BSP postmortem
This post is a bit late, but still interesting:
Last weekend, I held a Bug Squashing Party at my company's offices in Mechlin, Belgium. This is the first time I've attended, let alone hosted, such an event; so I'm not that experienced in figuring out what I can and cannot do with other people's packages yet. As a result, our success rate was a bit lower than I'd hoped for. Still we closed two bugs, figured out that one more bug required just some binNMUs, that one should probably be tagged wheezy-ignore (as it was tagged squeeze-ignore too, and hasn't seen updates since then), and touched three more bugs.
Having said that, I did have a bit of a hidden agenda, in that I've been wanting to build a stronger Debian community in Belgium; we are ranked fairly highly on the Debian Developer per capita list, but us Belgian DDs never meet up, in contrast to DDs from three of the four countries that surround Belgium. In that, I did have some success, too; some local people showed up who'd never (directly) contributed to Debian before. While I'm not silly enough to think that just showing up to a BSP once makes you suddenly an active member of a community, it's still a good first step.
Unfortunately, however, I did not manage to get any other active Belgian DDs to show up. Apart from myself, only Dutch DD Joost Van Baal and DD Emeritus Joost Damad were present. If I can't find a way to improve on that, I'm not sure this BSPing will have a long life in Mechelen.
At any rate, though, I did have a lot of fun doing this. Surely that, if nothing else, counts as "success".
Just mentioning: I noticed your BSP-announcement just a few days before 15/12 on the Debian-mailing. It was impossible for me to attend the bsp (teacher, exams, ...) . I'm no Debian Developer, just using Debian for around 2 years now (GNU/linux for 12 years). As there are only 13 debian developers in Belgium: you've got about 25% of them. Now that is a success. Maybe the appearance of other people who are not directly related to Debian is a sign that there are opportunities to enlarge the number. Have you thought of mentoring people to become DD'S? That is of course a challenge but would be possible if you could achieve this with a couple of other persons.
I am one of the local people who showed up on Sunday and never contributed to Debian. I found the BSP quite interesting. Although there still is lots to learn for me, it got me started, hopefully in the right direction ;-). Thanks for hosting it!