This meeting was held Tuesday 9 November 2004, at 16:00 UTC, in the #ubuntu-meeting channel on irc.freenode.net.
Summarized by: Benjamin Mako Hill <mako@canonical.com>
Full Log Available: http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~mako/cc-meeting_log-20041109.html
At the start of the meeting, the agenda was initially blank. The agenda was quickly augmented to include the following requests (mostly on the urging of Matt Zimmerman):
The first two were interspersed in the meeting but I've separated them a bit here for the purpose of making the summary readable.
At the last Community Council meeting, the council decided to allow a "fast-track" for candidates which the Ubuntu governing boards were already familiar with from their work in Debian or other Free Software projects. The council went through the list today and fast tracked a number of currently active members whose previous contributions they were familiar with.
Candidates approved by the Community Council at this meeting include:
Thibaut Varene
Several Ubuntu maintainers have worked closely with Thibaut in the past and were comfortable with his examples in the past. Benjamin Mako Hill served as his Application Manager when he joined the Debian project.
Matthias Ulrichs
Many on the committee had had experience with Mattias from Debian and considered him a solid candidate for the fast-track.
Alexander Poslavsky
Alexander has been very active on the documentation team and very visible. He was approved as a doc-team maintainer.
John Hornbeck
John is another active documentation team contributor who was approved as a doc-team maintainer.
Enrico Zini
Enrico is the acting secretary of the doc team. That said, he has not signed himself up as a maintainer candidate. The Community Council provisionally approved him pending his confirmation that maintainership is something he wanted.
These approvals are from the Community Council only. All candidates must also be approved by the Technical Board.
Sivan Green
Sivan has expressed interest in becoming a maintainer. Currently, he is active primarily on the documentation team but is interested in working in technical areas as well which he acknowledges is not yet up to speed on this to become a developer.
The council acknowledged that Sivan has been very present in the community so far on mailing lists, IRC and the like. Martin Pitt pointed out that he had been working with him closely already.
Consensus was that Sivan should work with Martin Pitt on technical problems. Benjamin Mako Hill will oversee the documentation team work in preparation for a final report.
Decisions on the following other candidates were deferred. They should proceed with the full process:
The Community Council noted that they expect several of these people to get through the process quickly -- perhaps at the next meeting.
In appointing members of the documentation team to membership, the team brought up the issue of, "if a maintainer is approved for writing documentation, should their GPG key be in the keyring which would allow them to upload packages?"
Mark Shuttleworth and Benjamin Mako Hill argued that we should error on the side of giving too much power to documentation writers. Mako argued that there should only be one type of maintainer so as to avoid a hierarchy that implied that documentation writers were not as important as package maintainers. Mark Shuttleworth agreed saying that, "in the absences of other infrastructure, I'd prefer to use social structures to enforce 'doc only' maintainership."
Matt Zimmerman's major fear was about forcing folks who do not know and are not comfortable with GPG keys to have one in the keyring. The worst case scenario in his mind was that someone might be careless with a key they do not feel that they need and end up losing control of their key in a way that would endanger Ubuntu.
Benjamin Mako Hill suggested that we might need keys for maintainers to vote on members of the technical board and community council membership. The consensus was however, that this could be handled through a website almost as easily.
Matt Zimmerman suggested all contributors (even those that do not commit or maintain packages) be part of a larger voting community. Mark Shuttleworth was not very comfortable with this because he foresaw a situation of contributors with rather narrow rights who may not be major contributors in the sense of having (or even wanting) enfranchisement in Ubuntu.
The the conclusion, another Great Compromise, seemed to make everyone happy:
Finally, Mark Shuttleworth announced that Canonical would be willing to fund a number of people for the upcoming Ubuntu conference:
All of these spaces will go first to people who have been active in the community and the final decisions will be made by Mark. I've gone ahead and added sponsorship section to the attendees wiki page. If you'll need sponsorship to attend the conference, you can sign up as unconfirmed there and put your list at the bottom of the page for consideration.