Who am I?
My name is Heather Ellsworth and I’ve been visible in the Ubuntu ecosystem for about 5 years, and a lurker for much longer. I worked for Canonical from 2019-2023 and that launched my involvement with contributions to the Ubuntu desktop. Since leaving Canonical, I have not stopped my interest or engagement but rather tried to champion the snap cause from outside the Canonical walls.
In my day job, I am the Sr. Developer Relations Engineer at Mozilla Thunderbird (MZLA), where I work to connect contributors to the relevant folks on the team through documentation improvements, blog posts, diving into development and providing How-Tos based on my experiences.
Since my time in the Ubuntu community, here are some of my contributions:
- Learned how to create snaps, maintain them, and help teach that to newbies in a workshop that has been given several times by myself and others.
- Maintained many GNOME snaps relevant to the Ubuntu desktop.
- I ran an Ubuntu desktop team Indaba monthly youtube show for about 2 years. This put human faces on the efforts important to the Ubuntu desktop as well as highlighting community contributors for their efforts.
- Since joining Mozilla Thunderbird (MZLA), I’ve championed bringing Thunderbird to a first class citizen in their eyes and co-owning it’s maintenance with Canonical.
Why do I want to be elected?
I enjoy connecting community members with projects to facilitate new contributions. If I were elected to the Ubuntu Community Council, I would:
- Look for ways through documentation or other media to promote new contributions. Ancient wiki pages are for the past and we need a way forward to provide the information users and developers need in a fast and discoverable way.
- Advocate for community events to engage a wider audience. Sometimes it’s hard to see who a community is missing in their reach and new approaches should be considered to show new folks this welcoming community.
- Consider shared struggles with the Mozilla Thunderbird community and suggest ideas from past successes. One of the beauties of open source is supporting each other in our mutual efforts to promote the wider adoption of free software.
Thank you for considering me for this council!
