In a lot of talks or blog posts (like Sam’s talk at RMLL, or Raphaël’s blog posts – both in french), people have been talking about what people could do inside Debian, and how it would help Debian.

That doesn’t sound like the best approach to me. When describing tasks with the objective of getting potential contributors to pick them up, we should try to make them sexy, to tell users what is exciting about them, what they will learn doing those tasks, where satisfaction will come from. We really need to sell them better.

Of course, some Debian tasks are mainly grunt work. And for some of them, people just do them because someone has to do them. But I believe that most tasks inside Debian are actually more interesting than outsiders would expect. For example, I would be very interested in reading why an i18n expert (hint: Christian!) finds i18n sexy … and I should probably try to write about QA myself.

(As you might have noticed now, the subject of this blog post was misleading on purpose — chosen so that a lot of people would read the post :P)