First Community Leadership Meeting Summary

By José Antonio Rey | Published: 2013-03-23

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

Ubuntu Membership Board call for nominations

By pleia2 | Published: 2013-03-22

Ubuntu Membership is a recognition of significant and sustained contribution to Ubuntu and the Ubuntu community. To this end, the Community Council recruits members of our current membership community for the valuable role of reviewing and evaluating the contributions of potential members to bring them on board or assist with having them achieve this goal.

It’s now that time of year when we have several members of our boards expiring from their 2 year terms within the next couple months, which means we need to do some restaffing of this Membership Board.

We’re looking for 5 Ubuntu Members who can participate in the 12:00 UTC meetings:

12:00 UTC, meets once a month, specific day to be discussed by the board upon addition of new members

And for 4 Members who can participate in the 22:00 meetings:

22:00 UTC, meets once a month, specific day to be discussed by the board upon addition of new members

We have the following requirements for nominees:

  • be an Ubuntu member (preferably for some time)
  • be confident that you can evaluate contributions to various parts of our community
  • be committed to attending the membership meetings
  • broad insight into the Ubuntu community at large is a plus

Additionally, those sitting on membership boards are current Ubuntu Members with a proven track record of activity in the community. They have shown themselves over time to be able to work well with others and display the positive aspects of the Ubuntu Code of Conduct. They should be people who can discern character and evaluate contribution quality without emotion while engaging in an interview/discussion that communicates interest, a welcoming atmosphere, and which is marked by humanity, gentleness, and kindness. Even when they must deny applications, they should do so in such a way that applicants walk away with a sense of hopefulness and a desire to return with a more complete application rather than feeling discouraged or hurt.

To nominate yourself or somebody else (please confirm they wish to accept the nomination and state you have done so), please send a mail to the membership boards mailing list (ubuntu-membership-boards at lists.ubuntu.com). You will want to include some information about yourself (or the applicant you are nominating), a launchpad profile link and which time slot is being applied for.

We will be accepting nominations through Friday April 5th at 12:00 UTC. All nominations will be forwarded to the Community Council who will make the final decision and announcement.

Thanks in advance to you and to the dedication everybody has put into their roles as board members.

Originally posted to the ubuntu-news-team mailing list by Elizabeth Krumbach on Fri Mar 22 19:34:45 UTC 2013

Catch up with the Community Council

By José Antonio Rey | Published: 2013-03-20

Following on from the last few weeks of discussions many of the Community Council have been approached to discuss various topics. While we regularly meet with many of the other boards and councils on a regularly scheduled basis, it’s not limited to just those representatives. We’d like to invite anyone who has any issues or concerns to always know we’re welcome to be contacted. The Community Council meets twice a month, the 1st and 3rd Thursday of the month in #ubuntu-meeting on freenode. Anyone is welcome to add items to our agenda.

We are also open to doing quick chats (IRC or verbal we have been known to jump onto a hangout with folks) with community members as needed if you reach out to us. Don’t forget you can also send us email at community-council@lists.ubuntu.com. We’re really a friendly bunch 🙂

Originally posted to the ubuntu-news-team mailing list on Wed Mar 20 09:34:43 UTC 2013 by Laura Czajkowski

Ubuntu Technical Board Looks at Shuttleworth’s Proposal for Release Management Methodology

By pleia2 | Published: 2013-03-19

In this article, the news team invited Rick Spencer, Vice President of Ubuntu Engineering, to comment on the decisions by the Ubuntu Technical Board and how they will impact users.

The Ubuntu Technical Board (TB) discussed Ubuntu Founder, Mark Shuttleworth’s proposal to tweak the release management methodology of Ubuntu releases in its 18 March meeting. Shuttleworth’s proposal was a follow up to Vice President of Ubuntu Engineering, Rick Spencer’s original proposal and also harvest the fruits of the discussion that followed.

The TB is now referring to the non-LTS releases as “standard” releases. This change is in response to feedback that the term “Interim Release” denotes an unimportant release, and recognizes that these releases are in fact, important to many people.

During this meeting the following votes occurred.

The first vote was very crisp: Reduce maintenance period for regular/standard (non-LTS) Ubuntu releases from 18 months to 9 months (starting with release TBD)

What does this mean for users?

This means that users of the standard/non-LTS releases will have three months after the *next* release to update. So, if you are a standard/non-LTS user expect to upgrade to the next release about every six months, with a three month grace period if you can’t upgrade for some reason.

Why is this change important?

This change is important to the Ubuntu Community because it means that there will be fewer stable/LTS releases being supported at any one time. These stable/LTS releases will be better supported and leave developers and other contributors with more energy to focus on designing and implementing the next big idea. As Ubuntu enters the age of convergent devices, its contributors will need all the energy they can get for that development.

The second vote was about the “when” and the TB was asked to vote on Implementation of the above change to the maintenance schedule effective in 13.04 release and later.

What does this mean for users?

This means that the TB voted that the 13.04 release will get nine months of support. There was discussion about applying the principle retroactively, back to the 12.10 release; however, the TB felt this was backing out a promise and they did not want to set such a precedent.

The third and final vote was about allowing users to easily “track the tip” of development.

What does this mean for users?

This is akin to providing what Rick Spencer had labelled a “rolling release”. The general idea being that a user could opt for continuous upgrades on what is essentially the development release. For example, if a user was running the development series and updating daily then when 13.04 became a standard/non-LTS release, that user wouldn’t have to to do anything to then start getting updates for the 13.10 release.

The TB voted to allow the development team to enable this capability of tracking the development release without intervention. However, the specific implementation questions yet to be determined include how to enable users to continuously track the development focus of Ubuntu without having to explicitly upgrade.

Summary

All votes were unanimous among all three members of the TB that were present.

Discussions that followed the vote was based on how to better support the LTS release with optional upgrades. For example, could someone backport Unity to the previous stable/LTS release so that LTS release users could get the improved experience, if they desired. This topic was moved to next TB meeting.

For more information on the Ubuntu TB Meetings please see: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TechnicalBoard

Rick Spencer, Vice President of Ubuntu Engineering

Changes in Ubuntu releases decided by the Ubuntu Technical Board

By pleia2 | Published: 2013-03-19

In yesterday’s meeting we covered two of the topics from Mark’s proposal to the Technical Board:

Reducing the length of support for our regular (non-LTS) releases

The rationale here is that it’s costing a lot of time to maintain all those releases for 18 months. It’s also causing a lot of load on the SRU team and on developers to ensure that upgrading from one release to the other won’t cause regressions due to fixes being SRUed only to a few releases.

The change in support length from 18 months to 9 months will reduce the number of releases we need to support in parallel while still allowing enough time for our users to upgrade to the next release.

This change will affect Ubuntu releases starting with 13.04, any older regular release will still be supported for 18 months and LTS releases will still be supported for 5 years.

This change was approved through two votes, the first about shortening the support length to 9 months and the second about doing it starting with 13.04. Both votes had all 3 attending Technical Board members’ approval and had general support by the other members from mailing-list discussions.

Enable users to continuously track the development focus of Ubuntu
without having to explicitly upgrade

This discussion was about making it easier for some of our users to keep their machine always on the current development release.

This has nothing to do with Rolling Releases and is purely about setting up some kind of meta-series on the archive mirrors that people can use instead of having to manually upgrade from one development release to the next.

There again, all 3 present members agreed with this proposal.

Other discussions

Outside of those two items, we also briefly discussed some changes to our update tool to allow our users to upgrade by more than a single release at a time.

In the current state of things we allow for upgrades from a release to the next or from an LTS release to the next LTS release.

The plan here is to change that, so that a user of Ubuntu 12.10 could directly update to Ubuntu 13.10 or 14.04 LTS.

This change should make the life of our users much easier and will ensure that we get to the next LTS with much more reliable and well tested upgrades.

The Technical Board didn’t feel that there would be anything to vote on at this time and leaves the implementation and testing of this to the various teams involved (Foundations, QA, Release).

The 3 items the Technical Board has voted on and accepted are considered as final. We do not expect to have to vote again on any of this and are just waiting on the implementation of those.

Stéphane Graber, on behalf of the Ubuntu Technical Board