[UbuntuWomen] Testimonials for the Ubuntu Women Project Leadership Position

Matthew East mdke at ubuntu.com
Mon Jan 11 09:56:03 UTC 2010


Hi,

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 10:22 PM, Matt Zimmerman <mdz at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> It's my understanding that having the Community Council select a leader, as
> opposed to having an election, is fairly unusual.  I don't think there's an
> established process for how this works.

My reaction to this was the same as Matt's and I've raised it with the
CC already, but I think it's also worth clarifying here so that (a)
any misunderstandings in the Ubuntu Women community are avoided, and
(b) in case other teams are thinking of using this as a precedent.

I agree that this is unusual. The CC will usually be involved in
appointing team councils, but not team leaders. The reason for that is
that councils take delegated powers from the CC (appointment of Ubuntu
members, conflict resolution etc) and therefore it's thought to be
appropriate that the CC have involvement in those appointments. The
process set out on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CommunityCouncil/Delegation
applies to such appointments.

However in the case of an ordinary community team (artwork,
documentation, marketing, translation, ubuntu-women, local community
teams and so on) the CC isn't involved in the appointment of any
leader and the team is left to figure out their own processes and
leadership, if indeed they wish to have a leader at all - many don't.
For teams where a leader is appointed, I think my own expectations
would be that they would be selected either by consensus of the whole
team or by election within the team on which all participants in the
team can vote.

This is the first instance that I can recall where the CC has been
involved in the appointment of a leader in a community team, outside
the team councils that I've referred to above. For that reason I agree
with Matt that this is unusual.

The CC might become involved if there is a conflict about leadership
within a particular team. However, I don't understand that to be the
case here. As I understand it, the CC has become involved in this
through the specific request of the UW team. I don't quite understand
what the reasons are but personally I don't have a problem with the CC
being involved, provided that it's understood that its involvement was
at the request of the UW team itself, and that the CC as a matter of
principle doesn't seek to impose its choice of leader on this or any
other community team other than under the procedure set out in the
Delegation document and in specific instances like this one.

So with that background, here are my answers to the specific questions
Matt raised:

> Can you tell us a bit about how the CC will make their determination?  Is it
> fair to say that the expectations on
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CommunityCouncil/Delegation apply, as well as the
> UW-specific material on
> http://wiki.ubuntu-women.org/UbuntuWomen/LeadershipNominationsProcess/January2010?

No, I don't think the delegation page applies. As far as I can see,
the CC will simply try to select the best candidate for the job by
evaluating the candidates wiki pages and looking at the UbuntuWomen
wiki page.

> If the CC is making this choice on behalf of UW constituents, who will they
> consider those constituents to be?

I don't think the choice is made on behalf of UW constituents, I think
the CC is simply picking their preferred candidate.

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF




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