Margarita Manterola (marga, Google) & Debian DebConf13 Swiss venue intrigue

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 15, 2025

March 14, 2025

Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.

Today somebody asked me about what went wrong in the DebConf13 venue conflict. As in any technical problem, the best thing to do is find the root cause. In this case, there are a series of super-secret emails that are so private they weren't even shared on the debian-private mailing list.

Margarita Manterola (marga) was working for Google at the time and she started the email thread with a small group of people who would be sympathetic to overriding the work of the DebConf local team and forcing them to change the venue.

DebConf13 had been assigned to a local team in Switzerland. They proposed a remote venue called Le Camp.

There were two women involved in this and both of them had become pregnant at the same time. They didn't want to tell anybody about their pregnancies. It is not even mentioned in the emails but we know it is true in hindsight.

There is a perception, largely true, that women in Debian are the partners of male developers. The pregnancies and the fact these pregnancies started around the same time really underline the fact that female Developers are not really independent members of the community. When they are part of a discussion or when they participate in a vote they are usually lobbying the rest of us in unison with whatever their partner is saying. For outsiders reading the Debian mailing lists, these relationships are not obvious.

When people refer to a cabal in Debian we can't ignore the dangers of the groupthink problem. When people wear the same tartans, when they pretend there is no money to pay for things and when we see a core group of people who have pregnancies at the same time, why was that so embarrassing that they couldn't tell us about it? They are embarrassed to admit groupthink is a typical symptom of a cult.

Forcing people to do things is a common theme in Debian these days.

Marga's email describes the tactics of working as a group to put pressure on the local team and break their will.

The local team agreed to organize the conference as volunteers and people were actively trying to control the volunteers from Google.

Forcing people to do things, the Debian Suicide Cluster, coincidence of course.

Remember, Marga is the same person who didn't even want Carla to share the food at DebConf15 in Africa. But she wanted to have the whole venue change to accommodate her own family planning project.

In 2023, they wanted to force people to contribute money for the day trip and one volunteer who did a lot of work in the local team was Abraham Raji. After all the work he did, including the logo design, Abraham didn't want to pay for the day trip, he was left behind to swim alone and died by drowning.

Marga says a lot in this email but doesn't mention the pregnancies were also a factor in her thinking.

Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved.

Subject: Regarding DC13 venue issues
Date: Sun, 25 Nov 2012 00:31:36 +0100
From: Margarita Manterola <marga@debian.org>
To:


Hi,


[Re-sent due to wrong headers on the first try. Please reply to this mail]


This message is long. I'm sorry. I beg you to PLEASE read it anyway.


As most of you know, this has been quite a complicated year for me, I
started a new job, in a new country.  This has kept me away from Debian and
DebConf for most of this year.  I wasn't present in the venue decision for
DC13, and missed DC12.  I very much regretted both things, but have been
looking forward to DC13 all this time.


Now, finally, I'm settling and have a bit more free time, I've been working
on Debian bugs, and I have come back to see what was going on with DC13,
only to find a number of shocking things that I think need urgent action:


The venue is located on a town of 256 inhabitants, 100km from Geneva, 160km
from Basel and 180km from Zurich. No direct train available, bus needed.
The nearest supermarket is 3.7km away (by car).  This basically the
definition of a place in the middle of nowhere.  Something that we've been
trying hard to avoid after DC6, because after it, we learned that the
surroundings are also part of the venue.


Also, it is not cheap.  The current budget is around € 200,000, and we will
get no government help to cover the holes this time. Keep in mind that in
the past years we have raised about € 50,000 (apart from government help).
There has been work done on this front, but we are nowhere near the 200k
mark, and it's extremely unlikely that we'll get that much.


Finally, the accommodation offered is not adequate for what DebConf has
come to be. Only 101 beds in private/semi-private rooms (up to 6 people).
And 169 places to be used with sleeping bags (no private beds).  This could
have been fine 10 years ago, but it's not what the conference is now.


In other intances, people that wanted better rooms have just gone to a
nearby hotel.  In this case this is not possible.  The closest hotel (1.2km
away) is 320 CHF per night.  The rest of the hotels are way too far away,
would require renting a car.


To top everything off, they are requiring us to sign binding contracts to
pay for a certain amount of people that we can't really be sure of, with
money that we haven't yet raised. Plus other contract niceties that some of
you probably know better than me.


All this that I have stated you most like already knew.  I'm just restating
them together, because I suspect that they've been brought up many times,
but as separate issues.  They are one big issue.


My conclusion is that Le Camp is unacceptable as a venue.  However, the
local team is very opposed to a change.  Their reasons vary.  
One of the reasons is that this is the venue that was voted on.  We need to
convince them that this doesn't matter.  The decision meeting is not a
binding contract.


Another reason is that it is not possible to find a better venue in
Switzerland.  I don't believe this. But if this were true, then we should
analyze having DC13 in a different country.  It's not too late to change.


Another reason is that it is "too late".  I understand that for the swiss
it would be late, but I know from my own experience and others' that this
has been done successfully in the past and until we actually sign the
contract, it is NOT too late, so we must act now.


This mail is to try to gather some consensus outside of IRC, with those
that have raised their voices before.  Because discussions on IRC about
this subject have turned nasty and nothing useful was achieved, and I
REALLY want to help making DC13 successful, not just complain and sulk.
The options I see right now are:


1- Convince the local team to find a different venue. [Hard]
2- Find a different venue outside of the local team, and then convince them
   to go for it. [Also hard]
3- Discard Switzerland and find a new location. [Bound to make people
   unhappy, but easier than 1 and 2]
4- ? Any other ideas?


Regarding alternative venues, there's already a proposed venue, but
mentioning it to the local team has created a very unhelpful atmosphere on
IRC, I fail to understand why.  This is something where acting as a group
instead of individual complainers would maybe make a difference.


I'm really interested in hearing options and actions that we might take.
Please do not shrug this off.  I know that this has been discussed many
times, and that I wasn't there before. It saddens me, but this has not been
solved.  We need to solve it.


Please reply with opinions, ideas, ways that we could make this better.


Thank you for your time.


PS: Please do not share this mail with other people yet.


-- 
Love,
Marga

Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved.

Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved. █