DMB meetings

The Developer Membership Board conducts meetings every two weeks.

Scheduling

DMB meetings are held on Mondays alternating between 13:00 UTC and 15:30 UTC. In case of common vacations (such as over New Year), a meeting may be skipped. Refer to the Agenda to check on the times, dates and topics of upcoming meetings.

The meeting schedule can be changed by the DMB by majority vote, and it is expected for the schedule to be confirmed or changed as necessary at the first meeting after new DMB members are elected. Please also consider the needs of pending and future applicants if changing the schedule, as doing so may affect their plans.

Meeting location

The meeting starts on Matrix in the #meeting:ubuntu.com channel, and we then offer to move to a Google Meet. If participants are unable (or do not want) to use Google Meet, we conduct the meeting on Matrix.

Chair

We share the responsibility of chairing the meetings.

The chair drives the meeting according the agenda, ensures we are following the rules of the Voting and quorum section, assigns follow up tasks like Application-related communication.

At the end of every meeting, we try to pre-select the next meeting’s chair.

General progress during meetings

In January 2023 the DMB agreed to the following. See the original thread (November 2022 and January 2023) for more details.

  • We accept that it’s OK for DMB members to be absent or distracted for whatever reason, but not to hold up meetings because of this. Corollary: if as a DMB member you are so distracted that you’re holding up the meeting, then maybe you should consider yourself to be actually absent, and conscious to not hold the others up waiting on you.

  • We think that three minutes is about the maximum that should normally be acceptable for a response from a DMB member, with the majority of responses expected to be much quicker than that.

  • If a DMB member holds up meeting progress for more than three minutes because we’re waiting for a response from them, then the chair should consider that person to be absent and move on. This includes voting: if that means the vote wasn’t quorate, then we will end the vote and continue as if that person was absent anyway.

  • DMB members should prepare questions and comments in advance as much as possible to avoid holding up meetings while they research, think and type.

  • However, we don’t want to prevent people from taking their time to research, think or or type long answers when this is actually required – for example in response to something that happened during the meeting itself. So a DMB member can indicate that they are genuinely active in the meeting but not ready to speak yet by sending “…”, or a longer explanation if they wish, at least once every three minutes. This can include thinking time, doing research on an application, working on a long answer, etc. We will take “…” to mean “I’m still here, working on my next message to the channel, extending my timeout by another three minutes”. The meeting will normally then wait for their message before moving on, subject to the chair’s discretion.

  • For the avoidance of doubt, the above applies to DMB members only, not to anyone else, and certainly not to applicants. We’ve not seen an issue with applicants being unreasonably slow to respond, and want them to give us thoughtful responses and not feel under any additional pressure. They should respond as feel appropriate and as they always have done.

Handling applications

  • Try to handle applicants in the order they applied; earliest first.

  • Applicants will usually attend a Matrix/Google Meets meeting to be questioned by the DMB on matters that members wish to clarify before they can vote. If the applicants or the DMB are having trouble meeting each other (for example, due to time zone) then as a fallback, the application may be handled over email, but it is important this happens in a timely fashion.

  • Many of our applicants do not have English as their first language.

    • Be understanding if the answers you get are not 100% clear.

    • Ask questions one at a time. Let the meeting know when you are done questioning so that others can take over.

  • Make sure that the applicant has signed the Ubuntu Code of Conduct. It must be signed by every Ubuntu Developer.