Debian-Community.org is an effort to give something back to the community that has a great share in making Debian the universal OS that it is. Many people contribute to Debian: obviously the developers and package maintainers, but also translators and artists and everybody who files bugs or helps someone else on a mailinglist. If you want to be part of the Debian community, but don't want to become a developer or maintainer, Debian so far hasn't offered much opportunity.

So this (still somewhat whacky idea was born, to offer a nice email-address to anybody who wants it and to setup planet(s), who aggregate more than just the developers and wannabe-developers. And, of course, we want to promote ("sell") t-shirts, because everybody loves t-shirts and they are an excellent way to show what you care about! Even though debian-community.org is open to official Debian developers, the main target audience are the other 99,99% of the debian population! You!

But of course, Debian-Community will be about more than just emails, planets and t-shirts. People choose Debian not (only) because of the community, but because of Debian's strengths: it's rocksolid technical base, long releasecycles which allow to use Debian as a base for customisations and because of the strong philosophical values.

But even though a stable Debian release is not only rocksolid, but also usable and user-friendly, things always can be improved. I envision Debian-Community.org to become a meeting point for people wanting to further polish "stable", mostly in the documentation area (incl. video-tutorials), but also by contributing in other ways (which don't need to be limited to "stable" as well). For now, maybe you can contribute to the EtchFAQ?

Last but not least, debian-community.org aims to become fully localised. The majority of Debian users is much more comfortable in their native tongue than in English - so debian-community.org should be available in $your_language too. Patches very welcome!

This should only be the beginning, if you have other good ideas what to do with this domain, we love to hear it!

Watch the video from the talk about d-c.org at ?DebConf7: in high quality or in low quality or the previous talk held at FOSDEM 2007: in high quality or in low quality and the slides used

3 rules (for using the emailaddress and planets):

Very roughly, the wording here and the procedure still needs some polishing:

• be nice
• respect other members of the community

• only use the email address for debian-related matters

  If you don't comply with the rules, you will be warned. After three warnings, your account will be removed. No more rules. (Except that the exact procedure, who will decide when it's time for a warning, still needs to be layed out.)

  Please make the debian community a place you like to hang out.

  I do like the idea and rules in the Debian Community Guidelines and Ubuntu Code of Conduct, but I even better like them to be real short and simple.

debian-community.org, official endorsement, rules or constitution

None, at the moment and for a start. At the moment it's mostly me, I hope more people will jump and join in. And I believe we can run this informally for quite a while without any problems. In the long term I think an official endorsement from Debian is important (and maybe we want more rules how to use the ressources, too. Maybe..) and therefore a clear goal of the project. But right now I think it's more important to set this all up and get some useful work done.

In general I'm happy to handover the domain to SPI - maybe thats not even needed / desireble: community.debian.org is a nice domain as well Time will tell. For a start, using a new domain was the easiest and debian-community.org sounds good, doesn't it?!

Contact

Send mail to Holger Levsen or join #debian-community on irc.debian.org

Current status:

• Beta! Some things have started
• an alioth-project (d-community) so we have a svn-repo and two mailinglists:
  • d-community-discuss for general discussion about debian-community.org
  • d-community-commits for svn commit mails
  • Hosting for a faster machine found at Uni Gent
  • Preliminary webpage design by Andrew Donnellan based on the work of Valessio Brito online at
  • planets have been set up
• We have a ToDo list!
• Debian-community contributors.