Our logo: a collection of horse parts creepily arranged to form an Ubuntu logo.

One of the topics that we discussed at the recent [Ubuntu Developer Summit](https://uds.ubuntu.com) in Orlando was how my team, the *Canonical Community Team* at Canonical, can best serve our community. The team’s mandate is to build a fun, productive, and worthwhile community in which everyone can participate and help to make Ubuntu successful.

One realization over the last few weeks is that the team has changed quite a bit over the years and it could be useful to provide some background on how the team works, what we work on, what we don’t work on, and how you folks can interact with us.

## In The Beginning

Things were quite different when I first joined Canonical. There was no community team, just me, and back then I reported directly to Mark Shuttleworth. Mark used to like new starters to report directly to him for those roles he had a personal interest in with the intention of moving them over later to report to someone else when he was comfortable that things were running smoothly.

A little while into working at Canonical Mark asked me to move over to join the Ubuntu Engineering Management team and report to Matt Zimmerman, our CTO (who has since moved on to work at [Singly](https://singly.com/)).

Since then things have transitioned from the team being just me and myself to a team of community coordinators who I manage. As such, the nature of my role has changed over the years from being purely community-facing to now managing a team who work closely with the community too.

## The Team

I am now going to spin through each member of the team and summarize what they do and how their role has adjusted and developed over time.

One important point to note is that everyone on the team has incredibly diverse jobs. While I will be describing their primary responsibilities below, there are also a wealth of other small tasks, issues, situations, and problems that everyone on the team coordinates with every day. Put it this way…no-one gets bored very easily. 😉

### David Planella

**Ubuntu App Dev and Translations Coordinator**
Based in Spain.
**Has wonderful hair**.
`dpm` on IRC.
**[Email David](mailto:davidDOTplanellaAtcanonicalDOTcom)**.

David was originally hired to work exclusively on translations. His role was created out of a need for the OEM team to deliver quality translations to customers, but it was felt that we could expand this position sufficiently to help build growth and support for our large community of translators. David was a natural fit for the position with his experience in the translations community.

In the Oneiric cycle I asked David to expand his focus and work on the application developer side of Ubuntu, which he was happy to do so. Since then he has worked with the UX and Web teams at Canonical to put together the IA, design, and user testing for [developer.ubuntu.com](https://developer.ubuntu.com), with wonderful results.

His work is now continuing to grow a community of app developers and a community that can provide support and guidance around delivering apps on Ubuntu. He is still involved in translations but this is reduced somewhat. David also organizes the Ubuntu App Developer IRC training event in each cycle.

### Jorge Castro

**Ubuntu Cloud Coordinator**
Based in Florida, USA.
**Huge dinosaur fan**.
`jcastro` on IRC.
**[Email Jorge](mailto:jorgeDOTcastroATcanonical-DOT-com)**.

Jorge was originally hired to work with upstreams to help them work with Ubuntu. As his role developed, and particularly as we started building technology such as the App Indicators and ultimately Unity, Jorge was tasked with working with upstreams to help them to make use of our technology.

As Unity development continued, I asked Jorge to also focus on growing a community who would participate actively in Unity itself. He worked closely with the DX team to help get things in place whereby developers could contribute to the Unity code base.

Towards the end of the last cycle I asked Jorge to spend more time working with the Juju team and to go out to some events to evangelize Ubuntu cloud technology. This was a good fit and Jorge’s role has now changed to working with and growing the Ubuntu Cloud community full-time, with a particular focus on Juju and growing a community of Juju charmers.

In addition to this Jorge works on parts on parts of UDS, but these responsibilities will be moving over to Michael in the next cycle.

### Daniel Holbach

**Ubuntu Developer Relations**
Based in Germany.
**Creates awesome mix tapes and hates it when Jono and Jorge talk about Megadeth**.
`dholbach` on IRC.
**[Email Daniel](mailto:daniel-DOT-holbachATcanonicalDOTcom)**.

Daniel was the first horseman to join the team shortly after it was formed, transitioning over from the Ubuntu distro team. Daniel has always worked and focused on growing our developer community…specifically those who participate as MOTU and Core Devs. Daniel has a long heritage of working with developers in the Ubuntu community.

Daniel has also worked on projects such as Harvest, 5-A-Day, Ubuntu Developer Week, and the Hall Of Fame, and in the last cycle I asked him to spend some time working on the UDS sponsorship process.

Daniel is also our go-to-guy for constructing the graphs and metrics that I use to track the work of the team to help them be successful. Daniel also works actively with many of our governance boards, and in particular with the Community Council.

Daniel will be continuing to focus on developers with a core goal of continuing to see our developer growth increase.

### Michael Hall

**Ubuntu Upstream Relations**
Based in Florida, USA.
**Our web yoda**.
`mhall119` on IRC.
**[Email Michael](mailto:michael–DOT–hallATcanonicalDOTcom)**.

Michael has contributed for a long time to the Ubuntu community and contributed to many web projects, including [loco.ubuntu.com](https://loco.ubuntu.com) and [summit.ubuntu.com](https://summit.ubuntu.com). He was hired by the Canonical Internal Systems Development group as a web developer.

Michael will be transitioning over to join the team in January and will be taking over Jorge’s previous role with a strong focus on upstreams, and in particular Ubuntu upstreams such as Unity.

### <someone> <new>

I am currently recruiting for a [QA Community Coordinator](https://archivedblog.jonobacon.com/2011/11/12/qa-community-coordinator-required-apply-within/). Be sure to get in touch if you have a solid QA and community background.

### Yours Truly

**Ubuntu Community Manager**
Based in California, USA.
**Likes to rock and roll**.
`jono` on IRC.
**[Email Me](mailto:jonoATubuntu-DOT-com)**.

My role has changed and diversified quite a bit since I started. These days my responsibilities are not just to ensure I am doing a good job in serving the community, but to also help and support my team to serve the community well too and be successful in their work.

This involves ensuring the guys are happy, that they know what they need to do, are meeting various stakeholder and community expectations, helping them to plan out and accomplish their goals, unblocking issues, communicating their accomplishments up the chain, and ensuring their Canonical experience and skills grow and expand with further opportunities.

I work to identify where we should be building our community strategy and growth, and which areas of the community need support and focus from Canonical, from the team, and other resources.

While my role has evolved over the years, I am passionate about working with our community, but I try to focus much of my efforts on the areas outside of the areas satisfied by the guys in the team. This includes working with our governance boards and leaders, the LoCo community, accessibility team and other areas, and handling conflict when it occurs. I also try to summarize progress and growth from the team in blog entries and on social media.

Finally, I spend time helping other Canonical teams, particularly newer teams, to work transparently and with the community as the company scales up. This also involves supporting other parts of the company, such as transitioning best practice between some teams and supporting new leaders when they join us.

## How We Work

While we are talking about what the team does, let me now explain how the team works together.

### Meetings

One piece of feedback we got shortly before the Ubuntu Developer Summit was a desire to see how the team functions more. As such, we have shifted our team meetings to be public IRC meetings.

These happen every Tuesday at **8am Pacific / 11am Eastern / 4pm UK / 5pm Europe** in the `#ubuntu-community-team` channel on the [freenode IRC network](https://freenode.net/using_the_network.shtml). You are all welcome to join the meetings and participate! 🙂

Outside of our public meeting, I have weekly 1-on-1 calls with each member of the team.

### Where We Do Our Work

We spend all of our time on IRC in the `#ubuntu-community-team` channel, and you are all welcome to get in touch with us whenever you need to.

Yesterday I published our [12.04 team goals](https://archivedblog.jonobacon.com/2011/11/22/canonical-community-team-12-04-plans/) and you can keep up to date with the progress on these goals [here](https://status.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-precise/canonical-community.html).

You can also keep up to date with our work as we blog it on [Planet Ubuntu](https://planet.ubuntu.com) and I do a weekly Q+A videocast every Wednesday at **12pm Pacific / 3pm Eastern / 8pm UK / 9pm Europe** – you can watch it [here](https://www.ustream.tv/channel/at-home-with-jono-bacon).

One of the most wonderful things about Open Source and collaborative community is that every community member participates in a *commons*; a shared area of community real-estate in which we can all contribute.

As an example, with most small Open Source software projects, the commons is the code-base, the website, documentation, IRC channel, mailing list etc. Within that project’s commons people can contribute in different ways, such as writing code, fixing bugs, updating the website, creating documentation, providing support etc.

Importantly, for the community to succeed, the commons needs to feel *shared and accessible* and that the *community can contribute and bring value*.

## Our Commons

Ubuntu itself has a rather large commons:

Unlike a single small software project, Ubuntu is really a *collection of projects and teams* that each share the Ubuntu ethos. While the above image is just an illustration (it doesn’t show real data), it provides a good visualization of how the Ubuntu commons (this collection of teams) fits together — each circle represents a different team and the piece of the commons that they maintain.

As an example, the largest circle could be MOTU and the `universe` archive, and the smallest circle could be a LoCo team based in a rural part of a country and it’s website, mailing list, and IRC channel. While these two examples vary in their size and focus, they are both important pieces of the Ubuntu commons and both bring value to Ubuntu and our users.

Like some other Open Source communities such as Mozilla, Fedora, and OpenStack, Ubuntu has a significant commercial investor — in our case [Canonical](https://www.canonical.com). Canonical invests in a variety of areas in Ubuntu including engineering, testing and certification, business development, corporate deployments, legal services, and more.

In some of these positions Canonical staff contribute work that interfaces clearly with our community (e.g. engineering) but other Canonical staff also contribute to areas that are traditionally of little interest or infeasible for our community to work on (e.g. certification, corporate development, government tenders, trademarks management etc). I think few would argue against the general benefits to Ubuntu that Canonical brings with this financial support.

## An Open Commons

In recent times we have made some bold and controversial decisions in the Ubuntu project, but the culture and history of Ubuntu making opinionated decisions is nothing new.

Ubuntu was one of the first distributions to make firm decisions about what software and configurations we shipped in the ISO (as opposed to the common trend at the time of shipping multiple solutions on the discs (e.g. multiple text editors)). It was these decisions that attracted me personally to Ubuntu; it brings focus and builds a better product.

Opinionated decisions are fine though, under the premise that the commons can succeed under the requirements outlined above that it needs to feel *shared and accessible* and that the *community can contribute and bring value*.

Of course, with opinionated decisions comes opinionated reactions and commentary. This opinion, so long as it is respectful, is also wonderful and gives us a great feel for the perspectives of our user-base. Unfortunately I think some of this discussion has also presented a view of the commons that does not really represent the Ubuntu commons fairly.

As an example, there has been criticism that contributing and participating in Unity’s design has been difficult at best. I think many of these criticisms are valid (and there has been some good work going on to help rectify this), but some of this criticism has been communicated out as *Canonical enforcing it’s will on Ubuntu*.

I am not going to to deny that Canonical has a strong editorial influence on Ubuntu…it does…and every one of you good peeps will have your own opinion on those decisions and whether they make sense, but while Canonical influences the project, it never *stops people from contributing openly in the Ubuntu commons*.

In other words, while Canonical may invest in certain software (e.g. Unity, Ubuntu Software Center, Thunderbird integration, JuJu etc), this investment *never* prevents our community from contributing to those areas or other parts of the commons.

## Ubuntu For Everyone

The key point here (and as I [blogged about recently](https://archivedblog.jonobacon.com/2011/11/08/ubuntu-more-than-the-default-install/)) is that Ubuntu is much more than our default installation, and the open nature of our commons fosters an environment in which everyone is welcome to a variety of different Ubuntu experiences better.

As an example, I personally prefer *Banshee* to *Rhythmbox*, and *Evolution* to *Thunderbird*. I also use *Inkscape*, *GIMP*, *Blender*, and *Chromium*. These tools are not shipped by default in Ubuntu, but that doesn’t make them feel any less Ubuntu. they still integrate nicely into my Ubuntu experience, and the visibility and ease of installing these tools has never been better. It is our many community contributors who make these experiences so pleasurable in Ubuntu, each contributing to the wider commons.

This is one of the reasons I am so proud to see other derivative distributions (e.g. Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Studio) doing their work; they provide entirely different experiences to the default Ubuntu install, but the shared work in the Ubuntu commons means they can build upon work elsewhere in the commons and vice-versa.

## The Opportunity

As Ubuntu has grown in popularity over the years, everything that we do is observed, judged, and reviewed by a global community of users, press, and curious on-lookers. We are standing at the forefront of a tremendous opportunity to take Free Software to more people, and bring technological freedom and opportunity to everyone.

The goal of this post was simply to focus on two core attributes in the Ubuntu commons:

1. The Ubuntu commons provides a wealth of opportunities for contribution and is *open to all*. It is bigger than the default decisions, bigger than the default app selection, bigger than the areas where Canonical invests, and bigger than Unity.
2. There is a place in the commons for *everyone* and for people of *all skills*. The commons includes packagers, programmers, advocates, documentation writers, translators, testers, governors, support providers, and much more.

For us to achieve these goals, and for us to get to 200 million users, we need everyone to bring their expertise, time, and excitement to Ubuntu, and to join us on this journey and to make it is simple and effective to participate as possible.

This is why the Ubuntu commons is so valuable; there is an opportunity for each one of you, wherever you read this, and whatever your skills, to find a part of the commons where you can help. If you want to help and don’t know how to get started, feel free to leave a comment and we will get you on your journey.