Who am I?
My name is Jason C. Nucciarone, and I am one of the “Not so Ancient Elders” of the Ubuntu High-Performance Computing Community team. By day I am an HPC engineer at Canonical working on Charmed HPC, and by night I work on various things around the Ubuntu Community such as chairing the Ubuntu Summit, planning UbuCon’s, writing abstract proposals for various conferences, and attending conferences to spread awareness about our community and the open source projects under our umbrella (and promote using Ubuntu for HPC). I’m also involved with the Snapcrafters and a moderator for the Snapcraft Forum.
Outside of tech, I like to travel, go camping, and party.
Why do I want to join the Community Council?
I have multiple reasons for why I want to join the Community Council for a two year term:
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Communication platforms modernization
- I think we’ve made leaps and strides over the past year by adopting Matrix as an official communications platform and electing a Matrix Council. I believe that this has greatly improved the accessibility of the community. I’d like to purse how we can further modernize how we communicate such as looking at the community mailing lists and possibly pursuing other avenues for forum-like, asynchronous communication.
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Fishing outside the pond
- I want to figure out how to reach people that are “outside our circle of friends.” E.g. reach people that don’t go - or are unable to go - to the big FOSS events, aren’t necessarily desktop-focused, or just aren’t aware of the wider open source community, and connect them with opportunities in the Ubuntu Community. I want to make it easier to onboard new contributors so that veteran community members are less likely to become burned out, or feel like they can’t take a break.
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Casting a wider net
- I want to pursue expanding the community into areas where we traditionally haven’t had strong representation, and reinforce where we currently have representation. We already started this with Ubuntu HPC and Rocks, and we have new/reactivating LoCos popping up frequently now. I’d like to work with the respective councils to understand how we can create a shared set of resources such as conference materials, web hosting, file storage, funding, etc so that there’s less duplication of effort between community teams, and less pressure is put upon individual volunteers. Also, I want to make it easier for teams to have sustainable collaboration so that if someone decides to leave (or take a temporary leave of absence), it is not a huge task for others to pick up from where they left off.
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Meeting the community where they are
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This is partially based off of the previous bullet, but I want to explore how we can sustainably fund - or help secure funding for - smaller, regional Ubuntu Community events. As a somewhat frequent flyer (I fly all the airlines so they all equally don’t care), I am well aware that air travel costs quite a bit and is out of budget for many people (unless you willing to your self-respect to ultra low cost carries), and at least if you live the USA, travel by rail isn’t really an option either. And don’t get me started on hotels and all the hidden taxes and fees.
I want to prioritize supporting smaller events that may not cast a wide net geographically, but still allow people to have in-person engagement with the Ubuntu Community, and talk about things that they are passionate about, and how they can be sustainable funded through their own efforts.
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Canonical
Community- I currently enjoy a good relationship with several Canonical teams and the Canonical Community Team. I want to help be a bridge between Canonical and the Community, and help facilitate communication between groups & teams.
This is part of my nomination for the upcoming Community Council election at the end of September.