[UbuntuWomen] Testimonials for the Ubuntu Women Project Leadership Position

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