Jonathan Carter Re-Elected As Debian Project Leader

Jonathan Carter who was initially elected as Debian Project Leader last year to succeed Sam Hartman has now been re-elected for another year serving in this role.

This year's DPL election was between Jonathan Carter and Sruthi Chandran. Carter's platform for serving as the DPL a second year was focused on addressing administrative weak spots -- including improved accounting. He also wants to continue his goals of his DPL 2019 term around improving local Debian teams and making for a better Debian onboarding process.

Sruthi Chandran's 2021 platform wanted to work on improving diversity within the project, outreach, and making for a more welcoming community. Sruthi as the first and only woman Debian Developer from India, is concerned with the skewed gender ratios in Free Software and Debian. She acknowledged that while Debian has invested "a good amount of money" in diversity programs like Outreachy it hasn't yielded the expected outcome and hoped to better evaluate and address it as the DPL.

As announced today, Jonathan Carter has been re-elected as Debian Project Leader.

During this year's DPL voting was also a general resolution vote over whether Debian should make a statement regarding Richard Stallman's readmission to the FSF board. The choices were calling on the FSF board to remove him, call for Stallman's resignation from all FSF bodies, discourage collaboration with the FSF while Stallman is in a leading position, call on the FSF to further its governance processes, support Stallman's reinstatement, denounce "the witch-hunt against RMS and the FSF", or Debian will not issue a public statement.

In the end, Debian decided to go with issuing no statement on the matter: "Debian will not issue a public statement on this issue." The most voted on proposal reads, "The Debian Project will not issue a public statement on whether Richard Stallman should be removed from leadership positions or not. Any individual (including Debian members) wishing to (co-)sign any of the open letters on this subject is invited to do this in a personal capacity."