The Ubuntu Communications Council (Comms Council) is responsible for looking after all aspects of communication for the Ubuntu Community. This includes both synchronous communication platforms, such as IRC, Matrix and Discord, and asynchronous communication platforms, such as Discourse, Ask Ubuntu, and the wiki.
The Comms Council defines policies, moderation guidelines, and manages the platform-specific operator and moderator teams. They also work on a cohesive overarching strategy for Ubuntu’s communications platforms, with the goal to improve how our community collaborates, supports, and interacts.
Even though the Council has the final responsibility in these matters, we encourage everyone to contribute! You do not need to be part of the Council in order to improve Ubuntu’s communication platforms. There is a lot of work ahead of them and they can’t do it alone!
The day-to-day management and operation of each communication platform is delegated to platform-specific teams, like the Matrix Operators and the Discourse Moderators.
Responsibilities of Councilmembers
Members of this Governing Body are expected to be active, participate in recurring meetings, and have a level of involvement and participation that ensures the continuous improvement of the Ubuntu Community. They report to the Community Council and should keep the Community Council up to date about ongoing efforts.
Members of the Ubuntu Communications Council are expected to be active in their role, or to inform their Council Members in writing if they need to take an extended leave of absence. If this absence is greater than six months, the Ubuntu Communications Council should decide if asking a member of the Ubuntu Community Council to help fill the role temporarily, ask a trusted Ubuntu Member to step up temporarily, or vote to replace the absent Council member. The same procedure applies if a member of the Ubuntu Communications Council is suddenly unreachable for a period of time greater than 90 days.
Who is in it
The current makeup of the communications council is temporary in order to get everything started. It contains representatives of every communication platform, to ensure a good handover. It’s supported by the Community Council and the Canonical Community Team to help bootstrap processes and goals. The current term is for one year, after which we’ll run elections to select the next members.
You can find the current council members in the communications-council team on Launchpad.
Platform-specific operator teams
Each platform has a team of operators that take care of the day-to-day activities of their respective platforms. They work with the Ubuntu Communications Council to implement changes and ensure their platforms are well maintained, governed, and that standard operating procedures are applied.
- Matrix Operators
- Discourse Moderators
- IRC Operators
History
This council is a merger of old platform-specific councils like the IRC Council, Matrix Council, and Forums Council. This merger has multiple goals.
- More cohesion and shared knowledge: With the Matrix Council, we’ve seen how useful it is to have people from both the IRC and Matrix sides work together. It has really helped reduce the “rivalry” between platforms and the Matrix side learned a lot from the IRC side. It improved the speed of our decisions and we were better able to take the concerns from the IRC side into account. It also helped introduce senior people from the IRC side to the Matrix side.
- More community governance: Some of our platforms, such as Discourse, currently don’t have councils. As a result, Canonical basically unilaterally decides what happens on those platforms. Apart from the lack of community involvement, this is also an awkward position for Canonical to be in. Canonical employees don’t want to make unilateral decisions about core platforms, but they also don’t have an easy way to involve the community in decisions. Other platforms, like IRC and the Forum, had councils, but over the years felt less and less part of Ubuntu and haven’t had elections in a long time.
- Less overhead: With the Matrix Council, we’ve seen how difficult it is to find enough capable people willing to join the Council. This seems to be a problem in a lot of other places too, such as the membership board. We simply have too many governance bodies and too few people to run them. Some people feel pressured to join councils simply to prop up the numbers, even though they don’t have enough time to invest. Moreover, some of our platforms don’t have councils, so we would actually need more councils if we want more community governance. Merging similar councils is a great way to solve this problem.
- More room for experimentation: When the Matrix initiative started, there was a lot of interest, but also a lot of hesitation, because it wasn’t clear who had the authority to kick-off such an initiative. When you only have councils for specific platforms, it’s really hard to try out a different platform because it’s not clear who has the authority to do that. With a Communications Council, it’s clear who has the authority, so it’s easier to just try out something for a bit and reflect.
- Enabling an overarching strategy: With a Communications Council, the members can think about how all the platforms fit together into an overarching communication strategy. This will allow us to create a much better experience than what we have today with the informal coordination attempts between councils.
Election
Councilmembers are elected for a two-year term. In order to be eligible for the Ubuntu Communications Council, an individual must be an official Ubuntu Member.
Elections follow the standard process used for other Ubuntu Governing bodies, such as the Ubuntu Community Council. At least 90 days before elections are due, the Community Council will start promoting elections using the standard communications tools at the disposal of the Ubuntu Community and of the Canonical Community and Communications teams.
Ubuntu Members that would like to take part of this Council need to create a post in a specific category in the Ubuntu Discourse, or any asynchronous communications platform that replaces it. Deadlines for applications should be clearly outlined by the Ubuntu Community Council with the help of the current Ubuntu Communications Council. Elections will take place at a pre-defined time and Ubuntu Members will be able to cast their vote using the approved, standard methods used by the Ubuntu Community.