Application Review Board Charter

For active teams and subprojects with Ubuntu, the Ubuntu Community Council delegates many of its responsibilities to "Team Councils." These councils act as proxies for the Community Council over a particular scope of activity within the Ubuntu community. These governance councils are ultimately responsible for the actions and activity within their team or scope and resolve disputes and manage policies and procedures internal to their team.

The Application Review Board (ARB) is the team governance council for the application review process and how it interfaces with the rest of the Ubuntu community and governance systems. It will:

• Consist of five to seven members. Membership should be public and published.
• Decisions will be made by a majority of voting ARB members when at least three members have voted.
• ARB members should be accessible by and responsive to the developer community.
• Hold "meetings" regularly and visibly. Meetings can either be in IRC in the "ubuntu-meeting" channel or in a public mailing list.
• Be appointed by the Ubuntu Technical Board. Nominations are open and public and considered and evaluated by the TB. Each candidate should prepare a wiki page summarizing their nomination and their contributions and including and referencing testimonials (e.g., something similar to what is prepared for Ubuntu membership). The TB will evaluate all nominations on the following criteria, listed in order of importance:
  • The nominees active status as an Ubuntu member (essential).
  • The nominees active status as an Ubuntu developer (desirable).
  • The nominees support from at least one active Ubuntu developer (essential).
  • Opinions and testimonials (positive and negative) from current Ubuntu members.
  • Clear evidence of activity within the developer community (quality, quantity and duration).
• Serve terms of two (2) years. ARB members could serve multiple or repeated terms. Weight will be given to proved contributors and reelection of consistently active members should be both easy and common.

The ARB has a number of rights and responsibilities, and is responsible for approving quality applications for availability to Ubuntu users. These include:

• Evaluating applications, including quality assessments, testing, and code review.
• Mentoring developers in improving their application and packaging, and (where appropriate) guiding them toward submission to Debian upstream or Ubuntu backports/universe/main.
• Resolving disputes in applications as per the existing dispute resolution system.

• Preparing team reports, following the procedures in Team Reporting

• Taking the chair position for meetings, in rotation with other ARB members.