We will be applying updates to all our servers and rebooting.
As part of this we will be doing a large upgrade to the Wiki, which will be down at least two hours.
The other services will be up or down during the outage window.
admin )
on 2025-05-22 21:00:00 UTC
We will be applying updates to all our servers and rebooting.
As part of this we will be doing a large upgrade to the Wiki, which will be down at least two hours.
The other services will be up or down during the outage window.
admin )
on 2025-05-20 20:13:07 UTC
Voting in the Fedora Linux 42 elections is now open. Go to the Elections app to cast your vote. This cycle we have lots of amazing candidates nominated for Council, Mindshare, EPEL and FESCo. Voting will close at 23:59 UTC on Monday, June 2 at 23:59 UTC and don’t forget to claim your “I Voted” badge when you cast your ballot. Links to candidate interviews are below.
There are four seats open for the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo). The candidates for election are:
There are two seats open for the Fedora Council. The candidates for election are:
There are four seats open for the Fedora Council. The candidates for election are:
There are three seats open for the EPEL Steering Committee. The candidates for election equal the number of open seats, so by default, the following candidates will be elected to the EPEL Steering Committee on June 2, 2025.
The post F42 Elections Voting is now Open! appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2025-05-20 20:06:31 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
Having been present in different areas and having served on the council, I can offer a user-centric perspective that considers not only the technical aspects, but also the needs of the users. From the council, we can make decisions that impact how users see not only the community, but also its management.
The hot topic right now is the ability to stream and play AAA games on Linux. To attract users who have tried Linux in the past and failed, I would show them how these two points are now good and demonstrate how we are improving our technology stack. By showing this, we could change how Fedora Linux is seen as a distribution for developers. We should also promote the Fedora podcast more. I may be biased because I founded it, but with YouTube’s growth and one of the biggest YouTubers’ recent adoption of Linux, Linux adoption is going to grow. By showcasing the project on YouTube through the podcast and other projects on the official Fedora channel, we can attract new users.
By being the activity increase in our public places, like mastodon, discourse, matrix and discord
The Fedora Project is a place to promote, integrate and use the newest technologies while keeping current and previous technologies working as expected.
I do remote work, so I can be active every time the project needs me.
The post Fedora Council Elections: Interview with Eduard Lucena (x3mboy) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2025-05-20 19:59:40 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
I’ve been an active Fedora contributor for over 12 years—co‑maintaining the Python and 3D‑printing stacks and sponsoring new packagers—and I’ve served five years on the Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) and seven years on the Packaging Committee (FPC). Through those roles I’ve gained a deep understanding of how Fedora is built and governed. I can bring that experience to the Fedora Council and ensure that the people who do the day‑to‑day work of creating Fedora Linux have a strong, informed voice at the table.
Onboarding new contributors is the key. Packaging is one of the most visible and rewarding entry points for newcomers, but our current sponsorship and review processes can be complex, intimidating and slow. I’d like to:
By making packaging more accessible, we’ll give new contributors quick wins, boost their confidence, and inspire them to explore other areas of Fedora.
The ultimate sign of Fedora’s impact is when it becomes the default platform for open‑source development and emerging technologies—such as AI. Success metrics might include:
fedora-latest (or even select it as default) and how many major projects (e.g. Python, Rust, GNOME, the Linux kernel) use it.By combining quantitative tracking (CI default stats, WSL distro statistics) with qualitative engagement (surveys, interviews), we can see where Fedora leads, where we trail, and where to invest next.
Fedora should be the premier innovation platform for the entire open‑source ecosystem.
Whether you’re launching an AI framework, advancing the Linux desktop, or experimenting with 3D printing software, Fedora ought to be your first choice for building, testing, and distributing your work. We already have a good range of tools for this.
As Council members, we must nurture all of these channels and actively create new ones to keep Fedora at the forefront of open‑source development.
I’m on the Python Maintenance team at Red Hat, and my manager fully supports my candidacy. If elected:
The post Fedora Council Elections: Interview with Miro Hrončok (churchyard) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2025-05-20 19:52:10 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
I’d like to help the Fedora Project to continue to be a supportive diverse international FOSS community. I want to support the non-US perspective in Council discussions and to help deal with existing or future issues, which may appear.
One of the projects I have been thinking for a while is bringing the GitOps ideas to the distribution building (see https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/rfc-new-community-initiative-gitops-for-fedora-packaging/146990 )
I’d like make the overall process of making a distribution to become more accessible and more open to new contributors, beyond just the packager role.
I would like to see Fedora as a first choice for upstream projects to try and test the new features and integration scenarios.
I see the goal of the Fedora Project to integrate the variety of FOSS tools and applications into a platform which can be presented to a user as a unified experience or can be used to build other higher level services.
And as such, the project needs not just tools and services for building and testing code, but also a communication platform and the community which can handle the discussions and arguments around that code and its integration issues.
Tough question. I will do my best 
The post Fedora Council Elections: Interview with Aleksandra Fedorova (bookwar) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2025-05-20 19:47:27 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
During my past involvement with Fedora Council as Mentored Projects Initiative co-leader, I learned a lot about the project governance and which areas need more support. I want to continue focusing on mentoring but this time internal mentoring and Fedora policies regarding it. How to introduce new people to Fedora kernel, infrastructure, DEI, applications and other SIGs.
In addition, there should be more guidance for council members, so they can contribute more efficiently. I want to contribute to such guides for the future council members. Last but not least, I think I have a good “get things done” mentality that helps to move forward topics with pro-active helping.
I think the participation and promotion of Fedora in mentoring programs and internal mentoring is crucial to achieve this goal. When people contribute to projects they feel rewarded and that encourage them to continue contributing. Internal mentoring creates alternatives for existing contributor to be able to contribute to another area of their interest. This is vital to keep them engaged in the community.
Measuring a project success is a very hard task. In my opinion, a successful FOSS project are those that meet the user needs, adapt over time to new needs and all of these while having an inclusive and healthy community with open discussions.
I guess a more objective and easy way of measuring it is based on user base adoption rate and satisfaction.
I don’t think I will ever see Fedora out of the Solar System so that makes this answer much simpler. I think it could be or maybe is, the most popular Linux distribution and one of the distributions that could convince people to move away from proprietary operative systems.
Fedora Council work won’t be related to my day-to-day work. Although, a week has 168 hours, considering I want to sleep 56 of them and need to work another 40 of them.. I will have around 72 hours of free time per week (wow, this is quite depressing). I can probably take a couple of hours a week to work in the Fedora Council
The post Fedora Council Elections: Interview with Fernando F Mancera (ffmancera) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2025-05-20 19:41:26 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
I’ve been around Fedora since the beginning. I love Fedora, and I want to see it continue to grow and thrive. I have a fair amount of experience serving on and with governing bodies. This is one of the areas where I can most effectively contribute to projects now.
There are many ways to increase contributions. I’d like to focus on two that both involve expanding our contributor pool beyond the people making Fedora Linux.
First, there is a lot of room for alternative distributions and package sets. We see this already in editions and spins. By identifying target audiences, we can encourage more contributions in new areas.
Second, there are a number of systems derived from Fedora, such as CentOS, various CentOS derivatives, Amazon Linux, and the distros from Universal Blue. For various reasons, these projects are not part of Fedora. Nonetheless, there is a lot of room for contributors to those projects to also be Fedora contributors in a mutually beneficial way. We see this already, and I’d work to strengthen those relationships.
The Council created Strategy 2028 to double the number of active contributors. This is a measurable outcome, and we should continue to monitor it and work towards it. Aside from the Fedora strategy, I often look at how often Fedora and family are referenced online. When I search for how to do something on Linux, I want the search results to be full of answers for Fedora and related distros.
Fedora should be the default choice for Linux. It is user-friendly and innovative, and it helps drive many of the technologies that shape the Linux landscape. Our engineering is excellent, but we can do more to prmote Fedora as the leading distribution it is.
I’m fortunate to have a job that will support me doing Council work during work time. That said, I’ll be honest that I’m stretched thing and my existing obligations aren’t going away. Fedora Council and other high-level strategic work is important to me, and I’ll continue to work to get more community engagement on other work to free me up for this.
The post Fedora Council Elections: Interview with Shaun McCance (shaunm) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2025-05-20 19:36:44 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
I have a great love for the Fedora community, and want to ensure it continues to be a strong and vibrant place. One of the best way I can contribute is to help the Fedora council make great decisions. For me, it’s about giving back to a great project.
First, it’s about ensuring that Fedora continues to be appealing — not only as an operating system, but as a community and a project. It’s also about recognizing that perhaps free software operating systems aren’t as cool or shiny as they were 20 years ago, and that’s OK — part of what makes Fedora special is the community that it has built — and perhaps we haven’t been good at explaining that part.
I would love to see Fedora leadership focus as much on community engagement as they do downloads.
I see Fedora as an incredible group of humans — from many parts of the world — who come together to participate and make something bigger than themselves. It’s a place where people (typically) respect each other, collaborate to solve interesting problems, and continue to promote the ideals of software freedom and innovation.
I think it’s a myth that people just “find” free time. Fedora is important to me, and I’ll prioritize it in my schedule so that I can actively participate.
The post Fedora Council Elections: Interview with Jared Smith (jsmith) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2025-05-20 19:30:48 UTC
This is a part of the Fedora Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
Since the past year, I have been deeply involved in both the investigation (community preferences between Forgejo and GitLab) and the implementation of the Fedora Project’s move from Pagure to Forgejo. One of my major focuses throughout this contribution was to ensure that we were making technological decisions and contributions as democratically as possible. Regardless of which subprojects or SIGs contributors hailed from, I ensured that their opinions were accounted for in the final decision on where the Fedora Project would collaborate. Beyond the recognition and learning, I believe it is crucial to ensure that members have clear pathways for contribution and a meaningful sense of impact. This helps ensure that contributors are not only motivated to continue, but also encourages existing contributors to mentor and support their growth.
With that being where I am coming from, I wish to utilize this platform to continue making technological decisions accessible to the various subprojects and SIGs that make use of our infrastructure services. I want to be able to devise pathways through which we can mentor prospective contributors without needing a scoped project or a formalized mentoring program. Alongside that, I want to continue my role as an effective conduit between sponsored teams and community teams, to understand the evolving needs of infrastructure applications – and potentially lead the creation of new ones as needed by the community or the Fedora Council. With my continuous participation in the Fedora Join SIG over the years, I also wish to contribute significantly toward realizing the Fedora Project’s strategic goal of doubling the number of active contributors.
I have taken a statistical approach to onboarding, mentoring, and retention of contributors for several years now, and it largely remains the same – whether I am participating as a mentor in a formalized mentorship program or guiding a group of interested volunteers toward contributions. Following Ankur Sinha’s ideology of “seeking potential, not polish” in contributors (which has been ingrained in me for over five years), I plan on establishing pathways through which we can build a structured mentoring cohort without being constrained by the scoped projects and monetary requirements that often accompany formalized mentoring programmes. The ultimate goal is to create a positive space within the community where newcomers are encouraged to bring fresh ideas to the table, driving an innovative yet sustainable path toward Fedora Project’s growth.
The strength of the Fedora Project lies in the people involved in it. These include contributors designing the next community mascot, members writing documentation on how to get NVIDIA drivers working, engineers ensuring maximum uptime in the infrastructure, individuals publishing posts about recent developments in our community, and our most esteemed users who make use of the technology we create. We all mutually derive energy from one another, and any deterioration in community health within a particular subproject or SIG tends to reflect on others as well in one way or another. Alongside the lived experience of contributing to the team, we can also make use of anonymized statistical surveys to gather metrics about discussions in forums, meetings in channels, contributions to repositories, attendance at events, and more.
Fedora Linux has been the distribution where I finally stopped distrohopping about six years ago, when I was looking for something that would run better than Windows on my aging laptop. I could go on about Fedora Linux being a balanced blend of unmatched innovation and stellar user experience, but I like to think we are more than that. With a range of downstream distributions like RHEL, CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux, Alma Linux, Amazon Linux, and others, our community empowers people with the technology of today that shapes the enterprise distributions of tomorrow. People not only get the opportunity to contribute to an inclusive community, but their contributions also flow into our friend projects like Podman, Ansible, OpenShift, Distrobox etc. – making us one of the most exciting and rewarding communities to be a part of.
I am grateful to be employed in close proximity to the Fedora Project and CentOS Project communities, and my organization i.e. Red Hat Community Linux Engineering team has consistently enabled me to connect and collaborate with the community members. I have always made it a point to set aside time – whether I am working on infrastructure development or simply hanging out with my Fedora Project friends. While time zones can make it challenging to connect with folks on the other side of the world, that has never stopped me from moving appointments around my calendar to make space for what matters to me most i.e. participating in the Fedora Council. Furthermore, I plan to commit a dedicated, scheduled time each week to proactively (not reactively) prioritize action items, while emphasizing delegation wherever applicable.
The post Fedora Council Elections: Interview with Akashdeep Dhar (t0xic0der) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2025-05-20 19:21:48 UTC
This is a part of the Mindshare Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
I’ve been on the fringes (brim?) of Fedora for a long time – I’ve been at Red Hat for over a decade, and I’ve worked on projects like Foreman and Ansible, and I’ve got lots of friends in Fedora.
In the last year or so I’ve come closer by joining the CommOps data work that Justin and Robert were leading, helping to do survey writing & analysis, and generally just lending an opinion where I can. I’ve also tried to learn from / contribute to Fedora in use of Matrix & Discourse, both of which I brought to Ansible.
This year, I formally joined Fedora for the day-job too, as a member of the Community Linux Engineering team. That means I’m back to being a sysadmin alongside people like Kevin and Michal and helping to run our infrastructure.
I might have returned to my sysadmin roots for my job, but I still care a great deal about community architect work, especially from a data perspective. I’ve had some great chats with various existing Mindshare folks about how we can use the data we hold in ways that benefit the project and the community, and I thought it might be a good idea to be here in person to drive those efforts. I’d like to see us making strong use of that data to support the various Mindshare Teams in their work, as well as using it to support the wider Fedora strategy.
Data visualisation can be incredibly effective if done well – the popularity of sites like dataisbeautoful and so forth are ample proof. So we don’t just need to get a grip on our data, we need to message it well. I’d like to see CommOps taking a lead on the data, but also rworking with Design, Marketing, and others to make the insights we find really land with users and contributors.
I’m really just restating the above here, but our data! I think the Mindshare Committee could be crucial for gathering expectations on what data would be useful to the various teams, and helping making sure that data gets delivered. Repeating work in disjointed ways isn’t going to get us as good a result, and the Committee can provide that oversight.
The post Mindshare Elections: Interview with Greg Sutcliffe (gwmngilfen) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2025-05-20 19:16:49 UTC
This is a part of the Mindshare Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
I’ve worked as ambassador for a long time, also I worked with commops, marketing, I was also member of the Mindshare Committee, and representative in the Council. Right now I’m working in the i3 Spin, and
I’m starting y first package, also I’m an infra apprentice.
The Mindshare Committee was created with the intention of reunite all non technical teams, and improve the communication between the non technical and the technical parts of Fedora. Today I feel like Ambassadors are lost, Design team is doing an awesome work, CommOps have suffered several re-constructions and the communication is as broken as it can be. I want to contribute in create that bridge again and more: I want to contribute in creating a real bridge between users and the Fedora Project.
By being present. One thing that you can feel is that every contributor is on their own, only some SIGs and the Design team are seen as teams and not a person alone. By making the teams to be able to project the work as a team, the community can see Mindshare as a committee that can help them to accomplish their goals.
CommOps without a doubt.
The post Mindshare Elections: Interview with Eduard Lucena (x3mboy) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2025-05-20 19:11:05 UTC
This is a part of the Mindshare Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
I have been involved in Fedora for almost four years and primarily work on the Fedora Design team. My past and current projects include:
Currently, I am preparing assets and designs for Flock Prague 
I’m passionate about free and open-source software (FOSS) and a strong advocate for open design. To me, open design means making design accessible to everyone — both in the final product and in how it’s created. It’s about sharing knowledge openly and encouraging community participation.
I think Fedora really reflects those values, and I’d love to be more involved in the leadership behind it. The work that Mindshare does to support community outreach and contributor engagement is important. It’s essential to have representation from all parts of the community, and I believe I can bring a different perspective as a non-technical contributor.
Being a key member of the Design team would be beneficial to Mindshare’s Digital Ambassadorship. I can integrate this into the Design team’s workflow and help lead the content creation process by making sure our branding and messaging is consistent in any visuals we may want to use. This would help make the Mindshare Committee and make our visual identity more recognisable.
We should probably focus more on keeping contributors around in the non-technical SIGs. Technical contributions are key for Fedora, but non-technical SIGs are just as important.
This really fits with the Mindshare Committee main responsibilities outlined on their docs page. I’m especially interested in helping boost involvement in the quieter parts of our community.
I’ve already started doing this with the Design Team by creating onboarding docs, and I’m planning to document more of our resources and how we work.
The post Mindshare Elections: Interview with Emma Kidney (ekidney) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2025-05-20 19:04:50 UTC
This is a part of the Mindshare Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
I’ve been at least tangentially involved with Fedora since the beginning. Initially, I worked with the Fedora documentation team while I was the GNOME documentation team lead, then later as a documentation community architect at Red Hat. I now work as the CentOS community architect. As part of that role, I often work with the Fedora community architect on a number of things, from social media to event execution.
I’m passionate about promoting Fedora specifically and open source in general. Although I have a technical background, I’ve found that community engagement and promotion are where I can contribute most effectively. There’s a lot of opportunity for cross-community engagement between Fedora and CentOS, and I think that serving on Mindshare will allow me to increase these efforts.
Mindshare serves as a sort of umbrella for a number of Fedora teams. Rather than focus on improving the visibility of Mindshare itself, we should work to align these teams and provide them the resources they need, so that their work can be more visible in the community.
We can be more strategic in our community engagement efforts. Our events presence tends to be haphazard, without a unifying message. Some of our social media channels have great content, but we don’t have project-wide strategic goals across all our social media. I would work across the teams to develop plans that align with Fedora Strategy 2028.
The post Mindshare Elections: Interview with Shaun McCance (shaunm) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2025-05-20 18:56:57 UTC
This is a part of the Mindshare Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
I currently work as the lead for Release Engineering on the Community Linux Engineering team. I’ve held this position for several releases now, including most recently Fedora Linux 42. My involvement spans across the full release process—from branching, signing, and mass rebuilds to finalizing deliverables. Over time, I’ve taken up mentoring new contributors, writing documentation, and automating parts of the releng workflow.
Beyond release engineering, I’ve actively contributed to Fedora’s community outreach. I co-organized Fedora Hatch Pune 2022, which was part of the post-pandemic reintroduction of local Fedora events. Most recently, I served as one of the lead organizers for GNOME Asia 2024 in Bangalore, which was proudly sponsored by Fedora. I’ve also represented Fedora as a speaker at various conferences to promote open source collaboration and awareness.
My journey into Fedora began after contributing to Debian, where I worked on packaging Kotlin and some Ruby libraries. The welcoming nature of Fedora—especially through Fedora India meetups—really pulled me in and motivated me to give back even more.
My motivation stems from the grassroots experiences I’ve had within the Fedora community—both as a contributor and as an organizer. Being part of event planning, release operations, and community discussions has shown me the immense value of unified outreach and communication.
Mindshare is the glue that binds the community side of Fedora—mentorship, events, DEI, and marketing. I want to bring a fresh and on-the-ground perspective to the committee. Especially now, with the new structure, refined responsibilities, and renewed focus on contributor support coming to Mindshare, I believe it’s the right time (after sharing a fair bit of organising events, talking to contributors, etc) to step up and help evolve how Fedora engages with its global community.
I’ve seen how transformative local events and inclusive spaces can be. My “why” is simple: to help Fedora be more visible, more welcoming, and more accessible to every potential contributor, no matter where they come from.
To improve Mindshare’s visibility, we need to bridge the gap between what the committee can offer and what contributors experience/expect day to day.
One of the first areas I’d focus on is regional engagement, especially in APAC, which often gets overlooked in larger Fedora activities. Despite having a growing and enthusiastic contributor base, many APAC contributors struggle with visibility, support, or even awareness of what Mindshare or Fedora can provide them. I’d work to:
Secondly, I want to highlight a very thoughtful idea from my manager and mentor, Ant, who proposed a smoother and smarter onboarding process for new contributors. Too often, we lose interested people simply because there’s no follow-up or structured path after their first interaction. His roadmap for contributor onboarding outlines:
During my term, I’d love to collaborate with Mindshare and community teams to pilot and scale this approach, making Fedora more welcoming, especially for those unsure of where to begin. How? Let’s implement the proposal for a month to assess its KPIs, followed by a retrospective
Lastly, visibility also means storytelling, showcasing success stories, contributions, and event highlights through Fedora Magazine, social media, and meetups, so contributors feel part of a living, breathing community. We have talented designers and visually proficient members of both CLE and the Fedora community who we could involve in this. Again, bridging that Red Hat – Fedora divide to increase engagement. Let’s begin with a small initiative, like a “Fedora Voice of the Month” feature. Perhaps we can share these narratives through an introductory article.
The APAC region needs focused attention, both in terms of visibility and contributor recognition. While we have a strong and growing contributor base here, there are consistent barriers that limit participation in Fedora’s global landscape: time zone differences, limited access to funding, visa struggles, or simply a lack of regular local engagement.
Instead of large-scale funding pushes, I want to explore low-cost, high-impact ways (this is the new proposed scheme,e which I think will be very helpful) to:
Another area I care deeply about is onboarding and retention. Many contributors join Fedora with enthusiasm but quietly step back due to unclear guidance or a lack of follow-up. I’ve been inspired to help implement a more structured and friendly contributor experience. During my term, I’d like to support:
Finally, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) is a value I deeply care about. I’ve been inspired by the amazing work led by Jona, Justin, and many others, whether it’s a welcoming social space or a campaign that uplifts stories from around the world. A small effort, like a video or social highlight, goes a long way. From my gathered knowledge from my new Mindshare hat on, I would like to bridge the gap between all the moving parts so the information remains centralised and easier for everyone to navigate!
For example, at GNOME Asia 2023 in Nepal, I attended my first Fedora DEI session. It was inspiring, but it also made me think: what’s next? How do we ensure that DEI isn’t just a message, but a movement? I’d like to help:
Fedora thrives because of its people. And through better recognition, smarter onboarding, and deeper inclusion, I believe Mindshare can help bring the heart of Fedora closer to everyone.
The post Mindshare Elections: Interview with Samyak Jain (jnsamyak) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2025-05-20 18:51:01 UTC
This is a part of the Mindshare Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
I’ve been an active contributor to the Fedora Project for over a decade, primarily as a key member of the Fedora QA team. Throughout this journey, I have participated in and signed off on numerous Fedora releases, ensuring quality through structured test planning, organizing test days, and coordinating Rawhide test efforts. My role has evolved over time to include not just testing, but also community engagement and advocacy. I have been a visible and vocal ambassador for Fedora, regularly promoting it at conferences, university events, and through online platforms.
In addition to QA, I’ve taken on mentorship responsibilities — helping new contributors onboard, guiding Google Summer of Code interns as an Org Admin, and actively contributing to Fedora’s mentorship and onboarding initiatives. I’ve also helped shape test planning and communication processes for Fedora’s diverse SIGs, including accessibility (a11y), power management, and container technologies like Podman. More recently, I’ve helped integrate AI/ML use cases with Fedora tooling, organized Fedora x PyTorch sessions at events like DevConf.IN, and contributed to Fedora Magazine and community documentation.
Over the last 10+ years in the Fedora Project, I’ve come to realize that contribution is only part of the story — the rest is recognition, representation, and reach. My motivation to be a candidate for Fedora Mindshare comes from these values, built through years of engagement as a QA contributor, release sign-off lead, mentor, and passionate advocate.
I believe recognition is not just a pat on the back; it’s a vital tool for sustainability. I’ve seen firsthand how a single word of encouragement or a spotlight on someone’s work can inspire long-term engagement. This is why I’ve taken on roles that go beyond testing — helping onboard new contributors, organizing Fedora Magazine articles to highlight community voices, and shaping mentorship initiatives that offer visible pathways for growth.
I’ve also worked to expand Fedora’s adoption in local and underrepresented regions. Whether it’s representing Fedora at DevConf.IN, mentoring GSoC contributors from across India, or leading Fedora x PyTorch meetups, I’ve tried to meet people where they are — in language, in accessibility, in culture. I want to bring this local-global balance to Mindshare: empowering Fedora contributors from diverse geographies to feel that this project belongs to them.
Most recently, I’ve been deeply involved with the Fedora a11y initiative — not just to improve accessibility for users, but to rethink how we include testers, contributors, and advocates who rely on accessible tools to participate. Fedora’s strength lies in being inclusive, and Mindshare plays a critical role in amplifying that.
With my background in QA, mentoring, event organizing, accessibility, and digital advocacy, I hope to strengthen the bridges between Fedora’s technical excellence and its human stories. I want to ensure that contributors feel seen, new users feel welcomed, and Fedora continues to thrive in both global and local communities.
To improve the visibility and awareness of the Mindshare Committee, I would focus on recognition, digital ambassadorship, and local engagement. We need to consistently highlight the people behind Fedora — not just through global events but by showcasing contributors’ work in everyday channels like Fedora Magazine, social media, and newsletters. Recognition builds momentum.
I’d also strengthen Fedora’s presence through digital ambassadors — contributors who share Fedora stories, updates, and achievements online in their regions and languages. This helps us reach new audiences authentically. Finally, I’d support local events and regional meetups by providing templates, promotion kits, and spotlighting them globally — making sure community-led efforts aren’t just heard locally, but celebrated across Fedora.
Mindshare can be the bridge that connects contribution with visibility.Mindshare needs to be seen not as a separate silo, but as a support structure that’s actively invested in the success of contributors. With better visibility, we strengthen Fedora’s contributor experience and make it easier for people to join, stay, and thrive.
The part of Fedora that I believe needs the most attention from the Mindshare Committee right now is localized engagement and contributor recognition. While Fedora has a global contributor base, much of our outreach, documentation, and event focus remains centralized. We need to empower local communities — not just with translations, but with resources to run events, share success stories, and advocate for Fedora in their own voice.In parallel, recognition remains an underutilized tool. We have contributors doing impactful work in QA, accessibility, mentoring, and packaging, but they often go unseen. Mindshare can help build a more visible and sustained culture of appreciation through shout-outs, badges, contributor spotlights, and structured pathways for digital ambassadorship.
The post Mindshare Elections: Interview with Sumantro Muckherjee (sumantrom) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2025-05-20 18:42:44 UTC
This is a part of the Mindshare Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
gridhead in most other platformsI started contributing to the Fedora Project about five years back, and then I slowly moved on to maintaining Fedora Websites and Apps, both as a volunteer engineer and an objective representative to the Fedora Council. I have dabbled with the mentorship endeavours of the Fedora Project community every now and then, taking on a bunch of mentees both during formalized mentoring programmes and structured infrastructure initiatives.
I have been organizing and participating in various events (virtual and in-person alike) where I represented the Fedora Project either with the presentations I deliver or with the conversations I have, e.g., Fedora Hatch, Fedora Mentor Summit, FOSDEM, CentOS Connect, DevConf.IN, etc. I author posts on Fedora Magazine, Fedora Community Blog, Fedora Discussions, and personal website every now and then on various topics.
I have also previously served in the Fedora Council as an elected representative and provided the research behind the Git Forge selection for the Fedora Project. Currently, I work on researching, developing, and maintaining applications and services for Fedora Infrastructure and CentOS Infrastructure, with a major focus on contributing in the open to ensure that other community members can participate meaningfully in the efforts.
For several years now, my focus toward Fedora Project contributions has been around onboarding and retention of contributors by empowering them with access and support in subprojects and SIGs that they are interested in. As a software engineer by profession, I want to use my inclination to bridge the community outreach teams with engineering solutions like custom platforms, triaging workflows, dedicated tooling, etc.
I have witnessed the flame of multiple endeavours within the community dying out because of them not being able to enlist support from fellow members. The lack of awareness toward how members can contribute to the efforts hurts, as it ends up turning the venture very limited (both in scope as well as in impact), and the Mindshare Committee is the appropriate position to render correction to such situations with outreach.
Apart from that, I relate strongly with Mindshare Committee’s “boots on the ground” approach toward supporting various events, maintaining local communities, monitoring community health, and promoting strategic goals. That motivates me to give back to my Fedora Project friends by being instrumental in aligning our communication, getting onboarding right, ensuring sustainable relations, and enabling enthusiastic contributors.
As a forward-thinking individual, I want to use my strengths in delegation toward conveying details about the endeavours within the Fedora Project community. The visibility toward the Mindshare Committee
would not only help fellow contributors to be in the know about what’s
on and about in the community but also for those endeavours to enlist deserving support for paving their way toward a successful fulfilment of objective.I plan to continue being a friendly face across various community channels for most (if not all) subprojects and SIGs that we have in the Fedora Project. Surveys and statistics are nice and all, but a lived-in experience with interacting regularly
with the teams is an incomparable approach toward understanding the
community health in the said subprojects and SIGs and parts that require
attention from the Mindshare Committee.Apart from the awareness within the community, I plan on keeping a
time schedule from my week to help handle the social media platforms to
cater toward the larger free and open source software populace. I want
to be able to play to my strengths of representing the Fedora Project in various events (virtual and in-person alike) to spread the word about the Fedora Project’s positive impact while onboarding folks at the same time.
One of my major gripes about the Mindshare Committee was the fact that it was a reactive team and not a proactive one. Members of the committee were expected to express their thoughts on a certain initiative (not to be confused with a community initiative) taking place — and that, more or less, decided the extent of support that the Mindshare Committee could provide to contributing members of the said initiative.
Moving from a reflexive mindset to an assertive mindset in the Mindshare Committee interactions is a paradigm shift and would demand a greater deal of engagement from the elected members. Empowering Fedora Project friends around to collaborate responsibilities would not only help the situation by preventing potential burnouts but also help with the succession and continuance of leadership (remember, flywheel theory?).
With the revamp through from the previous year, I not only expect this change for the better — but rather I am willing to roll up my sleeves and establish an active participation of members in the initiative to actively report what support is needed, cater to those, and possibly bring those initiatives to the larger community. This aspect strengthens not only the folks involved but also other contributors on the fence.
The post Mindshare Elections: Interview with Akashdeep Dhar (t0xic0der) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2025-05-20 18:36:33 UTC
This is a part of the Mindshare Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
I am currently working on keeping the community active in the LATAM region by encouraging contributors to stay engaged and continue collaborating with any team. I also help some come out of anonymity and contribute by giving talks, hosting workshops, among other activities at universities, remotely, etc. I am always looking for ways to support the community in any way I can. I will always be available for Fedora, even when I technically can’t be.
I currently want to continue being a member of the Mindshare Committee because we are now in the process of reactivating the team, and the work we are doing is starting to take shape. We have new roles, goals to achieve, and new ways to support all contributors across the regions.
Supporting my region in particular is already where I need to focus most of my attention, in order to generate new regional and community activities, support countries in various ways, and motivate them.
I believe that right now the LATAM region needs attention from the committee, from the most basic aspects to the more complex ones. I will always believe that LATAM needs a regional event where people can also participate on a larger scale.
The post Mindshare Elections: Interview with Luis Bazan (lbazan) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2025-05-20 18:26:01 UTC
This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
I also keep an eye on, but rarely actively participate in, the Kernel, Rust, Python, EPEL, and ELN channels.
During my time in the Fedora community, I’ve worked on infrastructure and tools, maintained a variety of packages, submitted change proposals, and generally seen how things work together. I believe I can provide useful insights and guidance to others who wish to improve Fedora.
I expect to, as part of FESCo, help community members succeed in their work to improve Fedora, and to ensure that the work done aligns with Fedora’s goals and values. For example, it is often the case that change proposals miss a particular corner case, or fail to provide the context necessary for other contributors, or have some other small defect. FESCo helps ensure that these change proposals are in great shape so that they go smoothly for everyone involved. FESCo’s job isn’t to do work on Fedora, but to ensure those that are doing the work are set up for success.
All that to say, I think Fedora has done a great job building its reputation as a reliable, leading edge distribution and I would like to do my part in continuing that tradition.
I currently contribute to a few different areas of Fedora.
In the Cloud SIG, I’ve worked over the past year to ensure the Cloud images we build are available in public clouds like Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services. I maintain and administrate the service that uploads these images to those clouds nightly, as well as pushes container images to registry.fedoraproject.org and quay.io (thanks to Adam Williamson’s work).
I’ve also been working on Fedora’s signing infrastructure. Initially with an eye towards closing out Fedora Infrastructure’s oldest open ticket, I’ve begun the work of ensuring the signing service is capable of running on newer versions of Fedora and RHEL, and to improve the reliability of the service.
I believe making Fedora more widely available in public clouds benefits the community of Fedora users as the barrier to selecting Fedora is lowered. Improving our signing infrastructure helps contributors and users alike, as we rely on signatures to ensure the software we build is the software users run.
With great care. It’s reasonable to assume everyone on the team wants the best outcome. However, what is “best” is entirely dependent on the person or people deciding what they value most. It’s important to understand what the disagreeing parties are valuing differently, and why they hold those values. Sometimes there are ways to resolve the disagreement in a way that satisfies everyone’s values, and sometimes there isn’t. Whatever the resolution is, though, it’s critical to be respectful of the people involved and to not turn the disagreement into “us versus them”. It’s “us versus a complicated problem”.
I really appreciate Fedora’s willingness to experiment and I hope to continue to see new and exciting things happen in the distribution. At the same time, I appreciate that the purpose of Fedora is to be useful to people, not all of whom are interested in building Fedora. While innovation and backwards-compatibility don’t always go together, I really value having a smooth, clear path from the old to the new.
The post FESCo Elections: Interview with Jeremy Cline (jcline) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2025-05-20 18:19:41 UTC
This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
I want to be a member of FESCo because I think that the variety of experiences I have from around Fedora over the years can help make good technical decisions and I would like to continue working to help make Fedora better.
I don’t have much in the way of a specific direction I want to push Fedora in because I’m not sure FESCo has that kind of power. I’ve always viewed Fedora as a “do-ocracy” where things only happen by doing and if someone does the legwork to make it happen and unfunded mandates don’t have a great track record of success regardless of where they come from.
As far as the things I’m most interested in, I want to see Fedora continue to be a well tested and smootly operating distro that people want to use and work on. Beyond that, I do want to see Fedora be a good distro for AI/ML work and particularly open source AI/ML work. To be clear, that doesn’t involve forcing newfangled AI stuff onto people with no recourse – having some level of choice between “can’t you just add a checkbox to re-enable the feature to heat the CPU when space bar is pressed?” and “there is one way to do this and you will like it” is important to me.
At the moment, most of my contributions are around the ai-ml sig – I run the bi-weekly ai-ml SIG meetings and I work on packaging and improving testing for the ROCm stack.
Ideally, I’d work to find a solution that works for all parties but if that fails, I’d look within existing guidelines to see of there was a clearly better solution. If all solutions are equally within those guidelines, I’d probably go with the solution that I felt was the best choice.
It’s hard to really describe conflict resolution in a way that doesn’t sound like it came out of ChatGPT because in my experience, it usually comes down to the details for the exact situation you’re in. If there is a blindingly obvious single answer, 99% of people will go with that blindingly obvious answer and the situation wouldn’t need any mediation to begin with.
A lot of my background is around testing and test automation but that has included putting time into packaging, development and infrastructure. I started focusing on open source AI/ML tooling after finishing graduate work in AI/ML and I currently work for AMD where part of my job includes working on the ROCm stack in Fedora.
The post FESCo Elections: Interview with Tim Flink (tflink) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2025-05-20 18:14:27 UTC
This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
During my 18 years as a Fedora contributor I have been involved in various aspects of engineering Fedora Linux – almost all parts of the GNOME platform and the graphical applications that run on it, projects like Flatpak and Toolbx that are loosely associated with GNOME, and a random assortment of miscellaneous packages spanning programming languages and problem domains that scratched some personal itch of mine.
I believe this has given me abundant technical experience and knowledge to steer the engineering of the user-visible parts of Fedora Linux – ie., the upstream projects that glued together and integrated to form the distribution.
However, it’s only in the past two years, since Toolbx became a release-blocking deliverable, that I have gained some insights into Fedora infrastructure and release engineering. These two areas are sometimes hidden from users of Fedora Linux, but are critical to building and delivering it, and FESCo often has to decide on issues that have obvious and not so obvious impacts on them.
I believe this has given me a more wholesome understanding of Fedora engineering, and that’s why I want to be a member of FESCo now.
In fact, I was a member of FESCo from February to December 2015 to represent the interests of Fedora Workstation and its Working Group.
I decided not to run for re-election when my term ended because I felt that my expertise was too lopsided. I knew a lot about the upstream projects that Fedora distributed and how they were glued together and integrated to form the distribution, but I didn’t know much about all the behind-the-scenes infrastructure and release engineering work that goes on, and this reduced my effectiveness on the committee back then. I believe I am in a better position today.
If I am elected as a member of FESCo, I will bring my interest and knowledge in image-based Fedora variants, the Podman stack and Fedora’s OCI infrastructure, Fedora Flatpaks, and the GNOME universe to ensure that Fedora improves, shines and continues to be the first in features in those areas.
My current contributions to Fedora are aimed at Silverblue and Workstation, and some specific areas of CoreOS.
My main focus is the Toolbx project, which I started in July 2018. It was started to address the critical need to improve the software development and troubleshooting experience on image-based Fedora variants like Silverblue and CoreOS. Over time, it has been adopted as a useful tool on package-based Fedoras like Workstation.
Toolbx is a release-blocking deliverable for Fedora, and it’s a heavy user of Podman and Fedora’s OCI image infrastructure. So, I am part of the group of people who are involved in making sure that all the pieces continue to work reliably. This includes the toolbox(1) command and the registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-toolbox images, podman(1), crun(1), the Linux kernel, the shell start-up scripts, and all the points at which Toolbx integrates with Fedora Linux.
One thing to keep in mind when working in a team is that, if everything else is equal, it’s opinion of the person, who is doing the work and will be dealing with the consequences in the future, that matters.
Secondly, it’s good to follow the robustness principle or Postel’s law that states: “be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others”, or assume good intent, as long as everybody is sticking to demonstrable facts and not indulging in ad hominem attacks.
Continuing from the previous point, it’s important to stick to demonstrable facts and reiterate the objectives, priorities and trade-offs involved when stating an opinion, instead of appealing to emotion. Sometimes it helps to take a break.
For a sufficiently complex topic, it’s better to approach a disagreement with working prototypes and proof of concept implementations that can be clearly demonstrated and evaluated, instead of purely conceptual ideas. This makes it easier for everybody to understand the pros and cons, lets the discussion be grounded in facts, forces all sides to carefully think through their positions.
In case a consensus can’t be reached and someone has to enforce a decision from a position of authority, then it’s important to carefully describe the reasons, the priorities and the trade-offs behind the decision. Even if we might not agree with the views of a group, I think everybody still deserves a high quality justification for our decision. This forces us to carefully think through our decision through a form of rubber ducking, which leads to better decisions, and it helps to inform those that are silently following the discussion from a distance or may have to revisit the topic in the future.
I hope that one day Fedora Silverblue becomes the default implementation of the Workstation Edition.
The post FESCo Elections: Interview with Debarshi Ray (rishi) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2025-05-20 18:12:42 UTC
This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
I have been around in the Fedora community for many years now. With the many areas that I have contributed to, I think I can bring an important perspective to FESCo. I am excited by the recent success of Fedora Linux in general, and I want to make sure that this success is sustainable.
I am the most active package maintainer in Fedora, primarily because I’m the main point of contact for most Rust packages (and the Rust packaging toolchain). This includes a lot of package updates, triaging build failures and broken dependencies, and removing outdated / obsolete components from Fedora. I also regularly work with upstream projects to help port to new versions of their dependencies, and report and / or fix issues on some of the CPU architectures that are supported by Fedora. I am currently also working on bringing back packages for the Pantheon desktop, hoping that it will be possible to provide a spin based on Pantheon in the future. And every Fedora release cycle, I triage, report, and attempt to fix upgrade path issues.
Many disagreements I’ve handled were only concerned with details, while the goals of everyone involved were still aligned. So I try to find common ground and / or explore alternative or creative solutions that can work for everyone involved.
No pineapple, and definitely not on Pizza.
The post FESCo Elections: Interview with Fabio Valentini (decathorpe) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2025-05-20 18:07:23 UTC
This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
I’ve been a member of FESCo for many years now, and it’s been a great experience. It gives me the opportunity to see a much wider view of the project than just the pieces I would otherwise contribute to.
As for steering the direction of Fedora, I think I would mostly just continue to do as I have been doing: pushing for Fedora to continue to be both the most advanced and one of the most stable open-source distributions in the world.
Aside from my work on FESCo, I am a contributor to and former Lead on the Fedora ELN project, which is a prototype of what will eventually be the next major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Performing these activities in the public provides both an opportunity for the community to be involved with the creation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as well as painting a clear picture of Fedora’s value to Red Hat, our primary sponsor.
Most recently, I’ve joined the Log Detective team and I’m working to enable AI-powered build analysis to help packagers and maintainers quickly identify issues in their packages.
First and foremost, I always strive for consensus. Most disagreements are not fundamental differences between people. Instead, they tend to be more nuanced. My goal (particularly within my FESCo service) is to make sure that everyone’s opinion is heard and considered; I then try to figure out how to meet in the middle.
Of course, not every decision can be resolved with consensus. In the event that a true impasse is reached, that’s the point where I usually advocate for calling a vote and proceeding with the majority opinion. On the whole, I believe that democratic decision-making is the best solution that humanity has come up with for resolving otherwise-insoluble disagreements.
Just so it’s very clear, I’m a Red Hat employee. My day-job at Red Hat is to organize and improve the processes we use to kick off development of the next major RHEL release. As such, my stances on FESCo will often represent my opinion of what will make that effort operate more smoothly. So, no matter how entertaining it might be, we’re not going to be replacing the entire contents of /usr/share/icons with the Beefy Miracle icon.
Since it’s the topic on everyone’s lips these days, I’ll talk a little bit about my stance on Generative AI (aka GenAI). It’s a complicated topic and one that I think carries a lot of potential risks (and rewards!!) for open-source. I’ll start with the most important statement: my opinion of GenAI and that of my employer disagree at times. I will strive to represent what I believe are the best interests of the Fedora Project in this space and will not serve as a simple mouthpiece for my employer. That said, my stance on the topic is fairly nuanced: I have reservations about the way that data-sets are assembled and with how copyright (and copyleft) are respected in their usage. I have a strong moral opposition to attempts to replace human ingenuity and artistry with empty machine-generated forgeries. I am particularly concerned about the environmental impact of AI datacenters.
Where I believe that AI can shine, however, is when it supplements human capabilities. I believe that AI can be a useful tool to simplify repetitive tasks and to help process enormous batches of data to help isolate the pieces that humans should investigate. If I was to boil my stance down to a single statement it would be this: AI should never be responsible for making a decision; AI should be there to aid humans in making them.
The post FESCo Elections: Interview with Stephen Gallagher (sgallagh) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2025-05-20 18:03:18 UTC
This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
Conan Kudo is a common nickname for me)
)As a long-time member of the Fedora community as a user and a contributor, I have benefited from the excellent work of many FESCo members before me to ensure Fedora continues to evolve as an amazing platform for innovation. For the past few years, I have had the wonderful privilege of serving as a member of FESCo, and I enjoyed my time serving to steer Fedora into the future, and I wish to continue to contribute my expertise to help analyze and make good decisions on evolving the Fedora platform.
The bulk of my contributions to Fedora lately are on the desktop side of things. Most recently, I worked to get Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop promoted to Edition status, which succeeded the effort to make AArch64 a release-blocking architecture for KDE Plasma. Additionally, I helped bring up two new desktop SIGs into existence with the Fedora Miracle SIG and the Fedora COSMIC SIG, both of which now develop spins of their own with Fedora MiracleWM and Fedora COSMIC spins. I continue to mentor the folks in those SIGs to help them sustain their efforts. Finally, I have migrated multiple spins to the KIWI image build tool. Beyond the (Linux) desktop, I worked within Fedora Cloud to assist folks from Microsoft Azure to contribute the official Fedora WSL image that is now available.
My hope is that the work I do helps with making the experience using and contributing to Fedora better than it was ever before and that Fedora’s technical leadership in open source draws in more users and contributors.
I attempt to explain my viewpoint and try to build consensus through persuasion and collaboration. If there isn’t a path to consensus as-is, I try to identify the points of disagreement and see if there is a way to compromise to resolve the disagreement. Generally, this ultimately results in a decision that FESCo can act on.
To me, the most important thing about Fedora is that we’re a community with a bias for innovation. Our community looks to solve problems and make solutions available as FOSS, and this is something that Fedora uniquely does when many others take the easy path to ship old software or nonfree software everywhere. We work with tens of thousands of projects to deliver an amazing platform in an easily accessible and open fashion, built on FOSS infrastructure and tools. This makes Fedora special to me, and we should continue to hold ourselves to that high standard.
I’m also a big believer in community bonds and collaboration, which is why people tend to find me all over the place. I’m involved in Asahi Linux, CentOS, openSUSE, and several other similar projects in leadership roles as well as a contributor in order to demonstrate my commitment to this philosophy.
The post FESCo Elections: Interview with Neal Gompa (ngompa) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.
admin )
on 2025-05-20 18:01:58 UTC
This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
I have been active in the Fedora community since almost the very beginning (see also the next question), and an elected member of FESCo since the F40 election cycle. The project is facing some interesting set of challenges at the moment – from making infrastructure more scalable and robust in the face of AI scrapers, to making sure packagers are set up for success, or even rethinking long standing policies around what to package and how to package them. If reelected, I hope to continue working on policy changes that balance the interest of package maintainers and provenpackagers, and contribute my perspective as someone paid to work on open source but not on behalf of the project’s primary sponsor.
I’ve been doing packaging for RPM based distros since the Red Hat Linux days, and joined Fedora early on during the Fedora Core days. I’m a proven packager and a packager sponsor, and am currently actively maintaining packages both personally and in the Rust, EPEL, ELN, Python, Lua, and (to a certain extent) Golang SIGs.
My $dayjob at Meta pays me to contribute to Linux Userspace projects, of which Fedora is currently the main focus as the upstream to CentOS Stream and other Enterprise Linux distributions (RHEL etc.); my focus has been on automation to make bootstrapping EPEL for new Stream releases easier with tools such as ebranch and Package of Interest tracker. Most recently, I co-founded the CentOS Proposed Updates SIG, making it possible for users of CentOS Stream to get early access to critical MRs before they officially ship in CentOS Stream, and I am leading the effort to backport the latest GNOME to CentOS Stream as part of the Hyperscale SIG, in the process driving some packaging cleanups benefiting GNOME packaging in both Fedora and future CentOS / EL releases.
I have landed multiple change proposals in the past – most notably around Btrfs and systemd-oomd. Most recently, for the F42 cycle I implemented changes introducing an optional dependency generator for GNOME Shell extensions, reworking how the Django web framework is packaged, and deprecating python-pytest-runner.
In my experience, disagreements are often caused by misunderstandings, and I would try to clear them in one-to-one interactions whenever possible rather than having a public spat; in open source work in particular, given that the participants are often either volunteers or people working for other companies, it’s better to go slower and accommodate the concern of others rather than trying to push my ideas through before gaining consensus.
Sometimes consensus can’t be immediately reached – there have been cases where in hindsight we should refrain from taking irreversible action prematurely, and other cases where discussion is not going anywhere and we should just take a decision to drop a certain topic. One develops a feel for this over time, and I hope I can raise concerns over this more effectively in future terms.
I work for Meta – which runs CentOS Stream on millions of bare metal servers and in containers. I hope I have demonstrated over the past year in FESCo, and over a longer period in my other Fedora and CentOS engagements, that I try to put the community first and not let my employer’s interest override my responsibility to the community.
My wife and I are parents to a cat and a boy, and love cats and dogs equally.
The post FESCo Elections: Interview with Michel Lind (salimma) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.