Benjamin Somers

I’m a Research Engineer at IMT Atlantique in Brest, France, involved in several open source and hacker communities. Even though the name Debian came to my ears quite early in my life, I really started using it regularly in 2016, when I joined the ResEl association, a student-led ISP, in which a few DDs were active during their higher-ed years. In 2023, when the DebConf committee was looking for a new venue for DebConf24, Brest was mentioned. It was concluded for several reasons that it wouldn’t be a good fit, but I was convinced by santiago that it would be nice to host it in 2025. So I found myself leading the local team for DebConf25, discovering the community through the events I attended. My contributions to the Debian project are all DebConf-related (DC25, LaTeX templates for sponsorship brochures and flyers, and more recently some work in automating the bedroom assignment), but I really want to get involved in packaging stuff, which is a work in progress that is coming to fruition.