Report from the Dublin BSP

I should have posted this a few days ago, better late than never they say...

On Saturday, 8/9/12, a BSP was held in Dublin for the first time. Google kindly offered office space and some food and refreshments for the event, so we had a nice room with good Internet access and two big screens to project IRC activity.

I consider the event to be a big success. There was a good attendance: 15 people showed up, with most of them staying a solid 8 hours. There was a good balance of experienced Debian people and newcomers, as well as a few DDs that work for Google.

Even if the squashed bug count was not huge, it was great to see people helping each other, people who had never done any Debian work getting up to speed with the basics and getting excited about helping. I think the biggest outcome of this BSP is that after we packed up, we had already agreed on holding a second BSP in October, and to bootstrap a local Debian community! (Now we need to convince the listmasters to create the mailing list at #687430).

A few stats:

  1. 15 people attended.
  2. 7 DDs, 2 DM, and 6 unaffiliated contributors.
  3. 6 out of 15 attendees were Googlers.
  4. 8 different nationalities.
  5. 2 people came from Germany to attend the event.
  6. And the most important stat: 25 bugs were closed, lowered severity, received patches, or got worked on.

I would like to thank everybody who participated, to Google for sponsoring the event (and sponsoring the next one too!), and to marga@ and maxy@ for coming from München, and helping with the organisation and with the introductory talk.

I hope to see you all again in the next BSP, tentative date: October, 20th.