Jonathan Carter is the DPL for the fourth time in a row
Few days ago the results of the annual election of the Debian project leader were announced andn which victory took her Jonathan Carter, who was re-elected for the fourth time to be in command.
And is that since In 2020 Jonathan Carter has been at the helm of DebianSince those votes, in addition to Jonathan, Sruthi Chandran, Brian Gupta also participated for the leadership.
Before Jonathan was in charge it was Sam Hartman the DPL who was elected in 2019 and since then Jonathan Carter has been elected for 4 consecutive years (2020-2021-2022 and now 2023).
Unlike previous voting processes, in this round, no surprises were expected in the election, since Jonathan Carter was the only candidate.
Thus, of the approximately 1000 developers of Debian who could vote they only had the option of voting for or against Carter. The current and new leader of the project, Carter, received 259 votes and there were 15 votes against. The turnout was 279 votes or about 28 percent.
274 promoters participated in the vote, representing 28% of the total number of participants with the right to vote (Last year the participation was 34%, the ancestor 44%, historical maximum in 2000 -62,25%, minimum in 2016- 27,56%). And as mentioned, this year's elections were notable for the fact that only one candidate stood, which reduced the vote to choose between "for" and "against" (259 votes in favor, 15 against).
And it is that to be a leader of the Debian project implies:
The Debian Project Leader (or DPL for short) is the main official representative of the Debian project.
Externally, I represent the project in the real world. This involves giving talks and presentations on Debian, attending trade shows, building relationships with other organizations, establishing contracts, and handling legal matters.
Jonathan Carter has maintained over 60 Debian packages since 2016, contributing to the quality of the live images on the debian-live team and co-developing AIMS Desktop, a version of Debian used by various academic and educational institutions in South Africa.
Before the elections, Jonathan Carter announced on his electoral platform that he wanted to modernize Debian so that it wasn't just a starting point for derivatives. A move much discussed by Carter is the inclusion of non-free firmware on installation media, which the project has already voted on. Another project he describes on his platform is reducing wait times for packages to be released.
Why I'm running for DPL (once again)
When I was first chosen, my goal was to bring a sense of stability and normalcy to the project, having gone through some contentious issues in the previous years. I knew this was going to be difficult, as some wounds ran deep and beyond Debian, a lot of things in the world are simply out of our control.I think a lot of progress has been made to make Debian a much more stable project, and a lot of people have worked very hard to get us there, but the reason I want stability isn't just for its own good. With stability comes security and room to grow, and I think Debian is now at a stage where it's ready to grow into something more.
There is probably nothing that can prepare you more for a DPL term than having met a few DPL terms. I understand Debian very well, I understand our challenges well, I've learned how to work better with people within our project, all of which helped me identify and remove blockers, and while I think there are a lot of people on Debian who could be good DPLs , I believe my skills, experience, patience, and understanding come together in a great combination to help guide Debian over the next year.
For those interested in being able to know the results of the voting, they can consult them here.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it about Jonathan Carter's proposals, you can consult the details In the following link.