Advocating a prospective member

Before advocating a prospective member, you should check that they satisfy all things listed on the NM checklist.

You should only advocate someone if you think that they are ready to be a project member. This means that you should have known them for some time and can judge their work. It is important that prospective members have been working in the project for some time. Some ways prospective members might be contributing include:

maintaining a package (or several),
helping users,
publicity work,
translations,
organizing work for debconf,
sending patches,
contributing bug reports,
... and much more!

These ways of helping are not mutually exclusive, of course! Many prospective members will have done work in several areas of the project, and not everyone must be a packager. Remember, Debian welcomes non-packaging contributors as project members. For a wider overview of a given contributor, you may be interested in tools which aggregate some publicly-visible parts of the project. Your personal knowledge of the applicant is also important here.

The prospective member should be familiar with Debian's special ways of doing things and should have already contributed actively and effectively to the project. Most importantly, they should be committed to the ideals and structure of the Debian project. Ask yourself if you want to see them in Debian – if you think they should be a Debian Developer then go ahead and encourage them to apply.

Next carry out the following steps: Agree with the prospective member to recommend them and let them sign up. After that, you have to click on their name in the listing of Applicants and go the Advocate this application page. Enter your Debian login and press the Advocate button. You then will receive an e-mail with an auth key which you have to return OpenPGP signed. After this, the Applicant is added to the queue for an Application Manager with whom they will go through all steps of the New Member checks.