Andrea Veri's Blog Me, myself and I

Fedora Board’s Questionnaire

May 25, 2011

If you are not subscribed to the fedora-announce mailing list but you are still interested in having a look at my responses about community-asked questions, here they are:

  • What will you be able to accomplish by being elected, that you would not otherwise be able to do as a contributor?

(As you will notice by reading the list right down here) Being a single contributor makes achieving these points impossible since changing how localized communities should work, improving our CoC and enforcing its rules and re-thinking Board’s role in our community is something that must be discussed and voted within the Board and its members.

  • What are your top three priorities as a board member?

If elected, I will mainly try to focus on:

  1. Improving Fedora’s localization putting a great effort on introducing a form of formalization for specific localized communities having all the needed requirements to gain the “blessing” of Official local community for a certain country or language / dialect. This means pursuing one main objective, which is making Fedora Ambassadors and contributors not fighting each other but acting together as a community. Having two-three or even four websites / local communities just for the Italian or French langs is simply the wrong way to achieve the result of having a Fedora community together again. Ambassadors and contributors of a specific country or lang should focus on establishing *one* strong and trusted localized community, they should throw away the idea of multiple support websites, we need to put together everyone again, act as a team, Fedora together should be our motto. (the specific requirements to gain the above formalization will be written up by me and presented to the Board for a discussion, so expect more news to come about this point if my candidature will be accepted)
  2. Re-thinking what the Fedora Board should be within the Fedora community. It should represent the community and all its members, if a single or multiple members are having a specific problem, from the bigger to the smaller one, the Board must deal with them to find a valid solution, nothing and no one should be left behind. The Board, in the end, should be the main reference point for everyone wanting to propose a new idea or just willing to costructively complain about something not working in the right way. Discussing problems, respecting everyone’s ideas and opinions and finding a good consensus / common solutions for everyone is alwais the way to go to improve the relationships between community members, contributors and developers.
  3. Improving our Code of Conduct, finding a good way to enforce members respecting it and remembering which values should be found behind a community (respect between members and their ideas, costructive discussions, decisions taken with general consensus etc.) is the latest point but it’s definitely not the less important on my list. As I stated in my candicacy, I’ve been negatively impressed by the behaviour of some community members in two occasions: while introducing JustFedora’s Planet and while working on another Infrastructure duty. Criticizing without valid motivations just for the sake of doing so seemed to be the common rule on both of the above cases. I would like to remember everyone that this is *not* the best behaviour for an Open Source community, we need to act together as a single team, we don’t have to fight each other but we have to cooperate finding common solutions, discussing, criticizing *costructively* and helping our community coming out from the current situation.
  • Who do you think Fedora is for today? Who should it be for?

Fedora is about innovation, but as you may all know, innovation might take in several problems especially for new comers or people switching from a Microsoft OS. Most of the people I know do have a lot of problems to simply open up a computer, writing a mail or working on a document; I would like to see Fedora (but generally Linux based OSs) available to use to everyone: from developers to complete newbies. I would like to work making the idea of Linux being usable by a restricted circle of people changing and I’m sure the arrival of GNOME 3 will definitely help us out on achieving our goal. (It’s user-friendly but innovative interface it’s simply superb)

  • Where do you see Fedora in five years? How do you think we’ll get there?

An innovative Fedora but at the same time a distribution easy to use by any of us out there, an awesome cloud service available to everyone, a package manager made easier to learn and understand by newcomers, a GNOME 3 improved, stronger, robust and a gnome-shell completely ready and fully integrated on Fedora is what I would like to see happening within five years.

  • What will you do to ensure that Fedora remains at the forefront of innovation in the GNU/Linux space?

I will try to do my best to give a warm welcome to new ideas and projects within Fedora, I’ll listen, discuss with as many contributors and developers willing to propose something new and innovative that could benefit our beloved distribution. I would like to link this answer with the third point of the first answer I gave on the questionnaire: new ideas are strictly related to my vision of innovation, everyone should be free to propose something new without having to worry about receiving personal insults or complaints: this is unfortunately missing in our community. (is our community really prepared for new ideas yet?)