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A key change at iCommons
If you're not part of the iCommons mailing list, take a look at the letter that Heather Ford, Executive Director of iCommons, sent to the list yesterday:
Dear friends,
At the 2 August iCommons Board Meeting, the board decided to make some difficult but necessary changes at iCommons. It has become clear over the past months that our vision for iCommons is different from the... more
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Governance, Ubuntu-style
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 How to govern open societies has been a topic of heated discussion for many people at iCommons. How does a community, that is open and transparent, take decisions? How does a community that is open, transparent and global take decisions? How can excellent products be developed if the people working on them are all volunteers?
The obvious thing to do, when faced with questions like this, is to look to the experts to ask how others have approached this question. Ubuntu, the Linux distribution founded by Mark Shuttleworth is a great example of a successful, evolving open society, which has had to invent it's own ways of doing things.
iCommons spoke to Mark Shuttleworth about the founding of Ubuntu and how the community developed its methods of governance and how they are evolving.
What were the founding principles behind Ubuntu?
Right from the beginning, the goal was to produce a high quality distro that would always be made freely available to the public. Ubuntu was founded because I didn't believe that any of the existing companies producing Linux distributions would keep their products free in the long term. I believed that there would be a shift towards a more proprietary strategy once they had become popular and that that would be a missed opportunity in terms of the amazing potential of the free software movement. I believed that free software was a winning strategy and as such that it was also a smart investment.
Tell us about the Ubuntu community and how it was structured when you first started:
From the very beginning it was clear that anyone who was willing to make a significant contribution would be able to assume any role within the project and that there would always be room for outside participants in all of the structures that we created. This early decision forced us to do things in a bunch of different ways.
The first thing that happened was that, because we are all spread out around the world, discussions happened on mailing lists and IRC chat where (potentially) anyone can listen in and feel part of the discussion. Participation in every structure of the Ubuntu community is open to members of the community.
Describe the governance system:
The Ubuntu community is supervised by the Ubuntu Community Council that approves the creation of a new Team or Project, and appoints of team leaders. In addition, the Community Council is the body responsible for the Code of Conduct and tasked with ensuring that maintainers and other community members follow its guidelines. Participation in every structure of the Ubuntu community is open to members of the community.
I can imagine that loads of people from around the world want to use the Ubuntu trademark for their community-building projects. How do you manage the trademark?
We have a pretty open trademark policy. If you want to use the trademark to promote what you're doing locally, you just write us an email and we issue you with a licence.
According to Rishab Gosh from the FLOSS World project firms generally contribute about 17% of a free software project, with individuals making up the remaining amount. How does Ubuntu compare?
We started off with 15 people ' of which 10 worked full time for Canonical. Now its about 250 people of which 80 are developers, and 20 who work for Canonical.
So do you think that projects require this kind of 'start-up' funding to be successful?
Yes - though in some cases the contribution of the founders is such that they are the anchor team. In the case of Ubuntu, the scale of the challenge is so large that it needed a substantial full time team just to get going.
How did you come to develop Launchpad? iCommons is looking at developing a similar set of tools for our projects and we're interested in finding out how your tools came about.
In order to collaborate on such a large-scale project, we needed collaboration tools that didn't exist at the time ' for example, we wanted to be able to track our bugs along with Debian bugs and to collaborate with multiple parties.
So we built our own tools. Bazaar is a code-tracking tool that allows many-to-many collaboration, and Launchpad is a bug tracking application.
There are currently about 1500 projects using Launchpad ' 400 of which are tracking translations, about 300 are bug tracking projects and about 100 are for future planning projects.
Wow! We're impressed! And definitely inspired that iCommons may just be on the right track!
Picture: 'Mo-Shuttleworth' by Phillipa Moore, CC BY-SA 2.0 SA
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