The Thunderbird Council is the governing body of the Thunderbird project (and since June of this year, this includes K-9 Mail). It consists of seven councilors, elected by the Thunderbird community’s active contributors.
And the next Thunderbird Council election is coming up. People eligible to vote and to stand as candidates need to be on an electoral roll. Contributors are eligible to be an elector if they have contributed 10 or more hours per year of involvement in the Thunderbird project (including K-9 Mail). To illustrate this, if a contributor first became involved three years ago then the expected contribution is at least 30 hours, if two years ago then at least 20 hours, and if one year ago or less then at least 10 hours. Contributors may self-nominate, and on request must submit examples that illustrate their level of involvement.
Contribution can be any of the following:
- triaging bugs;
- fixing, or reviewing code changes;
- providing support on SUMO or other forums (including this forum);
- localizing Thunderbird (or K-9 Mail), related websites, or extensions;
- testing, writing, or reviewing add-ons;
- furthering the Thunderbird cause by constructive contributions to tb-planning;
- or public relations, including writing blog posts, posting on social media, artwork, etc.
This simple rule will spare us any complicated metric, such as “x number of patches submitted”, “x bugs submitted” or “x SUMO comments written”, etc. If we have missed a group of contributors, or if you are unsure if your contribution qualifies, please reach out to the Council (at council@thunderbird.net).
Since we already know some of the people who are dedicating time, their most precious asset, to Thunderbird, we have prepared a preliminary electoral roll based on previous years. The roll is available on GitHub. New additions are listed at the bottom under “(new for 2022)”.
We ask voters who were previously added to the electoral roll to check for themselves whether they still fulfill the criteria mentioned above and inform us if they are no longer contributing to the Thunderbird project at the required level or do not wish to participate in the election. We also kindly ask you to notify others who may be eligible to self-nominate if you notice someone is missing from the electoral roll.
To reiterate, people who are not on the preliminary electoral roll can contact any member of the Council (at council@thunderbird.net), mentioning their contribution and asking to be added to the electoral roll. The idea is not to make it hard to be on the electoral roll.
In general, the election process will work as in past years (as documented in the bylaws), follow-up emails will include more instructions on the exact timeline, but you will have until at least November 28th, 2022 to be added to the electoral roll.
The election itself will be run by neutral 3rd parties: Peter Saint-Andre, with G. Matthew Rice helping to moderate the list.
PS: I’ve adapted the original announcement by Andrei Hajdukewycz (Thunderbird Council Secretary) to hopefully answer some questions members of the K-9 Mail community who are not yet that familiar with the Thunderbird project might have.