Universe Contributors application for James Westby (james_w)

James Westby james.westby at canonical.com
Fri Aug 1 14:00:47 BST 2008


Hi all,

I would like to apply to become an Ubuntu Universe Contributor.

I have been involved in Ubuntu development for about 9 months now.
I have been helping out with various development tasks, but I
haven't really focused on one area. The closest I have come is
work on desktop packages and the utopia stack.

I have also contributed things outside of the patches/merges
area of development, for instance I have restarted MOTU
school, and thanks to Cesare and the rest of the mentoring team
this is starting to pick up speed.

You can see a summary of my development contributions to Ubuntu
at

   https://wiki.ubuntu.com/JamesWestby

My plan for the future is to keep on doing what I am doing.
I believe that under the new mentoring scheme I would become
eligible to mentor new contributors if I were accepted as
a Universe Contributor, which is something that I would like
to do. I would also keep working on the technical side with
a hope to one day be in a position to apply for MOTU status
so that I can do things like help out with the sponsoring
queue.

I'm Cc-ing three people that I have worked quite closely with
on various things. I hope that they can say that I am a valuable
contributor, and vouch that I uphold the CoC in my work. Martin and
Sebastien have sponsored a few uploads from me to main for desktop
packages. I worked with Sebastien and Bryce to fix some bugs in
the new xrandr capplet, as that was in pretty bad shape just before
the release of Hardy. dholbach has also sponsored a number of small
fixes for me in Universe. The other universe work went through
the sponsors queue, and so I am not sure who uploaded it.

Thanks for considering my application,

James

P.S. In the last paragraph I hinted at a slight problem I see
with the current system. If someone does a lot of good work through
the sponsors queue then they may not interact much with other
developers, and so it may be difficult for them to know who
to approach to advocate them. An application just with evidence
of their work may be good enough, but it's not really how things
seem to work for most people. It seems like something that
the MOTU Council may want to consider.

P.P.S. I am using my Canonical address for the application, which
is not the address I normally use on the mailing lists, not
because I think it should influence the decision, but just so that
you have all of the facts. :-)





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