Run a survey of Debian developers

As a first step to help bootstrap the process, we want to run a survey of Debian developers to identify recurring improvement ideas that have never been implemented and widely accepted bottlenecks that need to be addressed. Lee Garrett will coordinate this process and will lead the discussions in debian-devel or debian-project. Utkarsh Gupta will likely help to run the survey in surveys.debian.net.

We probably also want some direct feedback on what's acceptable or not in terms of ways to use the money, differentiating when it's Debian money and when's it's third party money like in the case of Freexian.

While we have those specific goals in mind, we want to use this opportunity to possibly gather more data from the community of Debian developers. The discussions during DPL election regularly conclude that we should "poll" the body of Debian developers more often. Let's use this survey to cover more topics. In coordination with the DPL and the developers at large, we could have more questions like:

shall we add an exception to allow inclusion of non-free firmware in our default images?
should we pay the DPL so that he can spend more time on Debian?
should we pay someone else to help the DPL reach its own goals?
should we expand the scope of Debian to also provide:
- debian docker images with software provided in Debian
- curated ansible playbook to configure software provided in Debian
- ...
should we rename testing to rolling and encourage its use?
etc.
Use cash to purchase target hardware or subsidize porterboxes?
Fund greater testing documentation and use cases for autopkgtest

Some specific funding ideas from Debian's bug tracker;

Debian bug: Enable uploads for Debian Maintainers to security-master
Debian bug: Sync packages from Built-Using field automatically to security-master
Debian bug: Allow releasing security updates via PGP-signed control messages
Debian bug: Simplify testing access for packages on security-master

From the BoF: "What must we do or change to the process so that it helps the smart minds that already contribute to Debian can spend more brain time on improving Debian at large?"

Run a survey of Debian developers

See also: