From its humble beginnings, with a mere handful of developers, the Debian Development Team has grown to nearly 400 active developers and enough additional help from regular contributors to bring the total list of participants to over 600 people. Most of these people have never physically met each other. Almost all of the communication between developers takes place via e-mail using the various mailing lists that the project supports through donor supplied hardware and bandwidth.
All contributions to the project are completely voluntary, including the many fine people, businesses, and institutions that contribute hardware to operate those lists and disk space to store the archives. What little actual cash is necessary, has in the past been paid out of pocket by the person taking care of the issue. Software in the Public Interest now provides services that allow for the project to collect donations for such cash necessities. This volunteer organization, by its very nature, does not lend itself to the hierarchical structures usually found in development organizations. Control from a central location is ineffective, at best, and counterproductive in many cases. The reason this process works without those controls stems from the modular package scheme that was developed so early in the project. This allows an individual developer to take responsibility for a ``known'' piece of the distribution. The efforts of this diverse group are directed by the bug tracking system, and the set of Policy documents that define the construction of Debian packages, and to some extent by the Debian Project Leader.
The combination of mailing lists and bug reporting system provides the only checks and balances needed to adequately control each individual developer. If developers have any questions about the proper way to deal with package responsibilities, the mailing list provides the access to other developers who will gladly assist them with suggestions and comments. If developers generate packages which are poorly formed, the bug tracking system allows anyone who notices the problem to bring it to their attention. With the recent rapid growth of the development group, this system became inadequate for dealing with the problems brought on by that rapid growth. This need has created multiple small teams within the larger structure, whose specific task has some narrowly focused agenda. Some of the current agendas include: Publicity; Documentation; Quality Assurance; and Testing.
These subgroups operate on the same general principles as the larger group, usually with their own mailing list and a team leader. These teams have a far better chance of coming to closure on the issues that they deal with, than the larger group was ever able to accomplish. Within this loose structure, the driving forces come from the universal desire of all participants to create an exceptional product of the highest possible quality. This helps to quell personal agendas and keep people focused on the general goals. It is this development model, borrowed from the Kernel Development Team and modified to suit the needs of the Debian team, that has allowed Debian to become the powerful distribution that it is today.