a lot of bugs. So, the pearl bugs are a bit harder to reproduce than the games bugs. The game bugs require you to install all of the games on your computer and test them. That's you know, hard work. So, then you have to find the bugs for example to reproduce. Oops, and you have to triage them. But, creating bugs is different paths. So, I've already given a talk about that. So, you can check on this wiki page or this talk this blog post by Raphael Herzog. And on the wiki page I've also linked to ask my previous talk. So, if you want more details about bug triaging specifically, check that. I'm not going to go in details today because I only have 20 minutes. So, promote. You can make publicity for Debian. You can hold a table at a conference. It's nice. It's mostly good if you like talking to people. So, that's not for everybody. You can print some stickers. You can give an interview to your local radio. You can go and talk to Debian to people about Debian. And there are many other ideas on this wiki page. So, there's a many ways to do promotions and it doesn't require you to know a lot about uh the intricate details of the project. Next thing is user support. So, you can help other people be uh help be comfortable on Debian. So, this page of the website lists uh many ways to offer support. There's uh yeah, okay. I plan to show it, but there's uh links to the IRC, to the mailing lists. There are many places to do user support. Uh you can uh uh um bring people around you over to Debian. It's most people are don't are not like religious religiously attached to their Windows. They're aware they're they can come over. You just need to help them come. Oh, here it is. So, there are uh many places to offer support, whatever is more comfortable for you. And you can also organize parties. So, install parties are a bit hard because there are some downtime. Upgrade parties, in my experience, work way better than trying to switch 10 of your friends one after the other. Just bring them at the same place. Then you have to explain things once. So, speaking of events, there's DebConf. In case you haven't heard about it, it's a nice moment. So, in DebConf, you can contribute to Debian. You can uh do the video team over there who does an amazing job. You can also go and cut cheese for the cheese and wine party. Cheese. >> [laughter] >> So, uh you can help and or join the team to organize future uh DebConf or mini DebConf or bug squashing parties just before the releases or install parties or, you know, any in-person moments because from it's it's easier to get people in in person. So, and maybe you're not a developer, but you're a specialist in something else. We need contributions. So, I've listed lawyers, accountants, people who do fundraising. I don't know all of what you do, but maybe some of what you're more more specialized in can help Debian. It's a wide project with many implications, and maybe you don't realize what you have to offer can contribute to Debian. Um and also Debian is a tech project, but it's also a human community. So, if you offer support to other members of the community if you have the community get close and solve their problems and develop children-like traditions, for example then that's also contributed to Debian. So thanks for those contributions. And if you're there here, you're probably already doing some of that. And uh I just want to give a a thought for Lunar, who was a Debian developer and died in November. So Yeah, uh I don't know if we have many much time left for questions, but if you have any uh please ask. Any questions? Okay. I think we're done, then. >> Thank you.