IRC Council Changes

In recent months there has been concern shared across many parts of the Ubuntu community about the effectiveness of the IRC Council. While there is little doubt that the intentions of the IRC Council are absolutely just in servicing the needs of the Ubuntu community, this page provides some recommended next steps in assisting the IRC Council to be as effective as possible.

Election

A number of seats in the existing IRC Council are about to expire and we will seek election of new members.

I would like to recommend that the election of new members of the board works in a similar way to other team council appointments.

To make it clear what attributes are expected of an IRC Council member, I would recommend the following:

• Be an Ubuntu member.
• Be able to demonstrate a competent technical knowledge of IRC.
• Be able to demonstrate a passion and desire for IRC and maintaining effective governance of our IRC community.
• In the interests of providing an objective separation of duties, Ops are welcome to apply for a role on the council and retain their Op status, but they are also informed that in the interests of having a separation of power, they also have the opportunity to step down as an Op temporarily.
• Be familiar of the expectations listed in the Governance Expectations section below and commit to executing on them as part of the IRC Council.

I would like to recommend this process for how we elect the council members:

• An open call for nominations should be announced in the IRC Community, and people can nominate themselves for a seat on the council. Everyone is welcome to apply.
• To apply for a seat the candidate creates a Wiki page outlining their work in the community, and inviting others to provide testimonials.
• When the application deadline has passed, the IRC Council will review the applications and provide a recommended board (or shortlist of candidates) for the Community Council to review
• The Community Council will meet together to finalise the final board.

Governance Expectations

In the interests of ensuring that the IRC Council is governing as effectively as possible, I have made this set of recommendations to the previous Community Council for input and they recieved broad support. As such, I would like to encourage these governance expectations with the new IRC Council:

• Regular IRC Meetings - at least one public real-time IRC meeting per month with a public request for agenda items. They should have an Agenda wiki page to handle this process. The community can add agenda items and they are discussed and decided upon like other governance boards.

• Community Bug Reporting - the IRC Council should encourage the community to file issues using the Community Bug Process at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingCommunityProblems - this will provide a good snapshot of what the community feel the problems are, and in turn provide content for the meetings.

• Reporting - meeting notes and outcomes should be published using the TeamReports framework at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TeamReports

• Escalation - a significant area of concern with IRC governance is how escalation occurs. I would recommend that the CC mentor the IRC Council in reviewing and improving their escalation processes.
• The Community Council will have a member sit on the IRC Council for the next six months to oversee progress that is made. This will be a temporary seat. This member will report progress back to the CC.
• The Community Council will review the progress made by the IRC Council in six months and if no significant progress has been made, governance will be reviewed again.