Merlijn Sebrechts for Ubuntu Community Council 2024

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This post is my nomination for the Ubuntu Community Council 2024 elections. For more information, see Call for nominations: Ubuntu Community Council

Who am I?

My name is Merlijn Sebrechts. Throughout the past ~12 years, I’ve contributed to a lot of different parts of the Ubuntu ecosystem.

  • I’ve been part of the Ubuntu Community Council since 2022, where I worked on setting up community governance for the Ubuntu Matrix project, helped restart the LoCo Council, improved the community documentation, and a bunch of stuff I can’t (yet) talk about. For more info about some of the work I did, see A year in the Ubuntu Community Council
  • I’m one of the admins of Snapcrafters where I worked on automated publishing of snaps using GitHub Workflows and maintain a bunch of snap packages.
  • I contributed to the larger Snapcraft ecosystem by writing documentation, blog posts, and PR’s for snapcraft and snapd.
  • I helped kickstart the Ubuntu community theme initiative, although my biggest contribution there might have been suggesting to call it “Yaru”.
  • I used to be very active in the Juju community, writing a bunch of Big Data Charms and documentation. I also helped design the 2.0 version of the charms.reactive framework and wrote a paper about how cool it is. Had the great pleasure of being appreciated by Jorge Castro and can confirm he is not a Chinese botnet.
  • I answered a bunch of questions on AskUbuntu.

During my day job, I teach software engineering courses at Ghent University and do research at imec in Belgium.

Why do I want to be re-elected?

I’d like to continue my work to improve the Ubuntu community and improve the relationship between Canonical and the rest of the community.

  • The Ubuntu Forum software is aging and the community is trying to figure out how to go forward. I’d like to help them find a new home and build bridges to the rest of the Ubuntu community.
  • I want to continue working on improving and clarifying the relationship between Canonical and the rest of the community.
  • I want to make our community more accessible to new people, and to help more volunteers grow into leadership positions.
  • I’d like to figure out how to better support the current leaders of our community to help them feel less overwhelmed and to reduce burnout.

One of the ways I’d like to achieve these things is to involve the community itself more, specifically by organizing “hack the community” workshops. The first one will happen at the Ubuntu Summit 2024.

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