Call for nominations: 2024 Ubuntu Technical Board

Announcements
, ,
1

We’re looking for motivated people that want to join the Ubuntu Technical Board!

The Ubuntu Technical Board is responsible for the technical direction of Ubuntu. It makes decisions on package selection, packaging policy, installation systems and processes, kernel, X server, display management, library versions, and dependencies. The board works with relevant teams to establish a consensus on the right path to take, especially where diverse elements of Ubuntu cannot find consensus on shared components.

You can find more information about the Technical Board at https://ubuntu.com/community/governance/technical-board

Who can apply

The eligibility requirements are

  • Be an Ubuntu Core Developer
  • Be available during typical meeting hours, see TechnicalBoardAgenda - Ubuntu Wiki
  • Insight into the Ubuntu Development process, architecture, and technical culture

The Technical Board usually meets twice a month in IRC and has discussions on its mailing list. They are current Ubuntu Core Developers 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 judge 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.

How to apply

You can apply by sending your self-nomination to community-council@lists.ubuntu.com. In that email, please include the following.

  • Your name
  • Your Launchpad ID
  • Your employer (if disclosure is permitted)
  • A link to a page describing who you are, and explaining why you want to join the board. This can be a Discourse post, a page on your personal website, or your page in the Ubuntu Wiki.

Nominations are now open and will close according to the timeline below. Please do not hesitate to share this post with anyone you will be a great fit for the Technical Board!

Election Timeline

  • Wednesday 2024-12-04, 23:59 UTC Call for nomination closes.
    • After this, the Community Council will review the submissions, submit them to Mark Shuttleworth for shortlisting, and set up the vote based on Mark’s shortlist.
  • Tuesday 2024-12-17 at 20:00 UTC: Realtime AMA with all shortlisted candidates during the TB meeting
  • Sunday 2025-01-05: Voting starts (Ubuntu Development team is eligible to vote)
  • Sunday 2025-01-19, 23:59 UTC: Voting ends

On behalf of the Community Council,
Merlijn Sebrechts

3 Likes
3

Thanks for posting this @merlijn-sebrechts - it seems SSO is down for the wiki so I am adding a reply to this post as the ‘page describing who you are etc’ part of the process to apply for reelection to the TB.

I’m Alex Murray (alexmurray on Launchpad/amurray on IRC) and have been a part of the Ubuntu community as a long-time user and enthusiast since back in 2006. In 2018 I was privileged to join Canonical as the Ubuntu Security Tech Lead and have worked as part of that amazing team ever since. I have a passion for making Ubuntu as secure and usable out-of-the-box whilst also ensuring Canonical has a great relationship with our community. In 2022 I was appointed to the Ubuntu Technical Board and have served the community in that role for the past 2 years.

I started and am still hosting the Ubuntu Security Podcast (now every 2 weeks) for the last 6 years as a way to evangelise the awesome work of the Ubuntu Security team and the various security aspects of Ubuntu.

I am also involved with security aspects of snapd and as one of the snap store reviewers to help guide snap publishers to make sure their snaps can work as smoothly as possible for their users.

Finally, I’ve been a core-dev for 3 and a half years now as well. I have a strong passion for Ubuntu and our community, and was part of the core-dev Office Hours booth at the recent Ubuntu Summit in the Hague. This was a great chance to both get to meet other Ubuntu developers from the community IRL but also to help resolve both various technical issues and provide guidance on ways to better approach and navigate Ubuntu development for unfamiliar community members.

I would be honoured to have the privilege of serving the community again as part of the Ubuntu Technical Board for the next 2 years if so chosen.

Thanks for your consideration.

7 Likes
4

I’m going to follow Alex’s lead here and post mine as a reply to to keep things organized :smiley:

I’m Julian (juliank on Launchpad, IRC), many may primarily recognize me as the maintainer of APT. I have been a part of the Ubuntu and Debian communities since about 2006, an Ubuntu Member since 2007 (17 years now, wow, half of my life).

My interest in Ubuntu started in 2006 from the Debian side, when I worked with @mvo on various package management stuff while still in school, such as APT, python-apt, gnome-app-install, software-center, and so on. I was working on packaging the Ubuntu tools for Debian primarily.

In 2015 I took over as the primary apt maintainer from mvo, and started upstream branches for Ubuntu LTS releases, providing updates for the stable releases, and 1 year later, in 2016, I became a Core Developer.

At the start of 2018 I joined Canonical in the Ubuntu Foundations team. Since then I have of course been significantly more active in Ubuntu than before. One of the first things I did when I joined was improve the merge-o-matic to add dynamic filtering via JavaScript to be able to easily search for my past merges and team merges - good memories. These days I’m in the Foundations’ system squad, which takes care of the core distro packaging, and of course continue to maintain APT and other pieces of the package management stack.

Due to my exposure to all sorts of weird issues as APT maintainer, I have an unusually strong and deep knowledge of packaging issues, but it doesn’t end there. I also was one of two main maintainers of autopkgtest.ubuntu.com with @laney before the QA team was around, did related work in britney and I filled the gap that @cyphermox left on boot loader maintenance, a sometimes incredibly complex field, and I also know our image building tools reasonably well. Sometimes I dabble a bit in Launchpad source code and repeatedly have worked with the Launchpad team on projects. As a Debian developer specifically I am also well trained in licensing questions, and I have often engaged with upstreams on licensing problems.

During this year’s time_t transition I had to temporarily rewrite parts of our tooling in a simplified manner to track the progress of the transition, and at the same time, I was working on implementing stronger cryptography in APT, and also executed the transition to usrmerge for the essential package set succesfully ahead of (and in collaboration with) Debian. I also took over germinate maintenance from @cjwatson, a critical piece of technology that powers our seeding of packages in main.

I probably forgot some places I touched!

I think this breadth and depth of experience and the expertise that I gained in it would make an excellent addition to the Technical Board, and I would be honored to have your vote.

6 Likes
5

Hey there. I’m going to follow Alex’s and Julian’s leads and also post on discourse.

I’m Sebastien Bacher (seb128), member of the Ubuntu Desktop Team and working for Canonical since 2004. I’m also an Ubuntu Archive members since 2007, was member of the DMB between 2022 and 2024 and I’ve been member of the Ubuntu Technical Board for the last 2 years.

While my focus is usually on the Desktop set I also strongly care about the rest Ubuntu and try to help unblocking things are the archive level and for flavors when possible.

Through the years I had the opportunity to contribute to a range of projects in Ubuntu and to acquire a solid technical understanding of the distribution. I’m also actively following/participating on IRC/Matrix/Discourse/Mailing lists/code reviews and sponsoring/translations/etc which gives me a good perspective on the state of the Ubuntu community and userbase.

At Canonical I’m advocating whenever possible for us to have our discussions in the open, to involve the community in our plans and to work upstream.
I would love to see more community members on the board. Let’s see if that’s happening during that cycle, but if not I will do my best to be a voice representing the community interests on the board.

I think I’ve been doing a decent job during my previous 2 years on the board. At least I was present and active in most of the meetings, took my share of actions and followed on most of those (I still have some work to do with the archive and release team on documenting their membership process).

I would be honored to keep serving on the Ubuntu Technical Board for the next 2 years if you vote for me.

Thanks,

4 Likes
6

I’m Robie Basak (IRC: rbasak; Launchpad: racb). I’d also like to stand again for the Technical Board.

I’ve been using GNU/Linux since the late nineties, professionally as a sysadmin since 2001, Ubuntu as a power user/developer since about 2005, and have been working on Ubuntu itself since I joined Canonical in 2011. My first sponsored upload to Ubuntu was in 2011, I became an uploader in 2013, and a Core Dev in 2014. I’ve served on the DMB and SRU teams since 2016, and the Technical Board since 2020. I’m also a Debian Developer since 2018.

I’ll be leaving Canonical at the end of January. I don’t expect to be working full time on Ubuntu itself any more, but I will continue to be involved. If I am re-elected, I will continue this role in a personal capacity from February.

Since I’ve been around a while you can judge me on my past performance. You will have seen that I’m active. I don’t just show up to vote; when I think something needs fixing, I start a discussion in the appropriate public forum, achieve consensus, and fix it as appropriate according to that consensus. I don’t mind if the consensus didn’t match my original opinion. I don’t avoid difficult or contentious topics. The harder problems need much more time and perseverance to solve, and I happily tackle these too.

To help you measure my past performance, here’s my platform from 2020 and from 2022. My opinions from those previous platforms still stand.

Some things I’m proud to have achieved recently:

  • The policy on third party software sources, which brings clarity to users and sets expectations on how snaps should interact with apt and the Ubuntu (deb) archive, default Ubuntu installations, and build provenance.
  • The new SRU documentation which is part of my bigger effort to properly fix the common mismatch in expectations between uploaders and the SRU team.
  • Like Alex I also helped staff the core dev office hours booth at the Summit, along with Lena and others. This led to an interview on Ask Noah, representing the Technical Board. I think I represented Ubuntu well there, but please judge for yourself!

Thank you for considering me!

2 Likes
7

Hi,

I am Michael Hudson-Doyle, mwhudson on IRC / Launchpad / etc, an Ubuntu Core developer, Debian Developer and member of the Ubuntu Foundations team at Canonical.

My history with Ubuntu only really goes back to when I started at Canonical, but as that was in 2007 it’s been a while now. I have worked on a number of different teams and projects since then, including Launchpad, various things for Linaro and then the Ubuntu Server team before finding my “forever home” in Foundations in 2016.

Over that time I’ve worked on the codehosting support in Launchpad, shared library support in Go, maintained glibc, rustc, took subiquity from a prototype to the default server installer, helped with several Python transitions and lots of other things. I know more about the image build pipeline for Ubuntu images than any one person should.

One slow burn project I’m particularly proud of was the effort to streamline and simplify the process by which the official Ubuntu images in the docker hub are built and published, which involved not only learning a lot about how the process worked but also a lot of talking and education.

Other recent projects have involved ways to exploit modern hardware more efficiently, including a rebuild of Ubuntu with -march=x86-64-v3 as default.

I think that one of my strengths as a developer and engineer is being able to look beyond the immediate issues and try to target fixes at the right level. If elected to the tech board, I hope to use this ability to help align Ubuntu’s processes with its needs as the computing landscape shifts and turns.

Cheers,

mwh

1 Like
8

Hello,

I am Gianfranco Costamagna, locutusofborg on IRC, costamagnagianfranco on Launchpad.
I am Ubuntu Core Developer since 2016, MOTU since 2015, and also Debian Developer since 2014.

I have been the person who did upload the most number of packages for various Ubuntu releases http://people.ubuntuwire.org/~stefanor/ubuntu-activity/
And I still contribute a lot, by maintaining virtualbox/haskell/sdl/libpng and other hundred of libraries, helping to make them migrate, fixing bugs and autopkgtests.

In my dailyjob I work with Linux in embedded world, bringing my competences in Ubuntu and vice-versa.

As an engineer, I like to simplify things, to fix bugs and try to understand how to change the architecture in case the fix is showing some structural issues in a package. I like no-delta between Debian and Ubuntu, I sponsor only after a Debian bug has been opened in case the bug is not Ubuntu-only, and I care to send patches upstream and get them integrated.

In the last years I worked a lot on riscv64 and loong64 bring up (this is the current port I’m fixing in Debian at the moment), helping to reach an archive success build rate above 96%

Cheers,

Gianfranco

1 Like
9

Hi everyone!

An update from the CC: Now that the nominations for the Technical Board are in, we would like to extend the voting cycle with one month, to allow for some discussion and Q&A with the many candidates.

We have many more candidates than positions, so we think it’s good if each candidate gets a little bit more time to explain their vision and priorities.

With this, the new timeline for TB elections becomes the following:

  • Tuesday 2024-12-17 at 20:00 UTC: Realtime AMA with all shortlisted candidates during the TB meeting
  • Sunday 2025-01-05: Voting starts (Ubuntu Development team is eligible to vote)
  • Sunday 2025-01-19, 23:59 UTC: Voting ends

Note: timeline is slightly delayed at the moment, I’ll update it when I know more.

We will publish the shortlist of candidates shortly.

2 Likes