This is where we discuss about the role of the Council. You are welcome to cross post from this thread.
My proposal:
- Comply and give mechanisms to ensure the Code of Conduct is followed by all Ubuntu members.
- Have a close relationship with the LoCo Council, the community manager and the community in general to be informed and fulfill the needs the community may have.
- Have the ability to delegate some work in other voluntiers and assign roles in the community. For example: secretary, recruiter, messenger, community manager (if not provided by Canonical), LoCo Council, etc.
- Have a secretary to inform everyone about the activities and curret projects ongoing by the community council.
- Organize meetings in which every LoCo council and Canonical employee can participate.
- Have an effective mechanism to kick members out of the council if they can’t keep a minimum of participation.
- Stablish what is the minimum of participation.
- Investigate what are the needs of the community and how to make it grow bigger and stronger. Also identify his weaknesses and sustain his strengths. Then apply these findings for that propouse.
- Have the ability to create new projects that benefit the community.
- Have the ability of close projects that don’t comply the CoC or go against the interests of the community in general.
Great first start @Rodhos! I’ll comment on each proposal:
This already occurs. I dealt with several cases in my tenure on the CC. Of course, we had participation at those times, so we need a way to make sure that the CC itself complies with the CoC, including stepping down gracefully. As I said in the other thread, I think clearly defined roles are necessary here. Setting expectations goes a long way. Right now, I would say there’s almost no clearly defined role except for ensuring the CoC is followed. If that’s all CC is, it’s not going to do much to keep our community vibrant and growing.
I think what might benefit here is actually having regular reports or regular meetings with one another. One of the best examples we have is the Membership Board, that writes to the CC every time a new member is added. Even then, it’s not really sufficient.
The idea of delegation has been a part of our community structure for a long time. I’m sure that, should additional roles be needed, it would be relatively simple to discuss and implement as there is a lot of precedent already. And as far as getting small bits of work done, such as who is going to contact someone to follow up on some piece of business, it’s always been the case on every board I’ve been on (Community Council, LoCo Council, Membership Board, Lubuntu Council) that it’s just figured out amongst members present.
I don’t feel too strongly about this, but I don’t necessarily think we should have particular appointments within each council or board. There certainly should be responsibility, but I see it as something the whole council should be responsible for rather than lumping it on one person.
As it stands all meetings that boards and councils have (except those that involve the most sensitive of issues) been entirely public on IRC. Did you mean something else?
There should be a stipulation to the nomination/voting process to deal with a member that has a truncated term, either due to being removed or stepping down. Maybe it could be as simple as accepting the next highest ranked nominee from the last vote?
This is going to be the hardest of things. Perhaps the best thing to do is to say that they should at least be involved in every vote. Again, unless excused, but if excuses become the norm, then we have a problem, too. To be fair, voting is a relatively simple process if you have the information at hand.
I believe this is an ongoing work that will constantly need attention in order to maintain the community. I believe this is even more important than upholding the CoC itself. In all actuality, the CoC is a project of that very goal.
I know you were brainstorming and so there may not be anything concrete, but what were you thinking about here or what inspired these thoughts? Examples?
Yep I was brainstorming. Nothing concrete so we can give it shape.
I thought as someone writing here a small report but you are right. Every member should report what he is doing. Just don’t lose the general vision and the objectives of the team.
I think in a party to meet everyone and make friends. Build relationships and community. Getting closer. 
For example, helping renew the Wiki or creating more platforms to give support, creating events to help spread the word. Creating promotional videos, flyers, posters, t-shirts. Supporting new communities like Ubuntu eco or something. Creating surveys…
I found this wiki page that is very intresting. Building community and assessing needs.
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Wow, never saw those before. Too bad, as it seems like valuable information. There’s a vast amount there, actually. Did you find anything that is particular helpful to the discussion at hand?
I haven’t went throw all of that yet but… I think this is valuable:
Every community is strained by push and pull forces that will affect your ability to retain volunteers. This will apply equally in your community. For the SPCA, euthanasia is clearly a blocker for many to get involved. What is your equivalent blocker? This could be difficult personalities, suboptimal working conditions, hugely complex processes and technical procedures, or anything else.
You should identify these blockers and ensure you have resources to help people over the hump. Importantly, you should not downplay or cover up the difficulties in your community, but until you can fix the problems (which you should seek to do as a matter of priority), it is entirely reasonable to make those difficulties as pleasant to navigate as possible.
Stop downplaying the issues, listen what the community has to say. Every time someone says “Hey, this is a problem, we have to fix this somehow” someone replies: “We are perfectly fine, it’s not our fault”. I know it’s hard to recognize mistakes and it’s harder to fix them but if we don’t try to listen then we are not making any progress.
Should I reply? Okay then, we are totally fine, let’s do nothing and stay like this forever while the community is slowly dying.
Sorry, I got too emotional 
Ah, the Community Team. I recall that meta work. @belkinsa was one of the key folks who organized the team and put a lot of work into those pages.
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What do you think these issues are? I’m reluctant to believe it’s the lack of Unity, but then again, I was never here because of Unity and I didn’t use it, either.
I believe there was hype because Ubuntu was Linux for human beings, it was easy to use out of the box with his own “modern” looking interface and there was all this cool projects like Unity, Ubuntu phone, Snap, Mir… Not anymore.
Certainly a part of users who were in love with Unity moved to KDE or another distro with Gnome since they don’t see a real advantage in using Ubuntu with Gnome or using Gnome was a disadvantage for them.
The hype vanished, the projects closed and users are tired of promises never fulfilled.
So Canonical moved to a more profitable model of business with servers, the cloud and IoT as his main focus. And that’s really great but it’s not for human beings anymore. Surely they still put effort into improving the desktop because many professionals use it to work. You can’t offer a desktop that runs slow even in modern machines.
They went on his little adventure with Unity and when they go back to Gnome found all this messy code (I don’t blame Emmanuelle Bassi). Imagine what would be Gnome today if Canonical had stayed with Gnome all this time. But sometimes couples have to break up to realize they want to be together.
So there is not hype, users are impatient and have moved to another distro or another desktop and continued with his lifes. They know Ubuntu still exists, it’s a useful tool but they don’t feel the urge to contribute to the community. Also, the Hispanic community is in Telegram groups or Facebook and don’t have idea what a LoCo is. Also, they are not using any service written in English like the wiki, Ask Ubuntu or the forums. They are insolated so you can’t interact with them. Maybe this is not a bad thing after all.
From what I know, normal people choose the distro where their drivers work. Next thing they ask for is close to Windows experience.
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And the only way to “solve” this is to show the community Canonical still cares about them.
Imagine Ubuntu it’s a bar. Only companies can enter the VIP zone. We still have a room open to everyone but no one has cleaned in years so people that used to came often prefers to go to a smaller but clean bar and enjoy good company.
Users are somewhat predictable. They use what it’s better for them. A very few thinks in building a community and working for free.
You seem to be saying that mindshare is key to more and better contributions - more people coming in the front door.
I was earlier saying that better engagement and mentoring of the normal trickle of folks is another key to more and better contributions - fewer people leaving by the back door.
These alternatives may be complimentary.
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Yes. It’s like fishing. You need a colorful bait and also pull in the right moment to keep them engaged.
7 posts were split to a new topic: Poll: Declne in community interest due to loss of Unity?
Cinnamon is unique, dde is unique, Manjaro mhwd is unique…even old Lubuntu was unique…
Regarding us, we can’t be unique with 2 extensions. 2 forked ones, can we?
And those all have particularly healthy communities because of it?
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@wxl, you are of the Lubuntu one, right? Would you say that Lubuntu’s is healthy and how so?
I’m not sure everybody knows about what already exists, so here are a few examples of events I know of:
Ubucon at SCALE, Ubucon Germany, Ubucon LATAM, Ubucon Europe, Ubucon Portugal. They happen ttraditionally once a year.
Ubuntu Party, they happen in France twice an year like the Ubuntu releases.
In Portugal we also do monthly get togethers (non-stop for five years), that are mostly social, with some technical conversations on the mix (not only about Ubuntu), and whenever we can we do what we call an Ubuntu Hour (technical talk or workshop with the duration of one hour about Ubuntu, Free Software, Free Culture, and Free and Open things in general, not so few time with speakers from other communities.
I’ve also been trying to organize an Ubuntu social event on related with other major events where I’m going (i,e.; Ubuntu Community dinner at FOSDEM for the previous two years).
Yep, Lubuntu’s doing fantastic. For 18.10, we changed from LXDE to LXQt. Die-hard LXDE fans were bothered by it, but LXDE is ultimately a dead project built on a dead project (GTK2), so too bad. We did get new interest because of the dramatic change. I think, however, that it may be circumstantial that we gained new contributors. We did lose two key folks, all amicably and mainly due to life pulling them in other directions.
But where we once had really only one developer, we now have four official ones (we just approved the fourth). Two of those developers were relatively new folks that popped up after we bridged Telegram to our development IRC channel. Myself and @tsimonq2 (the other two developers) worked hard to create new documentation and infrastructure and to work one on one to mentor folks through all of the crazy ins and outs of Debian packaging. There’s another one that is a shoe-in for number five. Number six isn’t too far away.
Outside of packaging stuff, we have a great support team, and excellent bunch of testers and bug triagers, a great documentation team (see manual.lubuntu.me; it’s pretty remarkable if I may say so myself), a burgeoning globalization team, and the start of a marketing team. Many of those folks were with us before the transition, too. So they’re not all new. But there are definitely new folks.
If I had to list the things that had the greatest impact on contributions:
- Telegram. Seriously.
- Looking for every opportunity possible to encourage folks to contribute, and following it up with the help and guidance and support they need to make contributions.
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