How the open-source community works-Ubuntu

To truly understand open-source technology, it is impossible to break away from the background of the community. Open source is not so much a production model as a social activity: people from different regions around the world, even using different languages, through the exchange of ideas and code in the Community, a project is created. Every project is a small society. This article begins with the Ubuntu community. The Ubuntu and Ubuntu communities have become two famous words. Not just cool-looking computer geeks, the Ubuntu community is composed of members from different backgrounds. The so-called one hundred

To truly understand open-source technology, it is impossible to break away from the background of the community. Open source is not so much a production model as a social activity: people from different regions around the world, even using different languages, through the exchange of ideas and code in the Community, a project is created. Every project is a small society. This article begins with the Ubuntu community.

The Ubuntu and Ubuntu communities have become two famous words. Ubuntu is not just a cool computer geek. the Ubuntu community is composed of members from different backgrounds. The so-called one hundred million people, all kinds of members. Such a large community must be managed by effective means, to promote stable and healthy community development. The Ubuntu community has always been dedicated to the principle of use. Everyone can contribute their own strength to the community, but the Community will not force members to do what they should do. It will only encourage members to do what they should do, it is this incentive mechanism that promotes the prosperity of the Ubuntu community, which is also an effective support mechanism for all Ubuntu enthusiasts.

Community Committee

With the growth of Ubuntu, community organizations and management began to become a problem, so a so-called "Community Committee" was established to help the correct development of the Community, the Community Committee is currently composed of eight people, none of them work in Canonical, and the eighth place is Mark Shuttleworth (51CTO Editor note: Mark Shuttleworth is the founder of Canonical and the initiator of the Ubuntu Foundation ), this is an interesting way of decentralization. Mark believes that this mechanism makes the Ubuntu community a success.

Community committees manage Ubuntu members. At the committee meeting, for those who have made significant and lasting contributions to Ubuntu, the committee Council has given them the following benefits: obtaining an email address with the extension of ubuntu.com; you have the privilege to push your blog posts to Ubuntu Planet. You can subscribe to a popular Linux-based news source for free. At present, the Ubuntu community is growing rapidly in various parts of the world, and cross-time zone management brings a lot of trouble to the Community Committee. It will certainly not work in the long term, therefore, the Ubuntu community committee decided to delegate it to the Ubuntu regional membership committee for management.

Regional Committees

The regional member committees actually have three independent groups: America, Asia/Oceania and EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa ). The Community Committee will still guide the regional member committees to carry out their work. The term of the committee is two years. When the term of office of the Committee members expires, it is necessary to nominate new candidates for new members, of course, if a member is unwilling to do so, he can apply for resignation in advance.

Regional committees often offer rewards, but ignore the contributions made by developers to the community. To this end, a so-called "Developer Member Committee" was established ", they are responsible for applying for more rights for Ubuntu developers and stimulating developers' potential. When a candidate proves that he is technically competent and trustworthy, then they will be entitled to appropriate privileges. With the halo of "Ubuntu developers", they will be automatically entitled to "Ubuntu members.

This means that as long as you make a contribution to Ubuntu, you will be recognized and everyone can join the contributor team. If you are not a developer, you can also engage in translation and Community technical support. While Canonical employees are paid, they do not have any privileges in the community. They still need to apply to the Community Committee. After the Community Committee investigates, confirm that they have made a lot of contributions to the community to grant them more privileges.

All the regional committees work in this way. Someone even proposed to adopt a standardized process. That is to say, the tasks executed by multiple committees are the same. As far as I know, some work has been done within the Committee to try to improve the current work, however, I think the standards of the regional committees should still allow for differences. The regional committees are also cooperating and sharing best practices, but no specific details are yet made public. In addition to keeping necessary secrets, it would be better if the standardized process becomes more transparent.

LoCo Committee

Another Committee under the supervision of the Community Committee is the LoCo Committee (the Committee of the local community), which is mainly responsible for dealing with some problems and conflicts in the local community. In fact, the LoCo Committee has not planned in advance, at first, it was a self-organized team of members of the local community. It was officially recognized because the organization grew and Its Role became increasingly obvious. The Ubuntu community committee had to acknowledge its existence. After the LoCo Committee joins the management team, the process has changed. Previously, when a LoCo Committee was approved, they did not need to update their status, however, the LoCo Committee is about to execute the update task. It is also beneficial for the LoCo committee to record their contributions and to the collaboration among multiple LoCo committees.

One major reason for the LoCo committee's approval was that their contributions to the organization and production were acknowledged and they also received Ubuntu CD as a reward for organizing activities, it will also be strongly supported by Canonical.

Canonical

Canonical has decided to set up a dedicated team responsible for community-related matters. This team is managed by Jono Bacon and he prefers to name those who report to him as "Riders ", team members include Daniel Holbach, who is responsible for the developer community, Jorge Castro is responsible for the Community's "upstream" or external project liaison, David Panella is responsible for translation, his ultimate goal is to allow Ubuntu users to see their native language in Ubuntu. The new rider is Ahmed Kamal, responsible for the cloud computing community.

This full-time team further clarified the attitude of Canonical to the community. They will inevitably become the mentor of the community and play a new role in the Ubuntu ecosystem.