MembershipAndMaintainershipProcess

MembershipAndMaintainershipProcess

Status

Introduction

Session to review and discuss the Ubuntu membership process.

Rationale

The Ubuntu membership process has been largely unchanged for the last six months. The process needs reviewing and some changes need to be made.

Background

During the Hoary time frame, the Community Council (CC) implemented a system where people could become maintainers for universe by getting the approval of the CC and two Masters Of the Universe (MOTU) or Technical Board (TB) members. This system was only designed to be in effect until the release of Hoary. This meeting considered whether it wanted to renew or make this system permanent.

The group also wanted to review the system for approving maintainers and to review the "Elmo Clause" which required CC review of maintainers which uploaded to main in order to bring in more people with more direct experience with the distribution.

The group also looked at areas within the system where some sort of extra review could help streamline the process and help it accomplish its goals of allowing people who want to get involved to do so, to provide positive reinforcement, and to adequately and accurately recognize substantial contributions.

Implementation Plan

Consensus was that the MOTU fast-track system is working well and should be written up into the process documents to become permanent.

The group also recommend that we bring in some pre-meeting review of candidates for both members and maintainers (perhaps in the days ahead of time) so that we can communicate with maintainers who don't have enough information on their page already. Mako volunteered to do that.

We should also encourage more active commenting by other members in the form of testimonials. Current members should comment directly on the wiki CC or TB agenda or on the individual maintainers' page. The CC members will check in with the folks whose name is on the write-up to verify this.

We should also come up with two or three meeting times that work for the larger group rather than the four. The new system should involve emailing the agenda for the next community council meeting 24 hours ahead of time -- automatically out of a cron if possible. Ideally, we could parse it from a iCal file or something.

Two proposed meetings times (we can rotate between them):

  • 22UTC
  • 12UTC

In terms of handling the Elmo clause, the group (including Elmo) came up with three potential solutions:

  • The ideal situation is appointing extra people to the TB who have a hand in the day-to-day running of the distribution and will be able to comment on maintainers directly.
  • And the alternative is that we keep the current system intact and require CC approval.
  • The third solution that the group agreed upon, although with serious reservations, would involve the creation of a third board composed entirely of people with day-to-day involvement in the distro.

The group encouraged all participants to make a mental note to get people who are contributing to go through the process to become a member and to brainstorm ideas that can help people make the jump to membership.

One idea was to advertise the perks which include:

  • The ability to vote on the CC
  • Business cards
  • A blog listed on planet
  • An Ubuntu.com email address

The process on the website should be rewritten to explain and document the process of people moving from maintainers who can upload to one component to people who can upload to other components. This is currently glossed over in the text.

UDU BOF Agenda

  • Give an overview of the Ubuntu membership process.
  • Discuss the sunset clause on the MOTU fast-track process.
  • Open for other comments and criticism about the Ubuntu member.

CategoryUdu CategorySpec

UbuntuDownUnder/BOFs/MembershipAndMaintainershipProcess (last edited 2008-08-06 16:31:16 by localhost)