Community Council Meeting -------------------------- This meeting was held Tuesday 21 December 2004, at 16:00 UTC, in the #ubuntu-meeting channel on irc.freenode.net. Summarized by: Benjamin Mako Hill Full Log Available: http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~mako/cc-meeting_log-20041221.html Agenda ------- The meeting was relatively short but cut straight to the point on a number of new issues. The agenda for the meeting included: * Overview of new member/maintainer/etc process from BoF at Mataró. * Country Teams: - Overview/Introduction of the *country teams* project by Matthias Urlichs. - Individual teams with people that have already stepped format include: + Israeli country team: sivang is willing to be a lead, has already started forming this local chapter of Ubuntu Linux in Israel. + Dutch country team: Martijn van de Streek is willing to take a leading role. + Danish country team: Niels Kjøller Hansen has stepped forward. * New Members: - Martijn Van De Streek - Sivan Green - Niels Kjøller Hansen (?) * Next Community Council Meeting Discussion ----------- New Member/New Maintainer Clarification Work ============================================= Benjamin Mako Hill began the meeting by giving an overview of the conclusions that the group came to at a BoF on the new member and maintainer process at Mataró held the previous week. Great notes of the event were taken by Alexander Poslavsky. Anyone interested in getting up to speed on the new maintainer process should read them. They are on the wiki here: http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/NewDevelopersAndMaintainers Benjamin Mako Hill gave the executive summary saying: We had a great session brainstorming on our maintainer process and I think the result is excellent. The notes in the link above read pretty well as a summary of the conclusion we came to. The goal was to balance the need to empower people early on with the need to keep the team working on the distribution technically exceptional. Another basic problem we were trying to solve was to find a way to recognize the contributions of people who are not developers or package maintainers and to enfranchise them within the governance system. We anted to recognize that there are lots of ways people participate, and gives those people a voice. The basic idea is that we have `members` who are recognized by this body: * they will be able to confirm new members of the CC; * they should have contributed meaningful to the community; * they do not need to be package maintainers; The rest of the system is basically the same as before. Procedurally, this means we approve members and then pass them to the TB for technical approval if they want to upload into the distribution without having to go through an existing committer or package maintainer. This reads as a codification of what we've been informally doing up to now except that maintainer is now a purely technical distinction. As a result of this new proposal, we have several people on the agenda for today who are applying for `member` status in the community but who are not currently pursuing TB approval to upload into Ubuntu. Benjamin Mako Hill will write this up as a formal document and have it approved by the council at the next meeting. It will then be moved into the community governance pages on the website. Country Team ============= Country Teams were another issue that received a lot of attention and work in Mataró. Matthias Urlichs is going to be heading up some of the coordination of these country teams and he introduced the concept at the CC meeting saying: Many of the country teams basically organized themselves -- we want to take advantage of that, recognize their contributions, and make that a more integrated part of Ubuntu. The technical side of "what we want from the country team" is on the CountryTeams wiki page: http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/CountryTeams although it basically says: * IRC * mailing list * maybe a forum and whatnot I think my main concern for country teams is that there should be somebody responsible for liaising with the primarily English-speaking development community as necessary. Also it might make sense for Ubuntu to have a common second-level domain names if at all possible. We might also want to make that Wiki list-of-stuff a more integral part of the site later. People interested in helping coordinate an Ubuntu Country Team should: * be visible in the local community, of course * keep a list of regional contacts * remind people of / enforce the Ubuntu Code of Conduct if necessary Mark Shuttleworth added that the teams would also be able to help coordinate the migration of code into the main distro, like input methods and font decisions etc by coordinating with Martin Pitt on the language pack project. Mark also pointed out that "we may have to refer to the teams as 'regional teams' rather than country teams." There teams were proposed to get things started: * Israeli country team: Sivan Green is willing to be a lead, has already started forming this local chapter of Ubuntu Linux in Israel. * Dutch country team: Martijn van de Streek is willing to take a leading role. * Danish country team: Niels Kjøller Hansen has stepped forward. New Members ============= Three folks had signed up on the wiki to be new members. They were all connected to new country teams: * Martijn Van De Streek * Sivan Green * Niels Kjøller Hansen Martin and Sivan was both at the meeting and, previously, at Mataró, and had been doing good visible work for some time. They were both passed unanimously and with no real discussion by the council. Niels had not created a wiki page yet so, unfamiliar with his work with Ubuntu to date, the council was not comfortable voting at this time. They'll be happy to review his application at any time he wants. Next Meeting ============== Due to the Holidays and many members of both the technical board and the community council taking time off to travel or relax, the technical board meeting for the following week was tentatively postponed one week. That said the dates for the next meetings will be adjusted: * January 4, 2005: Technical Board Meeting * January 11, 2004: Community Council Meeting Both the TB and CC hope to see some new faces there and some new agenda items from the community on our agenda (which can be found in the wiki).