The Joy theme has been selected as the default artwork for Debian systems for the upcoming release of Debian 7.0 (Wheezy). The theme is intended to appeal by being efficient with a light and simple theme. There is also a fancier variant called Joy Inksplat available in the desktop-base package for those who prefer a more fun desktop. For the release after Wheezy, there are early thoughts about introducing multiple themes, more fine-grained theme packages and metapackages for selecting among them.

DebCamp took place last week at the Universidad Centroamericana in Managua, Nicaragua. This week has been very productive, as can be seen from people's reports: Christian Perrier described on his blog his work on internationalisation, localisation and Samba packaging; Joey Hess mentioned his progress on git-annex assistant and Debian CDs; Gregor Herrmann wrote about his work within the Debian Perl Group; Steve McIntyre wrote about his preparations for the six sessions he is running; and Gunnar Wolf reported that DebCamp has officially started.
DebCamp is followed this week by DebConf12, the conference for Debian developers, which started with the Debian Day, an open event for enthusiasts, users, developers and anyone interested in finding out more about Debian and Free Software. The whole of DebConf is covered on video (which makes many people happy). The schedule of the conference and the relevant links for the video streaming are available on the dedicated DebConf page.

Stefano Zacchiroli sent his monthly report on DPL activities from DebConf12. During this month, Debian joined the FSF campaign on secure boot, and DuckDuckGo sent the first report of a donation after the agreement on revenue sharing. Stefano also mentions some interesting discussions for project evolution, in particular the proposals to change the way DM permissions are handled and to change the policy ruling the debian.net domain.

Stefano Zacchiroli delivered his final Bits from the DPL talk on the first day of DebConf12. In his talk (slides) he spoke about the early history of Debian, where we are today, how our place in the wider free software community has evolved, and our principles; he summed up by stating that we play a fundamental role in Free Software. He then explored the challenges that we face in meeting our responsibility to live up to our role in the Free Software community, including keeping contribution levels healthy, increasing the diversity of our community, being on time with releases, keeping release freezes short, collective code ownership, low company involvement and how the DPL role might need to evolve in the future.

Lucas Nussbaum announced on his blog the creation of the Debian Maintainer Dashboard, a service relying on UDD to expose as much useful information as possible about a maintainer’s packages. The Debian Maintainer Dashboard is in its early days and is waiting for contributors.
In related news, UDD has been migrated to ullman, one of the new machines recently set up by DSA.

There have been Debian Edu interviews with George Bredberg (in English), José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez (in English) and Markus Gamenius (in Norwegian), who all describe, among other things, how they got involved in Debian Edu and their views about it.

Fifteen people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Miguel Telleria de Esteban, Miroslav Suchý, Georgios M. Zarkadas, Julian Wollrath, Malcolm Locke, Shawn Landden, Colin King, David Suarez, Chris Johnston, Klas Lindfors, Alexander Inyukhin, Nikolai Lusan, Adrien Grellier, Ioan Rogers, and Eric Maeker into our project!