This week we had our first Ubuntu Leadership Meeting. The goal of the meeting is to bring together representatives from the different governance boards to provide an open field to discuss challenges and opportunities in the community. In this week’s call there was Elizabeth Krumbach (Community Council), Laura Czajkowski (LoCo/Community Councils), Sergio Meneses (LoCo Council), Randall Ross (LoCo Community), and Jono Bacon (Ubuntu Community Manager).
In this week’s session we discussed a few interesting topics. We first discussed the recent technical board decision around the regular release proposal, from Mark Shuttleworth. Our primary concern was ensuring that we can get the message out about the decision to the many different parts of our community from the core, out to end users. Elizabeth took an action to post to the community announce list, and Jono agreed to post to internal Canonical mailing lists, our social media networks, and to talk to the OEM and Web teams to ensure support change is reflected.
We also discussed the documentation team, who are currently struggling to keep up with maintaining docs in Ubuntu. Helping to resolve this issue seems multi-faceted: helping to bring on more admins for the team, increasing the number of volunteers, and improving on-boarding documentation. Elizabeth agreed to take care of the extra admins, Elizabeth and Daniel Holbach will write extra on-boarding docs, Ben Kerensa is going to hold a hangout to teach folks how to write docs, Jeremy Bicha will take care of branches and merge reviews to grow our reviewer base, and Jono will help promote getting people involved.
Finally, there was a discussion about printed certificates for Ubuntu members as a nice means of showing thanks for contributions to Ubuntu. Jono offered to check if Canonical can fund the printing and postage of the certificates. This looks like it is possible and he is working on figuring out the logistics as we speak.
See the full video of the hangout by clicking here, and make sure to stay tuned for the next scheduled hangout in a few weeks!
Written by Jono Bacon