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The Debian Project https://www.debian.org/ DebConf21 online closes press@debian.org
August 28th, 2021 https://www.debian.org/News/2021/20210828 ------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Saturday 28 August 2021, the annual Debian Developers and
Contributors Conference came to a close.

DebConf21 has been held online for the second time, due to the
coronavirus (COVID-19) disease pandemic.

All of the sessions have been streamed, with a variety of ways of participating: via IRC messaging, online collaborative text documents,
and video conferencing meeting rooms.

With 740 registered attendees from more than 15 different countries and
a total of over 70 event talks, discussion sessions, Birds of a Feather
(BoF) gatherings and other activities, DebConf21 [1] was a large
success.

1: https://debconf21.debconf.org

The setup made for former online events involving Jitsi, OBS, Voctomix, SReview, nginx, Etherpad, a web-based frontend for voctomix has been
improved and used for DebConf21 successfully. All components of the
video infrastructure are free software, and configured through the Video
Team's public ansible [2] repository.

2: https://salsa.debian.org/debconf-video-team/ansible

The DebConf21 schedule [3] included a wide variety of events, grouped in several tracks:

* Introduction to Free Software & Debian,
* Packaging, policy, and Debian infrastructure,
* Systems administration, automation and orchestration,
* Cloud and containers,
* Security,
* Community, diversity, local outreach and social context,
* Internationalization, Localization and Accessibility,
* Embedded & Kernel,
* Debian Blends and Debian derived distributions,
* Debian in Arts & Science
* and other.

3: https://debconf21.debconf.org/schedule/

The talks have been streamed using two rooms, and several of these
activities hav been held in different languages: Telugu, Portuguese,
Malayalam, Kannada, Hindi, Marathi and English, allowing a more diverse audience to enjoy and participate.

Between talks, the video stream has been showing the usual sponsors on
the loop, but also some additional clips including photos from previous DebConfs, fun facts about Debian and short shout-out videos sent by
attendees to communicate with their Debian friends.

The Debian publicity team did the usual «live coverage» to encourage participation with micronews announcing the different events. The
DebConf team also provided several mobile options to follow the
schedule [4].

4: https://debconf21.debconf.org/schedule/mobile/

For those who were not able to participate, most of the talks and
sessions are already available through the Debian meetings archive
website [5], and the remaining ones will appear in the following days.

5: https://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2021/DebConf21/

The DebConf21 [6] website will remain active for archival purposes and
will continue to offer links to the presentations and videos of talks
and events.

6: https://debconf21.debconf.org/

Next year, DebConf22 [7] is planned to be held in Prizren, Kosovo, in
July 2022.

7: https://wiki.debian.org/DebConf/22

DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all
participants. During the conference, several teams (Front Desk, Welcome
team and Community team) have been available to help so participants get
their best experience in the conference, and find solutions to any issue
that may arise. See the web page about the Code of Conduct in DebConf21
website [8] for more details on this.

8: https://debconf21.debconf.org/about/coc/

Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors [9] to support
DebConf21, particularly our Platinum Sponsors: Lenovo [10],
Infomaniak [11], Roche [12], Amazon Web Services (AWS) [13] and
Google [14].

9: https://debconf21.debconf.org/sponsors/
10: https://www.lenovo.com
11: https://www.infomaniak.com
12: https://code4life.roche.com/
13: https://aws.amazon.com/
14: https://google.com/


About Debian
------------

The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the
largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain
Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range
of computer types, Debian calls itself the "universal operating system".


About DebConf
-------------

DebConf is the Debian Project's developer conference. In addition to a
full schedule of technical, social and policy talks, DebConf provides an opportunity for developers, contributors and other interested people to
meet in person and work together more closely. It has taken place
annually since 2000 in locations as varied as Scotland, Argentina, and
Bosnia and Herzegovina. More information about DebConf is available from https://debconf.org [15].

15: https://debconf.org/


About Lenovo
------------

As a global technology leader manufacturing a wide portfolio of
connected products, including smartphones, tablets, PCs and workstations
as well as AR/VR devices, smart home/office and data center solutions,
Lenovo [16] understands how critical open systems and platforms are to a connected world.

16: https://www.lenovo.com


About Infomaniak
----------------

Infomaniak [17] is Switzerland's largest web-hosting company, also
offering backup and storage services, solutions for event organizers, live-streaming and video on demand services. It wholly owns its
datacenters and all elements critical to the functioning of the services
and products provided by the company (both software and hardware).

17: https://www.infomaniak.com


About Roche
-----------

Roche [18] is a major international pharmaceutical provider and research company dedicated to personalized healthcare. More than 100.000
employees worldwide work towards solving some of the greatest challenges
for humanity using science and technology. Roche is strongly involved in publicly funded collaborative research projects with other industrial
and academic partners and have supported DebConf since 2017.

18: https://code4life.roche.com/


About Amazon Web Services (AWS)
-------------------------------

Amazon Web Services (AWS) [19] is one of the world's most comprehensive
and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully featured
services from data centers globally (in 77 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions). AWS customers include the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises and leading government agencies.

19: https://aws.amazon.com


About Google
------------

Google [20] is one of the largest technology companies in the world,
providing a wide range of Internet-related services and products such as
online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware.

20: https://google.com/

Google has been supporting Debian by sponsoring DebConf for more than
ten years, and is also a Debian partner sponsoring parts of Salsa [21]'s continuous integration infrastructure within Google Cloud Platform.

21: https://salsa.debian.org


Contact Information
-------------------

For further information, please visit the DebConf21 web page at https://debconf21.debconf.org/ or send mail to <press@debian.org>.

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