Report from the MicroDebconf Brasília 2015

This was an event organized due to a coincidental meeting of a few DD’s in the city of Brasilia on May 31st 2015. What a good thing when we can mix vacations, friends and Debian ;-)

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We called it Micro due to its short duration and planning phase, to be fair with other Mini DebConfs that take a lot more of organization. We also ended up having a translation sprint inside the event that attracted contributors from other cities.

Our main goal was to boost the local community and bring new contributors to Debian. And we definitely made it!

The meeting happened at University of Brasilia (UnB Gama). It started with a short presentation where each DD and Debian contributor presented their involvement with Debian and plans for the hacking session. This was an invitation for new contributors to choose the activities they were willing to engage, taking advantage of being guided by more experienced people.

Then we moved to smaller rooms where participants were split in different groups to work on each track: packaging, translation and community/contribution. We all came together later for the keysigning party.

Some of the highlights of the day:

• ~40 participants, from which ~10 were already engaged in the Debian community
• hands-on packaging tutorial
• 4 new packages uploaded
• from the 6 brazilian names annouced as new contributors in the DPN just after the meeting, 4 were among us in Brasília
• hands-on translation tutorial
• newbie translators paired with more experienced ones, numerous translations committed
• discussion about chalenges of migrating debianArt to Noosfero
• initial setup of Collab.Debian (with Noosfero), aiming to facilitate contributions of users to the Debian project (this platform was offcially released at DC15 lightining talks (46:00))
• first keysigning party for many of the participants
• first time some longterm Brazilian contributors had the change to meet in person

For more details of what happened, you can read our full report.

The MicroDebconf wouldn’t be possible without the support of prof. Paulo Meirelles from UnB Gama and all the LAPPIS team for the local organization and students mobilization. We also need to thank to Debian donnors, who covered the travel costs of one of our contributors.

Last but not least, thanks to our participants and the large Brazilian community who is giving a good example of team work. A similar meeting happened in July during the Free Software International Forum (FISL) and another one is already planned to happen in October as part of the LatinoWare.

I hope I can join those folks again in the near future!