DebConf21 online closes

August 28th, 2021

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 was a large success.

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 repository.

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

The talks have been streamed using two rooms, and several of these activities have 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.

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

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

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

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 for more details on this.

Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf21, particularly our Platinum Sponsors: Lenovo, Infomaniak, Roche, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google.

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.

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 understands how critical open systems and platforms are to a connected world.

About Infomaniak

Infomaniak 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).

About Roche

Roche 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.

About Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) 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.

About Google

Google 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.

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

Contact Information

For further information, please visit the DebConf21 web page at https://debconf21.debconf.org/ or send mail to <[email protected]>.