Very quietly, the Ubuntu community reached a major milestone today when
we held a
Community Council meeting, like it does fortnightly.
The only thing different was that the council included five new members
-- Mike Basinger, Corey Burger, Matthew East, Jerome S. Gotangco and
Daniel Holbach. These members are, with the exception of Holbach, not
employed by Canonical and were each confirmed by a vote of the full
Ubuntu
membership. Before the recent elections, I was the only member
who was not a Canonical employee -- and I used to be one.
From a technical perspective, the founding Ubuntu team was able to
benefit from everything that Debian had built -- a running start if
there ever was one. From a community perspective though, we had to start
from scratch and had to deal with the very difficult situation that
paid labor and closely entangled corporate interests. Working with
the rest of the team, I drafted a set of community norms (the
Code of
Conduct) and governance structures designed to keep both the
community and Canonical under control. They seemed like good ideas but,
because we didn't have a community yet, only reflected the sensibilities
of Mark Shuttleworth, myself, and the rest of the early Ubuntu team.
The highest Ubuntu governance board, the Community Council was initially
filled with people that were in the room in Oxford when we came up with
the idea: myself, Mark, James Troup, and Colin Watson. We decided that
the council members should, and would, be approved by a vote of the
membership. With no members though, we faced a bit of a bootstrapping
problem.
Three years later, Ubuntu has a vibrant community with hundreds of
enfranchised members who have an up-or-down say on the members of the
council itself. When we looked for new potential council members to
propose to the community, we tried to pick the most active, most
level-headed, and most representative group we could find. It was
pleasing to see that only one member of the new CC board works for
Canonical; Canonical employees are now outnumbered.
It has been interesting to see announcements by
Fedora,
FreeSpire,
OpenSuSE over the last few years proposing systems of more inclusive
community governance structures that, perhaps not entirely
coincidentally, look a bit like what Ubuntu has built in its attempts to
empower users in that sometimes awkward community/company environment.
Whatever the reasons, I think it means there's more pressure on us at
Ubuntu to keep raising the bar. I see today as a great example of how
we've done just that.
