The theme "softWaves" by Juliette Taka Belin has been selected as default theme for Debian 9 'stretch'.

After the Debian Desktop Team made the call for proposing themes, a total of twelve choices have been submitted, and any Debian contributor has received the opportunity to vote on them in a survey. We received 3,479 responses ranking the different choices, and softWaves has been the winner among them.

We'd like to thank all the designers that have participated providing nice wallpapers and artwork for Debian 9, and encourage everybody interested in this area of Debian, to join the Design Team. It is being considered to package all of them so they are easily available in Debian. If you want to help in this effort, or package any other artwork (for example, particularly designed to be accessibility-friendly), please contact the Debian Desktop Team, but hurry up, because the freeze for new packages in the next release of Debian starts on January 5th, 2017.

This is the second time that Debian ships a theme by Juliette Belin, who also created the theme "Lines" that enhances our actual stable release, Debian 8. Congratulations, Juliette, and thank you very much for your continued commitment to Debian!

Following the success of the last round of Outreachy, we are glad to announce that Debian will take part in the program for the next round, with internships lasting from the 6th of December 2016 to the 6th of March 2017.

From the official website: Outreachy helps people from groups underrepresented in free and open source software get involved. We provide a supportive community for beginning to contribute any time throughout the year and offer focused internship opportunities twice a year with a number of free software organizations.

Currently, internships are open internationally to women (cis and trans), trans men, and genderqueer people. Additionally, they are open to residents and nationals of the United States of any gender who are Black/African American, Hispanic/Latin@, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander.

If you want to apply to an internship in Debian, you should take a look at the wiki page, and contact the mentors for the projects listed, or seek more information on the (public) debian-outreach mailing-list. You can also contact the Outreach Team directly. If you have a project idea and are willing to mentor an intern, you can submit a project idea on the Outreachy wiki page.

Here's a few words on what the interns for the last round achieved within Outreachy:

• Tatiana Malygina worked on Continuous Integration for Bioinformatics applications; She has pushed more than a hundred commits to the Debian Med SVN repository over the last months, and has been sponsored for more than 20 package uploads.

• Valerie Young worked on Reproducible Builds infrastructure, driving a complete overhaul of the database and software behind the tests.reproducible-builds.org website. Her blog contains regular updates throughout the program.

• ceridwen worked on creating reprotest, an all-in-one tool allowing anyone to check whether a build is reproducible or not, replacing the string of ad-hoc scripts the reproducible builds team used so far. She posted regular updates on the Reproducible Builds team blog.

• While Scarlett Clark did not complete the internship (as she found a full-time job by the mid-term evaluation!), she spent the four weeks she participated in the program providing patches for reproducible builds in Debian and KDE upstream.

Debian would not be able to participate in Outreachy without the help of the Software Freedom Conservancy, who provides administrative support for Outreachy, as well as the continued support of Debian's donors, who provide funding for the internships. If you want to donate, please get in touch with one of our trusted organizations.

Debian is looking forward to welcoming new interns for the next few months, come join us!

DebConf17 will take place in Montreal, Canada from August 6 to August 12, 2017. It will be preceded by DebCamp, July 31 to August 4, and Debian Day, August 5.

We invite everyone to join us in organizing DebConf17. There are different areas where your help could be very valuable, and we are always looking forward to your ideas.

The DebConf content team is open to suggestions for invited speakers. If you'd like to propose somebody who is not a regular DebConf attendee follow the details in the call for speaker proposals blog post.

We are also beginning to contact potential sponsors from all around the globe. If you know any organization that could be interested, please consider handing them the sponsorship brochure or contact the fundraising team with any leads.

The DebConf team is holding IRC meetings every two weeks. Have a look at the DebConf17 website and wiki page, and engage in the IRC channels and the mailing list.

Let’s work together, as every year, on making the best DebConf ever!

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

• Edward John Betts (edward)
• Holger Wansing (holgerw)
• Timothy Martin Potter (tpot)
• Martijn van Brummelen (mvb)
• Stéphane Blondon (sblondon)
• Bertrand Marc (bmarc)
• Jochen Sprickerhof (jspricke)
• Ben Finney (bignose)
• Breno Leitao (leitao)
• Zlatan Todoric (zlatan)
• Ferenc Wágner (wferi)
• Matthieu Caneill (matthieucan)
• Steven Chamberlain (stevenc)

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

• Jonathan Cristopher Carter
• Reiner Herrmann
• Michael Jeanson
• Jens Reyer
• Jerome Benoit
• Frédéric Bonnard
• Olek Wojnar

Congratulations!

Today is Debian's 23rd anniversary. If you are close to any of the cities celebrating Debian Day 2016, you're very welcome to join the party!

If not, there's still time for you to organize a little celebration or contribution to Debian. For example, you can have a look at the Debian timeline and learn about the history of the project. If you notice that some piece of information is still missing, feel free to add it to the timeline.

Or you can scratch your creative itch and suggest a wallpaper to be part of the artwork for the next release.

Our favorite operating system is the result of all the work we have done together. Thanks to everybody who has contributed in these 23 years, and happy birthday Debian!