Bernelle Verster

Hi

I was dragged into Debian by Graham Inggs (ginggs); he was starting his Debian journey when we became friends many years ago (~ 2013, characterised by what to me at the time was a very odd secret agent-like meeting and exchanging of passports with Stefano Rivera) and along the way we talked with friends over beer about all things Debian. The project intrigued me and I agreed to help host the Debian Conference in Cape Town, South Africa in 2016. Since then I have maintained a perhaps more passive interest in Debian, but the conversations at the first DebConf I attended in Germany 2015 have stuck with me, both in terms of FLOSS, but also as a way of living. Once you start thinking about the principles underlying FLOSS, you start applying it to the rest of your life and then everything crumbles; you start questioning everything from first principles. Understandably this is incredibly frustrating and exhausting - two characteristics of the Debian community (and ideally of democracy), but it is also necessary.

Since DebConf16 I've grown up a lot - finished my PhD and resolved some issues in my life that previously made me less patient than I needed to be. At the same time I have continued to learn more about Debian through conversations with ginggs as well as the small FLOSS community in Cape Town - notably the Cape Linux User Group (CLUG). I have also given more thought where I want to contribute more, partly represented by the talk I gave at DebConf19 in Curitiba, Brazil and the volunteering I did there. I was recently asked to join the DebConf Committee, which I agreed to and is the reason for now pushing to become a DD.

For now, I only seriously intend to contribute to the DebConf committee, but I still would like to become an uploading DD in due course, contributing to biotech-related things and gaming/data visualisation stuff.