Who am I?
My name is Jason C. Nucciarone, and I am one of the “Not so Ancient Elders“ of Ubuntu’s High-Performance Computing subcommunity. Never heard of High-Performance Computing? If so, check out our governance page on the Ubuntu Community website! High-Performance Computing Team | Ubuntu. We meet every Wednesday on Jitsi.
My first Ubuntu release was Xenial Xersus (16.04) in 2016 when I started teaching myself programming with Coding for Dummies. I still remember setting up an early build of WSL 1 and wondering why Python’s multiprocessing module wasn’t working in “Bash on Windows“. A couple years later, I started working at my university’s HPC center as a research support consultant, eventually becoming a software engineer. Shortly after that, I joined Canonical through its Graduate Software Engineer program, so I’ve been working on the HPC team at Canonical for about 4 and a half years now. Over that time, I had the pleasure of starting the HPC community along with some other folks from around the Ubuntu Community, organizing multiple UbuCon’s and Ubuntu Summits, and representing Ubuntu at several external conferences such as OpenInfra, DevConf, GOOD, and Supercomputing (SC).
Some folks also like to joke that I’m the unofficial fourth member of the Canonical Community Team (I’ll let @aaronprisk and @ilvipero confirm that). I’ve helped them with several initiatives such as organizing UbuCon’s and the Ubuntu Summit, being the early beta-tester of our community’s migration to Matrix from IRC, and roasting Aaron for writing the prototype of the new community portal (ubuntu.com/community) in PHP. I’m also active in several parts of our community such as being one of the moderators for this Discourse forum, being a moderator for the Snapcraft forum, and lurking in various Ubuntu Circle spaces.
Why do I want to join the community council
Some of my reasons are copied/paraphrased from my Ubuntu Community Council self-nomination in 2024, however, these are still things I greatly believe in the community and have actively worked on since 2024!
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Expanding the Community
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I want to continue reaching people that are “outside our circle of friends.” For example, 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 whether through that’s through GitHub issues or monthly workshops. 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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I also want to continue pursuing the expansion of the community into areas where we traditionally haven’t had strong representation, and reinforce where we currently have representation. We already started this with the HPC and Rocks communities, and we have new/reactivating Ubuntu Circles 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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Create more pathways to Ubuntu Membership
- I want to grow the types of contributions that qualify for Ubuntu Membership such as rewarding Ubuntu Discourse users who consistently provide accepted solutions to other users, or active contributors to Ubuntu-adjacent projects on GitHub like Inference Snaps, Workshop SDKs, or widely-used open source desktop applications.
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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 am still well aware that air travel costs quite a bit and is out of budget for many people (rip Spirit and Play Airlines), 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. At least there’s a second Pennsylvanian line that runs to New York City now…
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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Accessible Governance
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There’s more and more people (and bots) on the internet, so it’s really easy for things to blow up on social media quickly. Our existing governance teams (Discourse Moderators, Communications Council, Flavou?r Leads, etc.) already do an excellent job running the day-to-day of the Ubuntu Community, so I want to ensure that they have the support and tools they need to effectively respond to spam, crises, chaos, you name it. Whether that’s through communications training or just having someone to ask advice from, I want to ensure they have it.
Outside of supporting our existing community leaders, I also want to ensure that the wider community has easy access to community governance through timely responses to emails, AMA livestreams (I had fun doing an AMA for the Summit in the Hague), and being active in community spaces on Matrix.
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Canonical
Community- I still (and 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 and teams.