Board questions and Townhall

What will you be able to accomplish if elected, that you couldn’t as an unelected contributor? Why this post? These are the answers to my board questions which are in the wiki here. The questions and answers from the first Board Elections Townhall meeting are here in the IRC logs. The second one is tonight at 20:00 UTC.

It allows me to contribute back to the project in a more central way than being a contributor and to contribute ideas and direction in a quicker and more direct way. It also allows me to continue on in the work I’ve being doing up until now including working to improve Fedora on cheap devices in particular working to have ARM accepted and promoted to a primary arch. In my last term I worked as part of the ARM team with FESCo to get a set of guidelines for promotion of a new architecture to primary.

What are your goals for your term on the board (in more detail)?

In no particular order:

* Continued expansion of support within Fedora to mobile and low power devices such as ARM to ensure Fedora can lead in the ever expanding mobile and low powered device space and allow Fedora to assist others to innovate in this massive arena.
* Allowing all groups that wish to use Fedora to be able to do so as simply and easily as possible.
* Ensuring all groups work together nicely and think outside their own box and to impact other groups in a good way rather than a “my way or the highway” attitude.

What do you think are the problems and challenges Fedora is currently facing? Do you have solutions for these issues?

There’s a number of challenges facing Fedora and there’s certainly problems.

One of the issues you can get whenever you put a large amount of people of different interests and diversity together. Having travelled to a number of FUDCons and chatted with people online I know Fedora has a wide and diverse community and that is a great thing as it’s what makes Fedora a thriving and diverse community. I would like to see the community be more aware of differences of others within our great community whether that be religion, cultural, sex or even desktop UX of choice. Whether it be on IRC when chatting, in mailing list discussions or face to face at a conference there should be no reason for people to be abused, objectified, yelled at or worse. I don’t believe we should support people in our community that known to do as such. We can do a lot more to improve this.

From a technical perspective there’s a number of things we can do to improve the community. The Fedora Engineering team is leading the charge in some of this such as the great mailing list mock ups, I’m sure community members have more ideas.

From a technical perspective there’s always a lot of challenges and things can be improved including simplification of some of our processes, making the documentation easier to find and read for new contributors and easier to understand when they do read it.

What do you think can be done to attract more people to join the Fedora community as contributors? Do you think Fedora’s visibility needs improvement? If yes, do you have any ideas on how?

I think Fedora has very good visibility already but I’m not sure everyone realises it and we can certainly improve that. For example Fedora runs on the 2.5 odd million OLPC XOs that are currently deployed and the couple of million already scheduled to be deployed this year. They’re probably the widest single deployment of Fedora and will also be one of the first products to ship with Fedora ARM. I also don’t believe we’ve done enough promotion of the work we’ve done with the Raspberry Pi. I’m sure these examples are just a few of where Fedora is used and where we’re leading the curve that people both within and more importantly outside the community realise.

I think we can also do a lot to improve the community involvement for non native English speakers. You just have to look at the size of the two FUDCon APACs to see the size of the community already involved and I’m sure they’re just the tip of the iceberg.

Do you think the issues the Board discusses and the decisions the Board makes are effectively and efficiently communicated throughout the Fedora community? If you believe communication between the Board, the Fedora community, and even the public at large can be enhanced, what first steps or ideas would you propose?

The communication of the board can certainly be improved. I think this is the case for all areas of the community though including but not limited to FESCo and FAmSCo too. I don’t think there’s a single fix for the communication issue, the board over time has tried a number of communication methods some more effect than others but none were perfect. I think it would be good for the board members to communicate more by blog posts as it’s a means of all parts of the community to read when they get time.