We’re looking for motivated people that want to join the Ubuntu Community Council!
The Community Council is the highest governance body of the Ubuntu project. They handle Code of Conduct violations, mediate conflict, and oversee Ubuntu’s governance structures.
We are looking for seven motivated council members.
The Ubuntu project is in constant flux. The advent of new communication platforms, new projects under our umbrella, and the ever-growing popularity of the project requires our community to evolve. We need to make sure Ubuntu is set to tackle the challenges of the next years. It needs a strong and active community council to guide the project forwards.
You show humanity, gentleness and kindness in your communication.
You create a welcoming atmosphere.
You want to invest time in the next two years to handle CoC violations, mediate conflict and help improve the Ubuntu community’s governance structures.
You are willing to regularly meet with the other council members
Why you should apply
You will be able to play a significant role in building the future of the Ubuntu community.
You will be able to work directly with the Canonical Community Team to improve how our community works and to make it a more welcoming place.
You will get wide recognition of your contributions with a high-profile, elected position.
How to apply
You can apply by replying to this post with your self-nomination. In this message, 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 this council. 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 think will be a great fit for the Community Council!
Election Process
Saturday September 5th, Call for nomination gets published
Saturday, September 26th, at 23:59 AoE: Call for nomination closes
In the period between the Call for nominations closing and the election opening, two things will happen in parallel.
The Community Council will review the submissions and submit them to Mark Shuttleworth for shortlisting. During this period, if an Ubuntu member has significant concerns about a candidate, they should send an email to community-council@lists.ubuntu.com. This will reach both the Community Council and Mark. They will review these concerns and Mark will take them into account during the shortlisting.
At the same time, we’ll set up an asynchronous “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) on Discourse with the candidates. Existing Ubuntu Members can submit questions, and candidates can respond to them asynchronously. This AMA will be moderated to ensure questions remain civil, on-topic, and focused on policy. Attacks against individuals will not be allowed. Significant concerns about individuals should be sent to the Community Council instead.
Saturday October 10th: shortlist gets announced and voting starts
It’s extremely variable, sometimes nothing for weeks and then sometimes huge portions of each day. 1-2 hours per week sounds like a reasonable ballpark estimate on average but this is misleading because of how punctuated the time requirements are.
Note that only Ubuntu Members are eligible to nominate themselves for the Ubuntu Community Council elections. @dmxplx I may simply be blind, but I couldn’t find your Launchpad account or your name in the primary list of Ubuntu Members at Members : “Ubuntu Members” team. Do you go by a different username on Launchpad, or are you a member of a sub-team of the primary Ubuntu Members team?
For those in this thread who aren’t sure what “Ubuntu Member” means, more details can be seen at Ubuntu Membership | Ubuntu.
I would like to raise a couple of procedural points regarding the current election timeline:
The Application Deadline: The official announcment call for nominations explicitly closed on Saturday, September 26th at 23:59 UTC. However, the final nomination was posted exactly 5 hours and 55 minutes after the deadline had passed. Was this deadline silently extended behind the scenes without a public announcement?
Shortlist Eligibility: Given that the submission window is formally closed and we have transitioned into the evaluation phase, will late submissions still be processed and added to the candidate shortlist despite missing the published timeline?
To protect the fairness, transparency, and equity of our community governance, it would be greatly appreciated if someone could clarify how strict cutoff times are enforced for all participants.
I think I made a mistake in writing the timeline. Given our community spans the globe, my intentions where to set the deadline at the end of Saturday 2026-09-26 anywhere on earth (AoE).
This is apparently not 23:59 UTC. I apologize for the confusion. Apparently I’ve communicated multiple timelines to different people, as I’ve also explicitly said “AoE” to some people.
To make this as fair as possible, I propose we take the latest of these deadlines (AoE) and use that as the cutoff deadline. That also makes it more fair to people living in more western parts of the globe.
Thank you for the transparent explanation and for prioritizing equity across global time zones.
Adopting the Anywhere on Earth (AoE) standard is a fair solution to account for the conflicting timelines communicated.
To make sure this transition is seamless and unambiguous for everyone, could we explicitly post a quick update clarifying that the final cutoff is today, Sunday, September 27th, at 12:00 UTC (the conclusion of Saturday AoE)?
Once that timestamp hits, locking the submission thread and officially announcing the transition to the evaluation phase will give the community complete clarity and wrap this up cleanly.
