Together we have the opportunity to bring real technological freedom to every part of the world, across multiple devices and the cloud, and clothed in an elegant, beautiful, experience. It is a bold vision, but our greatest strength in Ubuntu is our community and together we can do this. Come and join us and be a part of bringing Ubuntu to the masses.

• Jono Bacon, Ubuntu Community Manager

TODO: FAQ, Photos, Map current Ubuntu members, stadistics, values

Requirements for Membership

Contributions in all areas are welcome.

Membership is not required for contribution, but contribution is required for membership. There are many different ways of contributing to Ubuntu. Contributions are valued and recognized whether you contribute to artwork, any of the LoCoTeams, documentation, providing support on the forums, the answers tracker, IRC support, bug triage, translation, development and packaging, marketing and advocacy, contributing to the wiki, or anything else. The whole community needs each other and depends on each other. Whichever way you choose to bring benefit to Ubuntu and help others is very much appreciated. (To review the list of ways to contribute to Ubuntu, have a look at the Contribute To Ubuntu page.)

Ubuntu also benefits from contributions to upstream projects and Debian specifically. However, while contributions to those projects are appreciated and worth being recognized, involvement in downstream Ubuntu is required for membership. After all it’s all about Ubuntu membership.

The idea that only technical contributions (like patches or uploads of packages) or only contributions which give rise to karma in Launchpad is incorrect. The community is much broader and more diverse than that and it is sufficient to demonstrate significant and sustained contributions in any area of the Ubuntu community. It is important that members demonstrate the ability to interact with others, so detailed endorsements from others are important criteria that are evaluated during your application, because they give better insight into specific parts of the community. Testimonials from members of various parts of the community are appreciated, even if they're not Ubuntu members themselves.

In addition to interacting with others, you need to be Community savvy: so you need some insight into the community and be involved with it.

See below for the procedure to be followed to obtain membership and advise on how to prepare your membership application.

Different forms of involvement

The work done in other Open Source communities is vitally important to Ubuntu. If you are part of one of Ubuntu's Upstreams we appreciate your work.

If your collaboration with the Ubuntu project and involvement in the Ubuntu project constitutes as a significant and sustained contribution, you are eligible to Ubuntu membership.

Examples for this kind of collaboration might be: joint release planning, cross-collaboration in terms of QA and exchanging fixes, etc.

For example these cases constitute as valuable contributions as well:

• somebody working hard on Launchpad or some other piece of infrastructure, supporting and coordinating with the Ubuntu developers for months
• somebody working on upstream project X that dealt with loads of Ubuntu bugs and coordinated releases together with Ubuntu developers
• probably unrelated to Upstream contributions: somebody working with hardware manufacturers to get Ubuntu preinstalled

When applying for Ubuntu membership, please make the relevance of your work to the Ubuntu project very clear.

Benefits of Membership

Membership entitles you to the following benefits:

Ubuntu Community

• Voting privileges to confirm Ubuntu Community Council nominations.

• An @ubuntu.com email alias that forwards to your real email address. See UbuntuEmail for more details.

• An ubuntu/member/your_nick cloak on freenode - See IRC/Cloaks.

• The right to print business cards with the Ubuntu logo - The business cards can be found at the BusinessCards page, you will need to take care of the printing yourself.

• Syndication on Planet Ubuntu of your Ubuntu blog or the Ubuntu category posts in your blog, if you have one. Follow the registration instructions on PlanetUbuntu to add your blog!

• An Ubuntu Member title at the Ubuntu Forums. See this post for more information.

• SFTP access to a Web-accessible directory on people.ubuntu.com

• A certificate signed by sabdfl (Self appointed benevolent dictator for life) Mark Shuttleworth. See this form for more information.

3rd Party

• A subscription to Linux Weekly News - see this page for instructions on how to apply.

• Ability to join the Official Ubuntu Members group on LinkedIn. See Membership/LinkedIn for more information.

• Signing up for SixXS account with an Ubuntu email address and a link to your Launchpad page will grant you an "Ubuntu Credit Bonus" of 25 credit points.

• Ubuntu Member Flair on Reddit, read this for details.

• Discounted domain registration pricing and partner rates for cloud hosting at Gandi.net, see here for details