This post is my nomination for the Ubuntu Community Council 2026 elections. For more information, see Call for nominations: 2026 Ubuntu Community Council
Who am I?
My name is Merlijn Sebrechts. Throughout the past ~14 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
- Improving how our community communicates
- Setting up the Ubuntu Communications Council to replace the platform-specific councils
- Adopting Matrix
- Moving the Ubuntu Forums community to Discourse
- Improving Ubuntu Community Documentation
- Improving Ubuntu’s community governance structures
- Helping create the “Flavor Spec” as the contract between Canonical and Ubuntu flavors
- Helping to restart the LoCo Council & the Kubuntu Council
- Helping to setup official governance for parts of Ubuntu that don’t have them yet
- Helping to bring related communities such as Ubuntu Touch closer
- Handle Code of Conduct matters
- Defining a formal Code of Conduct Enfocement Process and writing guidance about
- Handling many confidential code of conduct matters, and helping individual teams with their CoC enforcement.
- For more info about some of the work I did, see A year in the Ubuntu Community Council
- Improving how our community communicates
- 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. However, I’ve winded down my direct involvement to focus more on community governance matters.
- I contributed to the larger Snapcraft ecosystem by writing documentation, blog posts, and PR’s for
snapcraftandsnapd. - 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.reactiveframework 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. I share a home with two lovely cats and an amazing wife.
Why do I want to be re-elected?
I’d like to continue my work to improve Ubuntu’s community governance and improve the relationship between Canonical and the rest of the community.
Looking back at the past two years, I’m happy with the progress we’ve made, but there is still a lot of work ahead. Many of the initiatives I’ve supported have not yet concluded. Working on a community the scale of Ubuntu is slow work, but it is slowly progressing.
- I want to continue working on improving and clarifying the relationship between Canonical and the rest of the community.
- Finish and ratify the Flavor Spec, so that the relationship between Flavors and Canonical is clear and codified.
- Set up community governance structures for parts of the project that lack them, such as the Snap ecosystem.
- I want to grow the Ubuntu Community beyond the traditional Operating System.
- Bringing the Ubuntu Touch community closer to the project
- Support the creation of community-led projects investigating unusual and innovative parts of Linux such as immutable operating systems and confidential computing.
- I want to make our community more accessible to new people, help volunteers grow into leadership positions, and support leaders so they’re less overwhelmed and less prone to burnout.
- Defining a clear path for a community member to grow, and supporting team initiatives to help newcomers.