[JoPP-Public] New member: Stefano Zacchiroli

Thu Aug 15 19:06:42 CEST 2013

On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 01:08:24AM +0000, Mathieu ONeil wrote:
> I am delighted to sponsor a (pardon the cringe) very special new
> member of our editorial board, Stefano Zacchiroli.  Stefano was until
> recently project leader for the legendary FOSS distribution, Debian,
> which is as we speak celebrating its 20th anniversary!
> 
> Stefano, over to you: thanks for briefly presenting yourself, your
> research interests and your intended contribution to the journal.

Hi everybody, and thanks Mathieu for your kind words!

I essentially live two lives: an academic and a geek one.  Luckily, they
seem to intersect on a Free Software spot.

As an academic, I'm a Maître de Conférences (~= Associate Professor) at
University Paris Diderot (France), and a research fellow at IRILL
(http://www.irill.org). My scientific background is in theoretical
computer science, mainly proof theory and logics. After moving to Paris
in 2008, I've started applying that background to the study of the
interactions among software components, and in particular to software
packages in Free Software distributions. As a result, I've been able to
"give back" to the Free Software community quite a bit of my research
work, in the form of software which is used daily to monitor the quality
of various distributions. A list of my publications is available at
http://upsilon.cc/~zack/research/publications/

As a geek, I've been active in the Free Software movement for the past
15 years, mainly in the Debian Project. I've been an official Debian
Developer since 2001. I've worked on several Debian sub-projects, the
most relevant of which for this list are probably in the area of
distribution-wide Quality Assurance. Related initiatives usually require
keeping an eye on, and often try to re-engineer, human processes
... which is quite challenging in a mostly volunteer project like
Debian, where "incentives" have nothing to do with those you find
studied in traditional management literature. My project-wide interest
has then naturally evolved into a desire to try the "hot seat", and
resulted in me being elected and serving 3 times as Debian Project
Leader, over the 2010-2013 period.

I've discovered the JoPP journal only recently, thanks to Biella
mentioning it, and I've got fascinated by it. Not only I loved your open
attitude on this list, but I also find very intriguing your choice of
topics, with a mixture of societal and political angles.  If you think
my contributions could be helpful, I'll be honored to serve as a member
of the editorial board!

All the best,
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli  . . . . . . .  zack at upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Former Debian Project Leader  . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o .
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