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 Thomas Ward. Since 2014 when I got my membership (primarily through my efforts supporting people on Ask Ubuntu at the time), my contributions have been on multiple areas of the Ubuntu and Ubuntu Flavors worlds.

• I’ve been a member of the Ubuntu Community Council since 2020, where I’ve continued working to bridge the gap between the Community and Canonical with regards to what community expectations are and to help get them addressed by Canonical.
• Additionally, I’ve been working as a member of the Lubuntu project as a member of its leadership council for a number of years.
• I am a member of the Developer Membership Board and have been for a couple of terms now, which allows me to also be able to regularly gauge the pulse of developer needs in the community as well.
• I’ve been a strong contributor to the Server Team, particularly with regards to NGINX, since 2017/2018.
• I am a Community Elected Moderator on Ask Ubuntu and have held the position since my election in 2016. I also have answered a bunch of questions there as well.

My day job is as a Network Security Administrator, where I do IT Security with a focus on network infrastructure security and endpoint systems security. I also do IT administration for Linux and Windows as well as needed.

Why do I want to be re-elected?

I’d love to continue to work to improve the Community and the relationship between the community and Canonical.

• The Ubuntu Forum is aging, outdated, and most of the admins and moderators are burned out from it. The community is trying to decide the best way forward, but behind the scenes I’m aware that the problem is multifold:

  1. Aging vBulletin software (vBulletin isn’t free, either!) and technical hurdles that will be caused by an upgrade/update to the software regarding theming, etc.
  2. Insecure PHP due to the age of vBulletin.
  3. Security risks therein due to age of system, forums, etc.

  It is my personal belief if we could put this on this Discourse or as a separate technical support discourse, we could achieve much of what the existing forums had, but on a modern platform and without the security flaws inherent to vBulletin.

• I’m working with technical teams at Canonical to make it more clear what the various teams do, and what the expectations are for any prospective team members in terms of work commitment, expected tasks and knowledge, etc. and to make that information clear to the community.

• I want to continue to improve the relationship between the Community and Canonical in any way I can.

A lot of this requires time and energy to make happen, but one of the advantages is that the Ubuntu Summit allows community council members to get in touch with Canonical people directly, and it helps to solve many of the problems with communication. That communication is crucial to helping make the Community better as well, as we coordinate directly with Canonical and the Community to try and make things better.

(Random side note, I’ll be at the Ubuntu Summit this year so if you want to say hi and shake my hand or such you’ll be able to!)