Representatives from the Ubuntu Governance bodies along with various Canonical, flavor and community leads met virtually, on March 11 2025 to discuss the state and future of the Ubuntu Community:
Welcome and Introductions
- @ilvipero kicked off both sessions of the Ubuntu Governance Sync meeting sharing meeting goals, format and schedule. After that, new comers introduced themselves.
Disclaimer
It is important to note that the Governance Sync Meetings have a clear goal to encourage communication and collaboration between various Ubuntu Governance bodies. The sync meetings are not created to gatekeep information, nor as a replacement for proper, established Governance processes, voting and decision making.
Mailing list spam
- We are currently tracking all the spam waves attacking mailing lists. Potential new email addresses and patterns collected by various governance bodies are to be communicated in the governance room, so that we can coordinate with Canonical IS
- Comments mentioned that requiring subscription to post could be a sensible change especially given the current situation.
Mailing lists and Discourse
The previous point started a broader discussion around the use of mailing lists and Discourse. Both platforms have advantages and disadvantages and it is beneficial to consolidate platforms when needed, while leaving the best tool for each job.
- If we want to replace mailing lists with Discourse some governance members have some workflow related potential questions, especially regarding threads, lists, and also archival of very old and valuable conversations.
- Mailing lists have serious challenges of upkeeping antispam, and he has doubts on the bandwidth available to Canonical IS .
- Discourse operators are happy to work with governance representatives and mailing list users to showcase Discourse, its options and what can be done with Discourse vs mailing lists. This is a going to be a time consuming activity, therefore the Canonical Community Team will help coordinate ad-hoc meetings.
- Other members of the Governance bodies also noticed a big move away from mailing lists, and one of the noticeable results is that Canonical IS is very slow reacting to any mailing-list related tasks.
- Require subscription to post to mailing list to provide additional spam protection, and could be a good start to protect mailing lists from spam.
- The discussion carried forward with pros and cons of mailing lists and discourse for collaboration. A separate meeting and chat is definitely required to discuss and understand:
- Mailing lists use cases
- Announcements mailing lists (like summit-news)
- Mail forward mailing lists (to reach a team such as community council)
- Regular group work mailing lists
- Automation based mailing lists like the following: The plucky-changes Archives
TB vacancy
There was an important discussion about the Technical Board (TB) vacancy, and how to address boards and governance bodies vacancies moving forward. The general consensus is that boards should be able to operate with one vacancy, and carry the work until the end of the term. Having said that, if governance bodies have too many vacancies and this is affecting their work, they should reach up the chain and request assistance. Decisions will be made on a case-by-case basis, as different governance bodies might have different requirements and challenges.
Debian import freeze dates
There was a brief discussion about proposal for changing the Debian import freeze dates. However meeting attendees would like to hear more from the release team before expressing opinions.
Ongoing move to Matrix
We discussed the ongoing move to Matrix, especially for Ubuntu Dev channels.
- Meetingology announcement can be found on this Discourse post. This topic was also announced and discussing during the Ubuntu Flavor Sync meeting.
- Public logs for Matrix rooms is something operators are working on but not short term. Meetingology could be useful to bridge that gap. Changes might be needed but the code is open source and available on launchpad.
- Having clients for arm systems is complicated.
- A small wrapper for the element web client is available for Debian and Ubuntu, and it works on arm64: Ubuntu – Details of package revolt in oracular
Official guidelines for elections
The governance bodies had an interesting discussion about election process, and this is the initial draft of proposal.
- 1-month call for nominations, nominations need to be public
- 1-week comment period for (private) concerns should be used only for serious concerns
- Shortlist published
- 1-week period for AMA, public comments and questions
- 2-week voting period (no option to remove candidates is accepted at this stage, those should be completed at point 2.)
- 1-week grace period until the next board.
- Looking at current election processes, there is a desire to write clear, concise and precise documentation around those, so that the community has expectations and guidelines that can be further discussed, refined, and changed.
- Official guidelines for inactive members and failure to receive quorum were a major discussion point and important thoughts were collected by various governance members.
- Relevant discussion about Quorum from 2018
- Decisions around quorum should be taken around active members, not all members. If members of governance are inactive they should not block progress.
- The DMB tried to do this to handle absent members
- Specific criteria needs to be decided by boards to define when a member is to be considered inactive
- Rules alone do not fix anything. Ubuntu governance needs to think about how to implement the rules.
- Considerations on boards and governance bodies with very few active members: Governance bodies should define a lower limit of active members that would require to ask for elections.
- Governance bodies could define a method in which someone can proactively announce that they have extenuating circumstances that will keep them from being active for a limited amount of time. Criteria and duration of what is acceptable should be considered.
- More people involved with elections and more candidates would be really welcome. Latest elections have been on a good trend, but we still have room for improvement.
- Define whether “next in line” is valid or not at the end of a result.
- “Next in line” should not be applicable to TB/CC elections. If someone needs to be replaced, new elections are needed.
- For DMB, it’s more clear because there is a “no further candidates” option, so anyone above that can be “next in line”.
Involvement and encouragement of non-elected candidates
This discussion started from the election points above and revolved about how to handle with kindness people who did not get elected, and provide encouragement and a path forward in the community.
- It can be difficult for people not in board to see what is actually happening, therefore contributing.
- People willing to contribute should be do so even if they do not have a formal governance title.
- An idea floated about creating teams with less or no official powers but still people can join and work on the sort of work that council normally works on. Ideas on naming could be “action team”
- The idea about “action teams” could be integrated with developing skills. Framing and communication of the pathway opportunity is very important.
- Lubuntu has a system in which you have multiple levels of governance. People can contribute without being in the team, but once you become a Lubuntu Member you gain access to a special members chat where you can have input on governance items. Then once you’ve been there a bit you can be elected to the Lubuntu Council and now you have voting power and access to more sensitive discussions. That makes sure the people leading Lubuntu are only the people who are in Lubuntu and good at it. And it also means that people who aren’t in the governance board yet still have some level of governance role.
- There was also an acknowledgement that governance bodies have the desire to become better mentors.
Ubuntu membership
There seems to be a general consensus within most members of governance bodies that better documentation should be created to guide people into an ubuntu membership:
- What makes a significant contribution. It’s much harder for non-code contributors.
- What is a worthwhile contribution?
- Define a list of different types of welcome non-code contributions.
- Several Ubuntu Members mentioned that they had to be pushed to apply for membership.
- An idea was shared to have interviews with Ubuntu Members who got their Membership thank to non-code contributions.
- In order to provide even more specific guidance, leaders of projects could post “help wanted” posters. Problem with gnome translations, for example.
- Governance or project team leaders could join the weekly forum sync meeting so the moderators can take note and provide connections with some interested people.
Get involved!
Ubuntu Governance Sync Meetings take place every 2 months on the second Tuesday of January, March, May, July, September. There are two sessions, 3PM UTC and 10PM UTC, to best accommodate our global community. All are welcome to participate in the discussion here on the Ubuntu Discourse!