Membership

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Ubuntu Official Ubuntu Membership means recognition of significant and sustained contribution to Ubuntu or the Ubuntu community.

Membership of the Ubuntu community means recognition of a significant and sustained contribution to Ubuntu and the Ubuntu community.

Requirements for Membership

Contributions in all areas are welcome.

There are many different ways of contributing to Ubuntu. Contributions are valued and recognised whether you contribute to artwork, any of the LoCoTeams, documentation, the forums, the answers tracker, IRC support, bug triage, translation, development and packaging, marketing and advocacy 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 Teams page.)

Ubuntu benefits through contributions to upstream projects and Debian specifically. While contributions to those projects are appreciated and worth being recognised, involvement in Ubuntu is required. After all it's all about Ubuntu membership. Smile :)

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 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 commmunity 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.

Benefits of Membership

Membership entitles you to the following benefits:

  • 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 IrcTeam/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.

  • 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.

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

Procedure for Obtaining Membership

We look for sustained and significant contributions. While there is no precise period that we look for, it is rare for applications to be accepted from people contributing for less than 6 months. If you are unsure if your contributions constitute as sustained and significant, ask your team mates and other Ubuntu members. Maybe they can even add some kind of endorsement to your application.

The regular way to apply for membership is through the regional membership boards. Alternatively some Ubuntu teams can grant membership directly through their governance Council. Examples are the Kubuntu Council, the Edubuntu Council, and the Developer Membership Board.

In each case, you need to add your name to the agenda for the next meeting of the membership board for your region, or the team council, and prepare carefully according to the instructions below.

The regional membership boards hold meetings in the early evening in the relevant region. If this time is not convenient for you, you can attend a meeting of a membership board for one of the other regions.

A chart showing the different methods of obtaining Ubuntu Membership is available in png format. Aubergine text indicates councils that you can go to in order to receive Ubuntu Membership.

Other venues for obtaining Membership

In addition to the Regional Membership Boards, who handle the bulk of membership approval, there are other groups in Ubuntu that handle specific other cases.

If your primary contributions to Ubuntu are:

  • in Edubuntu, you might want to add your application to the Edubuntu/Council agenda and attend a meeting there

  • in Kubuntu, you might want to add your application to the Kubuntu/Meetings agenda and attend a meeting there

  • very technical (Ubuntu development, packaging and the like), you might want to follow the UbuntuDevelopers process

Preparing your Application

It is vital to be well prepared for the meeting. You need to convince the membership board that you have contributed to Ubuntu.

Personal wiki page

Your contributions should therefore be carefully documented on your personal wiki page. Include the following details:

  1. A summary of your contributions to Ubuntu (no longer than 2-3 lines)
  2. A link to your Launchpad profile
  3. A complete description of your contributions to Ubuntu
  4. Your plans and ideas for Ubuntu in the near and far future

Code of Conduct

You must have signed the Code of Conduct (see the GnuPrivacyGuardHowto for more info on this), prior to applying for membership.

Testimonials

If there are recognized members of the Ubuntu community supporting you at the meeting, this will definitely speed up the process of approving you. If your "sponsors" can't attend the relevant meeting, ask them to leave a testimonial on your wiki page about your contributions.