Fedora Board elections 2013

So the eagle eyed amongst you would have noticed I didn’t throw my hat into the ring for another term on the board. By the time I pass the baton on to the next candidate around July time frame I will have down well over two years on the board and while it’s not a hard requirement I believe it’s enough and it’s time for someone else to step up and contribute their effort to the future direction of Fedora. I wish all the candidates of all the elections the best of luck.

Fedora Board and run off voting

Well it seems I was re-elected to the board for a second term. I’m looking forward to driving forward some of the issues I was dealing with and continuing with the projects I was working on. Of course the board is just a small proportion of what I do within the Fedora Project. I believe it’s important to represent the areas of the project I work in such as ARM as well as other wide projects such as OLPC and Sugar Labs that use Fedora as a core base to their projects as well as contributing back to some of the non technical parts of the project.

Of the three board seats that were up for election the third seat was a dead heat so don’t forget there is run off election between the two candidates that ends tomorrow.

Don’t forget to VOTE once again. It literally takes less than a minute to follow the link and make your vote heard. I personally think that this is as important as the first vote to ensure we get the best candidate.

I look forward to working with you all over the next 12 months.

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.

FUDCon Blacksburg Day 2 & 3

Well day two of FUDCon started with the usual bits and pieces that people have reported about including BarCamp pitches and the FPL’s state of the union address.

Again most of my day revolved around ARM bits and pieces including the Secondary Arches session. We gave away vouchers for 20 Raspberry Pi’s for people to hack on when they are released. I’m looking forward to those 20 people getting involved in the ARM project and blogging about all the cool things they do with them.

In between all the ARM sessions and lots of random hallway discussions about ARM, OLPCs and just about anything Fedora I managed to sneak off and sit in on a Gluster session to have a break from ARM related stuff. In between all of that I was hacking on rawhide for ARM but that’s another blog post entirely so stay tuned.

FUDPub was a good opportunity to have a break from the laptop and discuss various things and catch up with various people I hadn’t managed to spend much time with and get to know them a little better. I was somewhat surprised that the beer ran out so quickly.

Sunday morning was a slower kick off and was some serious ARM hacking and some further discussions. Things started to slow down as people departed to head home. Mid after noon was the second board meeting. We discussed a number of things from SOPA/PIPA support options through to Christoph’s Fedora Council proposal. In ended up being quite a long but fairly productive meeting.

Overall as always I found FUDCon very useful, this time in particular it was good to get some high bandwidth discussions over ARM related stuff with people that I’ve been speaking with daily on IRC and telephone over the last couple of months. It was also good to get it some more attention in the wider Fedora community to give people opportunity to hear about the things that we’re doing, the things we’re aiming to do and to ask questions about things like aim to promote ARM to a primary architecture.

FUDCon Blacksburg Day 1

So day one was very busy. Most of the day was spent discussing and planning various components of the ARM secondary architecture. We ran a number of sessions from koji infrastructure planning and development, building rawhide on ARM, defining requirements to promote ARM to a primary architecture. There was a LOT of information to digest and a lot of discussion had. It was all very productive.

From 16:00 we had a Fedora Board meeting to discuss board goals and Fedora goals and the success and/or failure of the current goals. We also discussed board communications with the rest of the community and projects for the board for the comming year.

Other than that even the hallway discussions were fairly high bandwidth as well and it was a very busy. I very much enjoyed sitting down for a few beers in the evening to discuss some of the many things I do within Fedora and other side projects and hobbies.

Preparing for FUDCon Blacksburg

Well its almost time for FUDCon Blacksburg. In fact this time next week I will have already been in Blacksburg for over a day. I’m really looking forward to the event but I know it’s going to be very busy. So what have I got planned for my time in Blacksburg? The list in fact is pretty small:

  • Fedora Board Business: We have a open board meeting planned. There will no doubt be a numbner of things to discuss and there’s already a number of things on the list.
  • Fedora ARM and Secondary Architectures in general. There’s a lot of things to discuss with ARM from koji infrastructure, building rawhide, things we need to do to progress ARM to a Primary Architecture and a lot of other things from technical to procedural and process oriented. There will also be ARM based OLPC XO 1.75s and if the rumours are true possibly even a pre production Raspberry Pi

That looks like a small list but it would be very easy to fill an entire week with those two topics on their own. If I get a spare session here and there I would also like to spend some time attending some of the Cloud SIG sessions as there’s going to be some great stuff happening there too!

My Fedora 2011 in review

Its been a some what mixed year for me personally and I certainly won’t be massively disappointed to see the end of 2011. In Fedora land the year has been completely full on!

The first major event that kicked off 2011 for me in Fedora was FUDCon Tempe which as always was brilliant. Its always awesome to catch up with a lot of Fedora Friends and to drive forward various bits of the project that are sometimes easier done face to face, whether it be in a session or at FUDPub over a beer or two! It was at Tempe that our fearless leader threw down his first challenge of the year to me… to blog about what I’m doing in the land of Fedora on a weekly basis. I didn’t quite meet this goal but have still averaged a post every fortnight.

From April a massive amount of my time was taken up with helping the Fedora ARM in particular getting Fedora 14 built for the XO 1.75 but also massively fixing packages upstream to build on ARM. With the F-14 release for the XO out I’ve been concentrating on F-15+ and later for both hard and soft floating point. The ARM project still continues to consume massive amounts of time and has basically covers a lot of the things I wanted to achieve as part of the Fedora Mobility SIG.

May saw me head off to the excellent Red Hat Summit for the second time. I was there for work and as always its very useful for the type of work I do for my $dayjob. I helped out on the Fedora booth and as always spent quite a bit of time with a number of Fedora contributors. It was there that our fearless leader convinced me that standing for The Fedora Board was also a good idea.

Fedora 15 was next up on the list, of course. A great release with gnome-3 and all sorts of other goodies. Not so good for Sugar on a Stick which had massively broken networking 🙁

October saw me attending FUDCon Milan which was a rather shorter than some FUDCons but great as always.

Fedora 16 was much more successful for Sugar on a Stick and we shipped probably the best release ever. In fact I think Fedora 16 was an awesome release.

I’m looking forward to 2012 greatly, both in the land of Fedora and in my personal life. I’m looking forward to seeing ARM progress onwards and upwards and hopefully make it to a primary architecture in the coming year. I’m not one for resolutions, I think ongoing reviews are much better so I look forward to working with all my Fedora friends throughout the coming year.

FUDCon Milan

Well another FUDCon is over, they seem to go quickly! This one seemed shorter than previous ones and that’s primarily because it was. Most FUDCon events are 2.5-3 days. This one was two. That’s not to say it wasn’t productive as it most definitely was and I was in Milan from Thursday until Tuesday along with a number of others which meant I got the opportunity to discuss a number of things face to face with a number of people that I usually speak to daily on IRC or other online means so it was certainly productive. And as always its good to meet up with friends face to face, meet new friends and eat, drink and generally be merry 🙂

So what did I achieve? Quite a bit but a lot of it isn’t directly accountable. So a bullet point list of what I can remember:

  • Discussions with dgilmore and others about ARM and various plans for F-15/16/17 and beyond
  • Secondary architectures!
  • Anaconda with wwoods and others including support for ARM, images, tablets, Live USB keys without overlay file systems to avoid corruption issues with SoaS deployments
  • Support for various OLPC XO and Sugar Labs issues we see or envision moving forward
  • Demos of ARM on the XO and other devices
  • A governance session
  • A lot of other random conversations
  • FUDPub 🙂

So what else did I get up to? Gelato with jsmith on a number of occasions, a day trip to Venice with spot and dgilmore including a VERY early start and some geocaching in both Venice and Milan and some sight seeing around Milan.

So a big THANK YOU to the organisers of FUDCon Milan with both my Fedora Board and personal hats on! 😀

The Rumor Of My Demise Has Been Greatly Exaggerated!

So it’s been a long time since I’ve blogged! At the beginning of the year I was aiming to post regularly. Jared challenged me to blog about my Fedora happenings weekly at FUDCon Tempe, that seemed to go OK until around June. For a while there I was actually quite a bit ahead, now I’m about 10 posts behind my goal 🙁

So what has this slacker been up to? Well quite a lot actually!

  • I’ve started my tenure on the Fedora Board. I’m some what into the groove now but I need to start blogging more about it too.
  • Fedora 14 on ARM. As part of the OLPC XO 1.75 I’ve been rebuilding the entirety of Fedora 14 on ARM. Its been somewhat daunting and I think to some people it must look like I’m on a quest to get a ChangeLog entry in every package in the distro :-/
  • My $DAYJOB has been manic! Lots of interesting RHEL 6 bit but also massive amounts of VMWare vSphere stuff. I’m off the VMWorld in Vegas this week so if there’s any Fedora people about at VMWorld or Vegas and you want to catch up get in touch with me

I’ve also been going through the final bits of my naturalisation process in the UK and attempting to sail regularly with my crew. Last week we won 2 races and came second in two races in the Sussex Regatta which gave us an overall win 😀

There’s all sorts of other things going on but I think that’s the biggies. Hopefully I’ll be able to start blogging more in the coming weeks!