When to apply for team membership

It can be difficult to know when you are ready to apply for uploader team membership. Here are some guidelines:

• There is no minimum number of sponsored uploads into the archive that you need to have. You need to have demonstrated enough previous work to be able to assure your endorsers that you can be trusted with unsupervised upload access to the primary archive.
  • On your application wiki page, you will describe your areas of work. As a guideline, the DMB will expect to see that you have demonstrated competence in at least those areas.
• At least some of your endorsers should be your (future) peers. If you are applying for upload rights to a package set, for example, we will expect to see your fellow set members providing endorsements.
• You should have knowledge of the Ubuntu release cycle and processes (for example SRUs)
• It is nice and probably makes your application easier if you are a part of the development community. Please consider hanging out on IRC and joining in with discussing and helping new contributors.
• You are encouraged to participate in peer review and to help with the training of new developers. This will help to make your application stronger.
• The DMB will expect you to have a need to upload directly such that membership of the requested team will fulfil this need. Usually the need is to reduce friction by eliminating sponsorship delays and/or the burden of sponsorship review work from your sponsors. In this case you will be expected to demonstrate your need in the form of already sponsored uploads to some of the packages for which you are requesting direct upload access. These examples will also help the DMB to assess your technical readiness to upload the requested packages without sponsorship supervision.

For part of the world (e.g APAC) where the DMB meeting times can be challenging to attend due to the timezone gap, note that the DMB usually tries to be accomodating. While the preference always remains the irc interview meeting, the DMB team can exceptionally do the interview by email if the applicant cannot make the regular meeting times. Please reach out to the DMB team to let them know about it if you fall into this category.

Applying for team membership

To become a Contributing Developer, MOTU, per-package uploader, Core Developer, SRU Developer or developer of a delegated team for which the DMB handles applications, you must apply to the Developer Membership Board, via the following process:

• Create a dedicated wiki page for your application, using the UbuntuDevelopment/DeveloperApplicationTemplate.

• Ask other developers to endorse your application by adding information to your wiki page. A typical application will have three to five endorsements. Developers who sponsored several uploads for you are good candidates.

• Announce your application by email to the devel-permissions mailing list. Please allow at least one week between the announcement of your application and the meeting at which the application is considered. The Developer Membership Board will consider a maximum of two applicants per meeting — if the agenda already lists two applicants for the next meeting, please attend the next free date (meetings are held every two weeks).

• Add your name, the team to which you are applying and the date of the meeting to the Developer Membership Board Agenda.

• Attend the meeting in #ubuntu-meeting on irc.freenode.net (to get an idea of the format of the meeting, you can read some of the old meeting logs)

All members of the development community are welcome to attend and ask questions, add your feedback (even if unsolicited) to the application wiki page or ask questions of an applicant on the devel-permissions mailing list.

The Developer Membership Board will have prepared for the meeting (reviewed the application details, checked a few examples of your work, talked to sponsors, etc.) and ask questions to make sure the applicant qualifies for the team. During the meeting the DMB members will cast their votes and if quorum is reached (4 of 7 currently), will add the applicant to the team or ask to re-apply in due time.

Debian Developers applying for Per-Package upload rights

The DMB has establised a procedure for interested Debian Developers to gain upload rights to their packages, on a dynamic and ongoing basis. That is, the list of packages one can upload can be further extended after the initial application to include other packages the DD maintains. This includes team maintained packages.

To exercise this process, the DD should first be an existing Ubuntu developer, for example by applying for PPU as per the above process or by joining the MOTU team if interest is broad. Subsequent changes are requested by mailing devel-permissions@lists.ubuntu.com listing the packages to add. If the 'impact' of the packages changes — for example, one of the packages is part of release media for the first time — the DMB may wish to ask some further clarifying questions to satisfy itself that the DD is sufficiently familiar with the differences between Ubuntu and Debian to upload the package(s) in question without supervision.

Applying for upload permissions which grant no further access

The DMB recognizes that individuals may wish to become members of teams that they have no technical reason to want to join, so that they may feel explicitly included as a member of the team.

For such "social" applications, the DMB will expect to see evidence of a large degree of social involvement in the team. Examples include mentoring new contributors and discussing policy.

It would be helpful if applicants could seek endorsements from existing members of the team when applying.

CategoryProcess
CategoryUbuntuDevelopment