As already mentioned, the Debian project evolves in a very distributed, very organic way. As a consequence, it may be difficult at times to stay in touch with what happens within the project without being overwhelmed with a never-ending flood of notifications.

If you only want the most important news about Debian, you probably should subscribe to the debian-announce@lists.debian.org list. This is a very low-traffic list (around a dozen messages a year), and only gives the most important announcements, such as the availability of a new stable release, the election of a new Project Leader, or the yearly Debian Conference.

More general (and regular) news about Debian are sent to the debian-news@lists.debian.org list. The traffic on this list is quite reasonable too (usually around a handful of messages a month), and it includes the semi-regular “Debian Project News”, which is a compilation of various small bits of information about what happens in the project. Since all Debian developers can contribute these news when they think they have something noteworthy to make public, the DPN gives a valuable insight while staying rather focused on the project as a whole.

For more information about the evolution of Debian and what is happening at some point in time in various teams, there's also the debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org list. As its name implies, the announcements it carries will probably be more interesting to developers, but it also allows interested parties to keep an eye on what happens in more concrete terms than just when a stable version is released. While debian-announce@lists.debian.org gives news about the user-visible results, debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org gives news about how these results are produced. As a side note, “d-d-a” (as it is sometimes referred to) is the only list that Debian developers must be subscribed to.

A more informal source of information can also be found on Planet Debian, which aggregates articles posted by Debian contributors on their respective blogs. While the contents do not deal exclusively with Debian development, they provide a view into what is happening in the community and what its members are up to.

The project is also well represented on social networks. While Debian only has an official presence on platforms built with free software (like the Identi.ca microblogging platform, powered by pump.io), there are many Debian contributors who are animating Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, Google+ pages, and more.