I’m happy to announce that the Ubuntu Communications Council is now officially formed!
The communications council oversees all communications platforms of our community. This includes Matrix, IRC, Discourse, and the Wiki.
Why was this council created?
This council is a merger of old platform-specific councils like the IRC Council, Matrix Council, and Forums Council. This merger has multiple goals.
- More cohesion and shared knowledge: With the Matrix Council, we’ve seen how useful it is to have people from both the IRC and Matrix sides work together. It has really helped reduce the “rivalry” between platforms and the Matrix side learned a lot from the IRC side. It improved the speed of our decisions and we were better able to take the concerns from the IRC side into account. It also helped introduce senior people from the IRC side to the Matrix side.
- More community governance: Some of our platforms, such as Discourse, currently don’t have councils. As a result, Canonical basically unilaterally decides what happens on those platforms. Apart from the lack of community involvement, this is also an awkward position for Canonical to be in. Canonical employees don’t want to make unilateral decisions about core platforms, but they also don’t have an easy way to involve the community in decisions. Other platforms, like IRC and the Forum, had councils, but over the years felt less and less part of Ubuntu and haven’t had elections in a long time.
- Less overhead: With the Matrix Council, we’ve seen how difficult it is to find enough capable people willing to join the Council. This seems to be a problem in a lot of other places too, such as the membership board. We simply have too many governance bodies and too few people to run them. Some people feel pressured to join councils simply to prop up the numbers, even though they don’t have enough time to invest. Moreover, some of our platforms don’t have councils, so we would actually need more councils if we want more community governance. Merging similar councils is a great way to solve this problem.
- More room for experimentation: When the Matrix initiative started, there was a lot of interest, but also a lot of hesitation, because it wasn’t clear who had the authority to kick-off such an initiative. When you only have councils for specific platforms, it’s really hard to try out a different platform because it’s not clear who has the authority to do that. With a Communications Council, it’s clear who has the authority, so it’s easier to just try out something for a bit and reflect.
- Enabling an overarching strategy: With a Communications Council, the members can think about how all the platforms fit together into an overarching communication strategy. This will allow us to create a much better experience than what we have today with the informal coordination attempts between councils.
Who is on it?
The current makeup of the communications council is temporary in order to get everything started. It contains representatives of every communication platform, to ensure a good handover.
More specifically, it has representatives of IRC, Matrix, Discourse, Ubuntu Forums, and Ubuntu Hideout. Although Ubuntu Hideout is not an official communications platform, it is still very useful to have their expertise and representation in the communications council.
The council is furthermore supported by the Community Council and the Canonical Community Team to help bootstrap processes and goals. The current term is for one year, after which we’ll run elections to select the next members.
You can find the current council members in the communications-council team on Launchpad.
What will they work on?
The current term is focussed on a couple of things.
- Handing over responsibilities from official platform-specific councils to the communications council, and winding down the platform-specific councils.
- Transitioning Ubuntu Forums to Discourse and merging Forum Membership with Ubuntu Membership
- Handling Matrix-IRC bridging.
- Transitioning from the Ubuntu Wikis to Discourse.
- Investigating whether some mailing lists can transition to Discourse.
This is a lot of work and will probably not be finished in the first year, but the most important current responsibility is performing the handover from platform-specific councils.
More information
See the Ubuntu Communications Council docs for more info.