This post is intended to be a nomination to the Community Council. For more information about the CC, please visit this page.
Who am I?
'ello, folks! My name is Jose Antonio Rey. I have been part of the Ubuntu community since 2011, and got my membership late the same year. I have been involved in different areas, including:
- A strong focus on advocacy:
- I have been to hundreds of community events throughout the years, providing talks and standing in booths. I have been able to demo Ubuntu and provide technical assistance to attendees, developing the relationship they had with their respective local communities.
- Organizing UbuCon Latin America for three consecutive years (2015, 2016, and 2017). This fostered collaboration in the Latin American community. During this period of time, we were able to bring speakers from all over the world, helping raise the bar for community-organized conferences.
- Bootstrapped the Ubuntu on Air! YouTube channel. This was a great window of visibility to the work that the Ubuntu community was performing, as well as an opportunity to engage a new target audience. We did not have any audiovisual content until that moment!
- Technical contributions:
- I was very focused on working with the Juju community. During my time, I was the only community Charmer (Juju Charm maintainer). Juju was heavily maintained by Canonical, which provided me an opportunity to learn more about the in and outs of how to collaborate with them in different levels.
- I also assisted in patching the Summit platform, which was an auto-scheduling platform for the Ubuntu Developer Summit. We even brought it to support virtual events!
- Community governance:
- I have been part of the LoCo Council, helping bring together initiatives to empower Local Communities get visibility and plan more complex events, as well as participate in bigger community events
- I am currently serving in the Community Council, having helped with new initiatives behind the scenes as well as resolving internal disputes
- Other contributions:
- I am part of the Ubuntu News team, helping collect relevant news regarding the Ubuntu Community. These are published by a great set of volunteers in the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter (kudos!)
- I was also part of the Classroom team, helping set up classes in IRC. We had four main yearly events, where we hosted a series of classes to help update the community.
- I was a part of the Ubuntu Beginners team, which helped shape the community at the level we are right now.
- I am part of the author team of the Official Ubuntu Book, both 8th and 9th editions. This was a great way to advocate Ubuntu from both a technical and non-technical perspective.
On my day-to-day, I am a jack of all trades. While I am currently open to work, I have worked as a Support Manager, Support Engineer, Project Manager, and have experience in multiple other surrounding areas due to my collaborative nature.
Why do I want to be re-elected?
My main focus is to enable the community to perform at the level that we can. There are several resources available to us that we are still not leveraging. In short, I want to:
- Identify what is missing, and how we can fill the gaps.
- Enable people to lead. I am certain that we have great leaders in our community, and we need to empower them to perform and help others grow.
- I want to continue enabling the collaboration between Canonical and the community. I have met many people throughout the years, and this can help create that bridge.
- I want to continue identifying conflict and resolving it. Learning from conflict and disagreements is key for improving what we currently have. If we don’t resolve it, it can boil down and create further conflict.
- I want to help regain the visibility of the work that great community members are doing. This helps motivate others to do great work as well!
- I want to have an open door. I want others to reach out when they need help, and to learn and improve from those experiences.
- I want to enable transparency. While there is a lot of work that needs to happen behind the scenes, transparency is key for helping others understand the point of the road that we are currently in. If we don’t know where we are, we can’t understand where we need to go and what we need to get there.
I want to have an open and welcoming community. I want people who are enthusiastic to join. I want to have a place where you can learn and teach. I believe that we can achieve this with some focus and a lot of willingness.
If you need to reach out for questions, feel free to reply here or email me at jose@ubuntu.com. In the meantime, let’s keep on working!