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

• Guilhem Moulin (guilhem)
• Lisa Baron (jeffity)
• Punit Agrawal (punit)

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

• Sebastien Jodogne
• Félix Lechner
• Uli Scholler
• Aurélien Couderc
• Ondřej Kobližek
• Patricio Paez

Congratulations!

This is a final reminder: if you intend to apply for a DebConf17 bursary and have not yet done so, please proceed as soon as possible.

Bursary applications for DebConf17 will be accepted until May 10th at 23:59 UTC. Applications submitted after this deadline will not be considered.

You can apply for a bursary when you register for the conference.

Remember that giving a talk is considered towards your bursary; if you have a submission to make, submit it even if it is only sketched-out. You will be able to detail it later.

Please make sure to double-check your accommodation choices (dates and venue). Details about accommodation arrangements can be found on the wiki.

Note: For DebCamp we only have on-site accommodation available. The option chosen in the registration system will only be for the DebConf period (August 5 to 12).

See you in Montréal!

The DebConf team would like to call for proposals for the DebConf17 Open Day, a whole day dedicated to sessions about Debian and Free Software, and aimed at the general public. Open Day will preceed DebConf17 and will be held in Montreal, Canada, on August 5th 2017.

DebConf Open Day will be a great opportunity for users, developers and people simply curious about our work to meet and learn about the Debian Project, Free Software in general and related topics.

Submit your proposal

We welcome submissions of workshops, presentations or any other activity which involves Debian and Free Software. Activities in both English and French are accepted.

Here are some ideas about content we'd love to offer during Open Day. This list is not exhaustive, feel free to propose other ideas!

• An introduction to various aspects of the Debian Project
• Talks about Debian and Free Software in art, education and/or research
• A primer on contributing to Free Software projects
• Free software & Privacy/Surveillance
• An introduction to programming and/or hardware tinkering
• A workshop about your favorite piece of Free Software
• A presentation about your favorite Free Software-related project (user group, advocacy group, etc.)

To submit your proposal, please fill the form at https://debconf17.debconf.org/talks/new/

Volunteer

We need volunteers to help ensure Open Day is a success! We are specifically looking for people familiar with the Debian installer to attend the Debian installfest, as resources for people seeking help to install Debian on their devices. If you're interested, please add your name to our wiki: https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf17/OpenDay#Installfest

Attend

Participation to Open Day is free and no registration is required.

The schedule for Open Day will be announced in June 2017.

The Debian Project Leader elections finished yesterday and the winner is Chris Lamb!

Of a total of 1062 developers, 322 developers voted using the Condorcet method.

More information about the result is available in the Debian Project Leader Elections 2017 page.

The current Debian Project Leader, Mehdi Dogguy, congratulated Chris Lamb in his Final bits from the (outgoing) DPL message. Thanks, Mehdi, for the service as DPL during this last twelve months!

The new term for the project leader starts on April 17th and expires on April 16th 2018.

This post was an April Fools' Day joke.

The space agencies running the International Space Station (ISS) reported that a laptop accidentally threw to space as waste in 2013 from the International State Station may have connected with a parallel Universe. This laptop was running Debian 6 and the ISS engineers managed to track its travel through the outer space. In early January, the laptop signal was lost but recovered back two weeks later in the same place. ISS engineers suspect that the laptop may had met and crossed a wormhole arriving a parallel Universe from where "somebody" sent it back later.

Eventually the laptop was recovered and in an first analysis the ISS engineers found that the laptop have a dual boot: a partition running the Debian installation made by them and a second partition running what seems to be a Debian fork or derivative totally unknown until now.

The engineers have been in contact with the Debian Project in the last weeks and a Debian group formed with delegates from different Debian teams have begun to study this new Debian derivative system. From the early results of this research, we can proudly say that somebody (or a group of beings) in a parallel universe understand Earth computers, and Debian, enough to:

• Clone the existing Debian system in a new partition and provide a dual boot using Grub.
• Change the desktop wallpaper from the previous Spacefun theme to one in rainbow colors.
• Fork all the packages whose source code was present in the initial Debian system, patch multiple bugs in those packages and some patches more for some tricky security problems.
• Add ten new language locales that do not correspond to any language spoken in Earth, with full translation for four of them.
• A copy of the Debian website repository, migrated to the git version control system and perfectly running, has been found in the /home/earth0/Documents folder. This new repo includes code to show the Debian micronews in the home page and many other improvements, keeping the style of not needing JavaScript and providing a nice control of up-to-date/outdated translations, similar to the one existing in Debian.

The work towards knowing better this new Universe and find a way to communicate with them has just began; all the Debian users and contributors are invited to join the effort to study the operating system found. We want to prepare our Community and our Universe to live and work peacefully and respectfully with the parallel Universe communities, in the true spirit of Free Software.

In the following weeks a General Resolution will be proposed for updating our motto to "the multiversal operating system".