On February 4th and 5th, Debian will be attending FOSDEM 2017 in Brussels, Belgium; a yearly gratis event (no registration needed) run by volunteers from the Open Source and Free Software community. It's free, and it's big: more than 600 speakers, over 600 events, in 29 rooms.

This year more than 45 current or past Debian contributors will speak at FOSDEM: Alexandre Viau, Bradley M. Kuhn, Daniel Pocock, Guus Sliepen, Johan Van de Wauw, John Sullivan, Josh Triplett, Julien Danjou, Keith Packard, Martin Pitt, Peter Van Eynde, Richard Hartmann, Sebastian Dröge, Stefano Zacchiroli and Wouter Verhelst, among others.

Similar to previous years, the event will be hosted at Université libre de Bruxelles. Debian contributors and enthusiasts will be taking shifts at the Debian stand with gadgets, T-Shirts and swag. You can find us at stand number 4 in building K, 1 B; CoreOS Linux and PostgreSQL will be our neighbours. See https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEvents/be/2017/FOSDEM for more details.

We are looking forward to meeting you all!

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Karen M Sandler (karen)
• Sebastien Badia (sbadia)
• Christos Trochalakis (ctrochalakis)
• Adrian Bunk (bunk)
• Michael Lustfield (mtecknology)
• James Clarke (jrtc27)
• Sean Whitton (spwhitton)
• Jerome Georges Benoit (calculus)
• Daniel Lange (dlange)
• Christoph Biedl (cbiedl)
• Gustavo Panizzo (gefa)
• Gert Wollny (gewo)
• Benjamin Barenblat (bbaren)
• Giovani Augusto Ferreira (giovani)
• Mechtilde Stehmann (mechtilde)
• Christopher Stuart Hoskin (mans0954)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Dmitry Bogatov
• Dominik George
• Gordon Ball
• Sruthi Chandran
• Michael Shuler
• Filip Pytloun
• Mario Anthony Limonciello
• Julien Puydt
• Nicholas D Steeves
• Raoul Snyman

Congratulations!

FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) are increasingly popular for data acquisition, device control and application acceleration. Debian now features a completely Free set of tools to program FPGA in Verilog, prepare the binary and have it executed on an affordable device.

See http://wiki.debian.org/FPGA/Lattice for details. Readers familiar with the technology may rightly guess that this refers to the yosys package together with berkeley-abc, arachne-"Place-and-Route" and the icestorm tools to communicate with the device.

The packages have been contributed by the Debian Science team.

We hope this effort to support the FPGA community to collect an increasing number of skills to further smoothen the Open Source experience and lower the entry barriers for this tantalising technology.

The Debian Contributor Survey launched last week!

In order to better understand and document who contributes to Debian, we (Mathieu ONeil, Molly de Blanc, and Stefano Zacchiroli) have created this survey to capture the current state of participation in the Debian Project through the lense of common demographics. We hope a general survey will become an annual effort, and that each year there will also be a focus on a specific aspect of the project or community. The 2016 edition contains sections concerning work, employment, and labour issues in order to learn about who is getting paid to work on and with Debian, and how those relationships affect contributions.

We want to hear from as many Debian contributors as possible—whether you've submitted a bug report, attended a DebConf, reviewed translations, maintain packages, participated in Debian teams, or are a Debian Developer. Completing the survey should take 10-30 minutes, depending on your current involvement with the project and employment status.

In an effort to reflect our own ideals as well as those of the Debian project, we are using LimeSurvey, an entirely free software survey tool, in an instance of it hosted by the LimeSurvey developers.

Survey responses are anonymous, IP and HTTP information are not logged, and all questions are optional. As it is still likely possible to determine who a respondent is based on their answers, results will only be distributed in aggregate form, in a way that does not allow deanonymization. The results of the survey will be analyzed as part of ongoing research work by the organizers. A report discussing the results will be published under a DFSG-free license and distributed to the Debian community as soon as it's ready. The raw, disaggregated answers will not be distributed and will be kept under the responsibility of the organizers.

We hope you will fill out the Debian Contributor Survey. The deadline for participation is: 4 December 2016, at 23:59 UTC.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us via email at:

• Mathieu ONeil mathieu.oneil@canberra.edu.au
• Molly de Blanc deblanc@riseup.net
• Stefano Zacchiroli zack@debian.org

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Adriano Rafael Gomes (adrianorg)
• Arturo Borrero González (arturo)
• Sandro Knauß (hefee)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Abhijith PA
• Mo Zhou
• Víctor Cuadrado Juan
• Zygmunt Bazyli Krynicki
• Robert Haist
• Sunil Mohan Adapa
• Elena Grandi
• Eric Heintzmann
• Dylan Aïssi
• Daniel Shahaf
• Samuel Henrique
• Kai-Chung Yan
• Tino Mettler

Congratulations!