Comment by _delirium

Depending on what you're interested in, I don't think you need to be involved in politics in the Debian world. I've been a minor participant for years and haven't run into much. A huge proportion of decisions, even some fairly complex ones, are made without fanfare. Most of that happens in the discussion threads of individual bugs, on the various collaborative-maintainership mailing lists, at Debcon, etc. There are definitely issues that do have a lot of fanfare, but they are fairly uncommon.