Key Ubuntu teams should have an open process for new members

[Sebastien Bacher]

(for context that's an email I sent the techboard before I joined the 
board, the discussion picked up recently and TB members agreed that we 
should have it on the mailing list)

Dear Technical Board,

I would like to bring that topic for consideration. I believe that the 
lack of open application process for core Ubuntu teams (Archive Admin, 
Release Team, SRU team) is hurting the project and has lead to an 
ongoing under-staffing of those groups.

I'm unsure how to best approach the topic so I'm going to list a few 
examples of situations I've witnessed or experienced and found problematic.

1. Could be an obvious one but the Archive and SRU teams don't have 
defined contact points, which makes quite difficult for anyone to engage 
with them. You can't try to IRC ping and hope someone reply but it is 
not great

2. Laney's application to become Archive Admin

The core teams members are usually  quite busy people. That's a topic 
that is coming on regular basis as people try to restore some sort of 
on-duty-rotation for the members, which has not had much success in 
recent years.

Iain proposed to join the ~ubuntu-archive team to help in early 2020. We 
had a in person discussion with several of the archive admins in 
Frankfurt in March at a Canonical event where everyone agreed that Iain 
is trusted and should be added, yet we couldn't move to the next step 
since there is no documented process to follow. Since we were a bit lost 
on how to get that moving I sent a group email end of June asking us to 
vote on adding Iain hoping it would unblock the situation. We got most 
people replying with a +1 position, then Steve replied by requesting 
that Iain got trained with an existing archive admin on specific tasks 
before being added. He also added that

'Regarding process: the de facto process up to now has been that you 
convince one of the administrators of the ~ubuntu-archive team, and 
you're in.'

3. Christian Ehrhardt applied to join the Archive team as well this 
year, he started by emailing me/a few others with an emailed titled 
'What does it take to become an Archive-Admin?'

which included those questions

'That made me wonder what exactly it would take to become an 
ArchiveAdmin myself.
There are plenty of docs about how to become a CoreDev or any of the
lower tier upload permissions. But the ArchiveAdmin role seems to be
freestyle - at least from what I can tell from the Wiki.

Thereby I was wondering - and hereby asking you - about:
- Are there things considered a strict requirement or qualification to
become an AA?
- Is there a formal process to become an Archive Admin?
- Are there regular rotations on AA-tasks like NBS, New queue, ...?
   - if so how much time per week is expected/required?'

To which he got as a reply

'So the Archive Admin team, similarly to the Ubuntu SRU and Ubuntu
Release teams, is a strict invite-only team with no formal process of
becoming one. The main reason is that being an AA gives a lot of power
in Ubuntu, basically giving full control over the Ubuntu archive
as-is, so it's not something anyone can get by just requesting
membership. This is also why there is no formal process as we do not
want it to be possible for arbitrary people to apply by themselves.'


That's not the first time I hear that position and I don't believe the 
claim to be true. I don't see how having an open process would lower the 
bar? The same people would take the decision of who is getting added. 
The application could go through a private list if needed. I also don't 
believe that we would have such a flow of low qualified applicants.

4. Those teams are understaffed and it is problematic for the project.

Random recent quotes from IRC

https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2022/10/06/%23ubuntu-release.html#t09:28
GunnarHj    The kinetic unapproved queue is longer than I would have 
expected a week before Final Freeze. Specifically gnome-user-docs is a 
concern of mine, but there are quite a few others. Is there a plan to 
attend to the queue soon?    09:28
xnox    GunnarHj:  i think a few release team people are out.
...
Eickmeyer[m]ginggs: I'm confused too. AIUI, the release team (partially 
meaning you) is supposed to be processing the unapproved queue this time 
of the release cycle. It hasn't budged all week.
...
rs2009: am interested in joining the release team, but wasn't sure how 
to apply

https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2022/10/17/%23ubuntu-devel.html
pitti: what's up with SRUs? looks like the jammy queue hasn't been 
processed since mid-August?


5. Another anecdotal fact, 
https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-release/+members shows only 3 members 
added in the last 6 years and they are all coming from the Canonical 
Foundation team.

I've been told one new member is being onboarded which isn't from 
Foundations (but from another Canonical team) but I don't think that 
change the picture and it does look like people wanting their group to 
be the only ones to have control and reflect bad on the project (unless 
you believe we don't have members outside of Canonical-foundations that 
would be suited for the job or wanting to do it, which I don't think is 
true)


I've been talking to members of those teams and their admin over the 
years and I don't believe they are interested in seeing more openness in 
the process which I why I'm bringing the topic to the TB at this point. 
I'm happy to provide more examples or to discuss the situation directly 
with TB members if needed.

Also as a disclosure, I find the lack of manpower and the review delays 
from those teams problematic and I tried to proposed my help to the SRU 
team several times in the past in private conversation with current 
members who seemed to be open to the idea to never hear back. We also 
tried to get someone from ~ubuntu-desktop added to the release group 
after Laney left Canonical and had less time to contribute to hit a 
similar walls.

I'm busy enough and already member of other key teams and I might not 
been the right applicant for those but I would have like to at least 
have someone tell me that because at this point I still don't know if 
the idea of having me helping got rejected or not considered? And if it 
was not if that's because of the lack of process which means we just end 
up in a situation where those teams don't even realize that the project 
has some members that would be wanted to help?

I've also to admit the situation has made me wonder a few times in the 
recent cycles if I should reconsider my involvement in the project

Thanks for reading,
Sebastien Bacher