I'm glad to announce that Virginia King has been selected as one of the three interns for this round of the FOSS Outreach Program for women. Starting December 9th, and continuing until March 9th, she'll be working on improving the documentation of Debian's bug tracking system.

The initial goal is to develop a Bug Triager Howto to help new contributors to Debian jump in and help existing teams triage bugs. We'll be getting in touch with some of the larger teams in Debian to help make this document as useful as possible. If you're a member of a team in Debian who would like this howto to address your specific workflow, please drop me an e-mail, and we'll keep you in the loop.

The secondary goals for this project are to:

• Improve documentation under http://www.debian.org/Bugs
• Document of bug-tags and categories
• Improve upstream debbugs documentation

Some of you may already be aware of the gift tag which has been used for a while to indicate bugs which are suitable for new contributors to use as an entry point to working on specific packages. Unfortunately, some of us (including me!) were unaware that this tag even existed.

Luckily, Lucas Nussbaum clued me in to the existence of this tag, and after a brief bike-shed-naming thread, and some voting using pocket_devotee we decided to name the new tag newcomer, and I have now added this tag to the BTS documentation, and tagged all of the bugs which were user tagged "gift" with this tag.

If you have bugs in your package which you think are ideal for new contributors to Debian (or your package) to fix, please tag them newcomer. If you're getting started in Debian, and working on bugs to fix, please search for the newcomer tag, grab the helm, and contribute to Debian.