Improving Free Communication in the Debian Community

These are some personal comments from Daniel Pocock, Director of the Software Freedom Institute.

Over many years I've taken a leadership role in the development of communications technology using free and open source software.

The words Community and Communication are very similar for good reason. Communication creates Community. You can't have a Community without a means of Communication. Most importantly, the tools and techniques used for Communication have a huge impact on the success and the health of a Community and its members.

For me, that means more than simply developing and publishing the code. It also means looking at the social and practical ways we interact with technology.

Free means more than just having solutions that are free of financial cost.

Free means being able to communicate without surveillance.

I first took an interest in communications technology when I was in primary school. At fourteen years of age, I passed the full exam for an amateur radio license and simultaneously engaged with voluntary work involving open source software, Linux and eventually Debian.

In the world of amateur radio, there is no encryption and therefore no privacy. That is simply the nature of a hobby based on radio. Nonetheless, due to the obligatory exam, all the participants are well aware of the technical possibilities for surveillance.

While radio amateurs and software engineers are well aware of risks involving surveillance and automated analysis of our communications, ninety-nine percent of Internet users are blissfully unaware of these practices and the risks involved. This is one area where the open source and free software communities have consistently failed to provide solutions. The internal fighting and vendettas are a big factor in those failures and the end users are the casualties.

Free means being able to communicate inconvenient truths without the menace of reprisals.

Privacy and freedom of expression are not the only social and ethical concerns we have in the development of communications technology.

Communications technology has an impact on both our productivity and our health. Numerous studies have confirmed this.

By way of example, Dr Glenn Wilson, University of London, conducted an experimental study into Infomania (information overload), reporting that information overload can reduce IQ by ten points. This was the same study that suggested everybody from schoolchildren to office workers suffer from a ten point drop in IQ when they are aware that an unread message is waiting for them.

In other words, if you are going to take an exam in the next couple of days, turn off your phone, log out of your email and log out of all social media accounts the week before the exam. Doing so could boost your score by at least one grade without any other efforts whatsoever.

Looking at the case of the Debian Day Volunteer Suicide, I discovered that email volumes on the debian-private gossip network had been gradually increasing in the months leading up to the suicide. In another example, somebody noted that the suicide victim had personally taken on the chore of cleaning out spam messages, examining over 7,000 of them.

Most notable of all are the following words from the victim:

Frans Pop: So, what has made me decide to leave the project. It's a combination of just plain emotional stress over the whole Sven Luther issue, frustration with the inability of the project to deal with that ...

What Frans Pop is complaining about is the way we communicate in Debian.

As a group, Debian Developers have traditionally communicated through email lists, IRC chat channels, the Debian bug tracking system and from time to time, meeting in person for a conference or bug squashing party.

There are small groups of us who work in the same company or the same city and have the opportunity to meet regularly in person. In some larger companies that are heavily influencing Debian, the Debian participants cross paths almost every day, meeting at the water cooler to plot against the rest of us.

For everybody else who doesn't have these in-person opportunities for communication, there is only the written form, whether it is email or IRC chat.

While written communications can be more effective for some technical discussions between experts, they are often far from ideal for resolving social and interpersonal issues. The conflict between Sven Luther, Frans Pop and other developers was a classic example of this.

If Sven Luther had been able to meet other developers more regularly in person, people may have responded much more appropriately to the death of his mother. People don't usually write about something like that in a public email exchange. The rest of the community remains oblivious to the situation and wastes time nit-picking the rest of the words in his emails. Yet something like that would come up far more quickly in a phone call or having beers in the pub.

Better social interactions may have saved thousands of emails on debian-private. Frans Pop may still be alive today.

The technology we have for open source phone calls and webcam meetings is never going to be a perfect substitute for meeting in person. On the other hand these real-time communications technologies are a powerful complement to the written communication tools we have. Free Real-Time Communications (RTC) tools can make the Debian Community more successful.

I've spent many years authoring parts of Debian including applications and libraries for Free RTC. To work around the political vendettas in Debian today, I now provide a parallel channel for people to install the Debian packages using the site debify.org. To work around the vendettas and access the packages is straightforward. For example, to install the Jami backport on a buster system:

wget -O - http://apt.debify.org/add-apt-debify | bash
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -t debify-buster-backports jami

Videos about my work in Free Communications for the Debian Community

Please see the Debian.Video page where I have published several videos about my work.

Authorship interests in Debian

The Debian QA pages give some indication of who has an authorship interest in Debian copyright.

Here is how it looked before misfits started engaging in plagiarism:

(taken from archive.org backup copy)