Hello, Traditionally, the NM process was about having a number of people go through several steps to collect all the information that we require to trust people as new Debian members. I have been reimplementing the New Member Process workflow on nm.debian.org. The site is now self-service for most of the bureaucratic steps, allowing applicants, advocates, AMs and any DD to provide input and review it autonomously. The NM process is now more of a collaborative work of the Debian community, with Debian Account Managers (who have responsibility over membership decisions) and Front Desk members (helpers of DAM) mostly just taking care of the final review and decision. * Changes for applicants To become a Debian Developer (uploading or not), log into the site[1], find[2] or create[3] your profile, click on the "request new status" link and then follow the instructions. [1] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianSingleSignOn [2] https://nm.debian.org/public/findperson [3] https://nm.debian.org/public/newnm You will need to - provide a gpg-signed statement saying that you really want to become a Debian Developer. The statement will automatically be posted to debian-newmaint@lists.debian.org to introduce you as a prospective new member. - provide a gpg-signed statement saying that you agree to uphold the Social Contract, the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the Debian Machine Usage Policy in your Debian work. - spend some time talking with an Application Manager who will ask you a few questions and send you a few pointers to make sure you are on the same page as the rest of the project. And that should be it. The site allows you to follow how things are going, and to make sure that your personal information like your name, gpg key, and short bio are correct. You can see the ongoing (new) processes at https://nm.debian.org/process * Changes for advocates As an advocate, you have a page where you can upload a gpg-signed statement of advocacy that will be automatically posted to debian-newmaint@lists.debian.org. Here[4] you can find some guidelines for writing good advocacy messages. If you write a poor advocacy message like "$NAME's a good friend of mine lol", any DD can use the site or the debian-newmaint list to ask you to do better than that. [4] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2010/05/msg00003.html * Changes for Application Managers Confirmation of the AM assignment is gone: if you rather not take the applicant, you can unassign yourself at any moment. You can also unassign yourself if you run out of time and you'd like another AM to take over the process from you. ID check is gone: the site takes care of it automatically, including running keycheck to check the number of DD signatures and the properties of the key. Philosophy & Procedures and Tasks & Skills are just one of the ways in which you can interact with your applicants. Remember that T&S can be skipped entirely if there is a decent technical track record of the applicant in Debian. nm.debian.org provides the minechangelogs tool and links to portfolio.debian.net, DDPO and contributors.debian.org. The result of your work is a gpg-signed statement saying whether you think that the applicant should be a Debian Developer right now, or not. Many parts of the mail templates are now obsolete: there has been no review of them yet in light of these changes. The templates are in collab-maint, though [5], so both you and your applicants (or anyone else, really) can help with that. [5] https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/nm-templates.git * Changes for everyone else Anyone can now add comments in any part of the current processes in the site, and they will get recorded in the log of the application. If you are a Debian Developer, you can review the statements that applicants and advocates have uploaded to the site, and mark the requirement as not fulfilled if you think that there is something wrong with it. Many pages in nm.debian.org now have a "Wiki Help" link at the top, which points to a wiki.debian.org page where anyone can write help and tips for other users of the site. * Migration from the old-style processes I have now disabled the advocacy links that started processes the old way; there is no migration procedure, so the existing processes continue as they are. When all the old-style processes will be done and closed, I'll refactor[6] the site codebase to only support viewing, so that the history of all the processes in Debian remains. [6] http://devopsreactions.tumblr.com/post/143934692418/old-code-refactoring * Up and coming This new implementation of the NM process is flexible enough that it can deal with all sort of other processes: asking for a guest account to porter machines, becoming Debian Maintainer, getting upload rights, and returning from emeritus, can now all be managed through the same interface. These processes will soon become almost fully automated. More road testing is still needed and will happen in the near future. For the Debian Account Manager / Front Desk team, Enrico Zini -- GPG key: 4096R/634F4BD1E7AD5568 2009-05-08 Enrico Zini <enrico@enricozini.org>
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