This meeting was held Tuesday 11 January 2005 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-20050111.html
Country Team process and new teams and leaders:
New Maintainers:
Other Items:
To open the discussion on country team leads, Matthias Urlichs pointed out that there was room for improvement that he had put some documentation on the wiki already.
The council realized that it was unclear what their role was in appointing either members or non-members to the head or lead position in a country team.
Mark Shuttleworth suggested that the CC would not need to play any role in appointing new country team leads (unless they wanted to become Ubuntu members as well, which would always be a good idea) but could just liaise directly with Matthias. That said, Mark clarified saying, "if there is a country where many ubuntu community members are unhappy with the team lead, we would need to be willing to get to the root of the issue and sort it out." These country team leaders will still be presented, bi-weekly, by Matthias to the council.
Since neither of the two proposed leaders were at the meeting and since it was in Matthias's domain, the council did not vote on either members although they can bring this up with Matthias and should come to the next CC meeting. A third attendee who stopped in mid-meeting was Chua Wen Kiat from Malaysia. All three candidates should be approved before the next meeting.
Finally, there was a good deal of discussion about a new potential team for a new United Kingdom country team.
John Levin asked, "The question with the UK-CT is, given that so much of the teams' tasks are to do with language, translation etc, what would it do?" Mark Shuttleworth pointed out that there was plenty of work to be done in regards to advocacy and beer.
Riddell said that he would prefer a Great Britain team to a United Kingdom team since it's the best geographical fit (someone in Northern Ireland would be more likely to take part in a Irish team). Colin Watson pointed out that this was a controversial position. But it did raise the issue of how to do to deal with these issues both within Great Britain and elsewhere. John Levin asked about dealing with geopolitics with, in the UK's example, Ireland, Wales (and Welsh) and Scotland.
Benjamin Mako Hill pointed out that you can have a UK/GB team and this will not stop anyone from also starting a Welsh team.
Mark said, "if we get a good team lead, those sorts of issues shouldn't be too much of a problem. A country lead might well be responsible for several sub-projects, different languages etc. For example, if we had a Spanish country lead he would need to be friendly to people from Catalonia etc., and probably work across several derivative projects." Benjamin Mako Hill pointed out that a Spanish team should not necessarily preclude a Catalan team either which was a sentiment every agreed to.
Jane Silber answered another question saying, "On the "what do country teams do" question, advocacy is a big part. Teams can help out with having an ubuntu presence at conferences and other events, also helping to coordinate local press coverage, we would like to encourage teams to be creative in terms of advocacy events/programs." Mark Shuttleworth said that they can also work with local magazines but a lot would be up to each team.
In an final effort to avoid controversy and to just do a better job of describing what the teams should be (since a country is not the necessary domain of a team), the council agreed that would be a good idea to rename the teams from country teams to Local Teams or Local Community teams ("LoCo" Teams for short). There was a short proposal to create a team to make sure that the names of new Ubuntu projects do not start off as jokes but it was quickly derailed.
And on that subject, Matt Zimmerman brought up the issue of Masters of the Universe. The project has been brought up before but has not advanced substantially, in part due to a lack of leadership and somebody to push the project. Mark said, "I had two potential leaders in mind, Chris Halls (haggai) and Christoph Haas, because of his mentoring background." There was a strong sentiment that Universe should not be handled by a Canonical employee and should be a community project. Benjamin Mako Hill argued the candidates, who will be working very closely with Debian, should also have good Debian connections (which both Chris and Christoph do).
Chris Halls was hesitant as it could be a very large job. Mark said he saw the job as likely taking on two major roles:
Colin Watson pointed out that there are sometimes changes in main that require sweeping changes in universe. In particular, the python2.4 transition and the libflac transition are both such examples.
If Chris and Christoph want the job, the council was happy offering it to them. That said, the job is big and other people will, in all likelihood, be needed to help out as well.
The second major issue in regards to uploading into universe was the mechanics of the process. James Troup said that there was one day of work necessary to make it so that the scripts which are currently processing things could be tweaked so that a certain set of keys could only upload into universe. Mark Shuttleworth told James to go ahead and spend that day on it and get the work done.
In terms of tracking the version changes between Ubuntu and Debian, the group pointed out that because we are in upstream version freeze, we don't need to worry about this too much right now but ultimately, it will become a bit more complicated issues and it will require a good deal of Bugzilla work by the MOTU maintainers.
The next major issue was handling porting and architecture specific issues.
The first issue on the table was issues in regards to the IA64 port. Thibaut Varene said he would work on this but was unable to follow through. T. Simonnet also said he would be able to work on a leadership role but Matt Zimmerman had fallen out of contact with him. Upon checking again, Matt realized that he had received an email that looked positive.
It was unclear whether the porting issues would be advanced enough to have an IA64 port of Hoary ready for release but it would require coordinate with T. Simonnet and others. Benjamin Mako Hill said he could help arrange an announcement to help try and get more IA64 users involved. Mark Shuttleworth pointed out that he had already invested in build hardware and the port would be able to go forward if community members stepped forward. The final decision on IA64 in Hoary is going to be up to Matt.
Any further discussion of IA64 was postponed until we had more information and people.
The discussion then moved to a PowerPC team. The team had a few idea of a few potential community leaders for a PowerPC team to follow up on a number of PowerPC goals. Work with Power5 is one goal and work with non-new-world Macs is another. Matt Zimmerman thought that as we move into the future, solid PPC support is going to be more important than IA64 support.
John Richard Moser brought up the issue of child-safety and content control earlier on the mailing lists saying:
On the Idea Pool (https://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/IdeaPool) it was suggested to create "A child-friendly option on Ubuntu so parents can turn on/off functionality + browsing web" by Louise McCance-Price. I have added a number of suggestions backing OFF from completely disabling Web browsing which would make Ubuntu attractive to parents, schools, libraries, and businesses as a gateway and possibly as a host.
I believe that the formation of a Content Control team to enhance Ubuntu's ability to filter HTTP content may be appropriate if the community is interested in this. This should be discussed here to determine if there is general support of this as an optional feature. If it seems to be something the community may be interested in, it should be discussed in #ubuntu-meeting on January 11, as part of the Community Council Agenda. If appropriate, a team should be formed.
Responding to this, Benjamin Mako Hill said, "I'm not convinced there is a demonstrated need for the team. That doesn't mean there's isn't a demonstrated need for the work." He also said that, in general terms, he liked the idea of having teams form around locus of people doing work on a common project which was nothing that was necessarily the case this time. Mark Shuttleworth agreed saying, "I don't think we should discuss it more here, other than perhaps to check out how cc members feel about having the functionality there."
The rest of the discussion remained around the filters themselves. Benjamin Mako Hill said, "there is no way we are going to come up with a list of filters. Everybody will disagree with everyone else, and probably disagree with themselves."
Benjamin Mako Hill also said that he was uncomfortable with any set of filters being on by default. Many other people including Mark agreed with this emphatically. Mako added that it is the filters (the list of things being blocked) themselves that are controversial, not the functionality. The council ended by explicitly empowering John to move forward and reminding him that he certainly had his work cut out for him.
The kernel for Warty was handled primarily by Herbert Xu. Currently, the kernel is being handled by Fabio Massimo Di Nitto. Mark Shuttleworth pointed out that in the near future, Canonical will hire a kernel lead to work on this. That said, a kernel team is an essential structure we desperately need now and that will carry over when a new kernel person is brought on board by Canonical Ltd.
Fabio said that we need need 3 types of figures inside the team:
Matt Zimmerman pointed out that porting will be handled by the architecture porting teams.
The tasks that are left for this team are large as well:
Fabio pointed out that one of the largest problem was just tracking the amount of work being done by upstream(s) in this case. He pointed out that 1, 2, 3, and 6 really should have dedicated people following them.
Mark Shuttleworth said, "I've mailed Linus asking him if he would recommend someone who has the necessary skills to keep up with upstream, and be a reasonable merge partner for Andrew Morton and Linus. I'm happy to have interested people get in touch with me directly."
Fabio added that especially in the short term, and in the long term as well, a powerful volunteer-based part of the kernel team is going to be essential. There will be an upcoming note about need for help in the kernel team soon.
Two new members were up for discussion and approval today by the council:
The council happily approved both candidates as new members. Both Jonathan and Oliver were also interested in becoming universe uploaders as well which was, according to the new rules from earlier in the meeting, really up to the currently in-flux MOTU leads.
Both were encouraged to digitally sign the Ubuntu CoC to show their agreement and then to mail it to Benjamin Mako Hill.
In terms of Universe uploaders, Matt Zimmerman was concerned that the current process was simply too slow for the next release and the goal of getting people involved in such a way that they could do uploads of packages.
Between now and hoary's release, folks who are interested in maintaining or uploading packages in Universe can become a member through a special accelerated process by signing the CoC, sending that to Benjamin Mako Hill and James Troup along with a signed approval from any two members of the Technical Board, Community Council, or the MOTU leadershi team. The individual must also have a GPG signed by someone in the strongly connected set or must fall back to another more difficult method of proving identity.
Contact Benjamin Mako Hill if you are confused and would like to go through this.