Stepping down from the IRC Council

[Lorenzo J. Lucchini]

After today's Community Council decision of adding several new members to the 
IRC Council, I believe the time has come for me to step down.

As you may know, I have had some issues during the past months about some 
IRC-related matters, and was considering giving up IRC Council duties.

While I was starting to feel a bit more comfortable lately, I definitely 
believe there don't need to be so many members in the IRC Council, so I'll 
pass the ball.

I also must admit that I've been feeling, in the past weeks, like there were 
debates ongoing and decisions being made about the IRC Council without the 
IRC Council, or at least myself, being in the least invited or involved; I 
may be mistaken, but I think this email I'm now sending was partly indirectly 
instigated.

I'd like to urge the IRC Council, the Community Council and the IRC Team to 
strive to avoid giving each other and the community this sort of sensation, 
as I believe it to be detrimental to the community's well-being.


I tried, during my time in the IRC Council, to create stronger ties between 
the English-speaking IRC community (namely, the IRC Team) and the teams that 
manage LoCo channels.

I'm relatively happy at the success of #ubuntu-irc in helping towards that 
goal, and I'm glad to see that many teams seemed excited at the idea of a 
tighter coordination (of course only to the extent it's beneficial), and how 
a simple document like https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IrcTeam/Coordination has been 
the start of something cool.


I hope that this approach, if deemed successful - or not necessarily this 
specific approach, but rather the wider idea of strengthening ties between 
various related groups - will in the future be applied in other instances, 
where (unfortunately, in my opinion) coordination has been lacking, or, in 
some specific very unfortunate cases, actively hindered by third parties who 
could take advantage of the weakness of ties between groups.


Feelings of secrecy, of things "being done behind one's back", really don't 
help, and lack of communication fuels such feelings; trying to "fix" it with 
a sudden burst of communication, on the other hand, may easily be felt 
as "stomping on feet".

So, my suggestion is to use a soft approach. For example, I tried my best with 
the Coordination document and #ubuntu-irc to make LoCo channels leaders feel 
like they were being invited to something new and cool, rather than being 
forced to follow a new set of rules and report to people they had little or 
no communication with, before.

I hope that will be a useful example for future actions.


Good luck IRC Team!


by LjL
ljl at ubuntu.com
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