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lecture: Debian Contributors

Acknowledging all Debian contributions

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A description of contributors.debian.org, the site that Debian uses to collect and acknowledge every contribution to the project. Its aims, its implementation, and where it got two years after its initial deployment.

People seem to identify official recognition with some kind of label, so it was original uderstood that you could only get official recognition from Debian if you were a Debian Maintainer or a Debian Developer. However, there were many more contributors to the project than just DMs and DDs, so in 2013 I started working on a site to make every contribution visible.

The result is contributors.debian.org, for which discussion started at DebConf 2013 and which has been deployed since almost two years.

The site introduces a new role, that of Debian Contributor, that everyone automatically gets when contributing to Debian, and it lists all Debian Contributors. Any Debian Developer can set up a new data feed for the site, and any Debian Contributor can maintain it.

I will introduce the site, how it works and what have been its effects so far.