F44 FESCo Election Interview

What is your preferred name?

Fabio Alessandro Locati

What is your FAS Username and Matrix ID?

FAS username: fale
Matrix ID: @fale:fale.io

What Matrix rooms do you tend to use?

I can be easily found in #atomic-desktops:fedoraproject.org, #bootc:fedoraproject.org, #coreos:fedoraproject.org, #devel:fedoraproject.org, #epel:fedoraproject.org, #event-devconf-cz:fedoraproject.org, #fedora:fedoraproject.org, #fedora-arm:matrix.org, #fedora-forgejo:fedoraproject.org, #fosdem:fedoraproject.org, #flock:fedoraproject.org, #golang:fedoraproject.org, #iot:fedoraproject.org, #meeting:fedoraproject.org, #meeting-1:fedoraproject.org, #mobility:fedoraproject.org, #python:fedoraproject.org, #rust:fedoraproject.org, #silverblue:fedoraproject.org, #sway:fedoraproject.org, #websites:fedoraproject.org

Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?

I have been part of the Fedora community for many years now: my FAS account dates back to January 2010 (over 15 years ago!), and I've contributed in many different roles to the Fedora project. I started as an ambassador, then became a packager and packaging mentor, and joined multiple SIGs, including Golang, Sway, and Atomic Desktop. For many years, I've been interested in immutable Linux desktops, Mobile Linux, and packaging challenges for "new" languages (such as Go), which are also becoming more relevant in the Fedora community now. Having contributed to the Fedora Project for a long time in many different areas, and given my experience and interest in other projects, I can bring those perspectives to FESCo.

How do you currently contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?

Currently, many of my contributions fall in the packaging area: I keep updating the packages I administer and exploring different solutions for packaging new languages and maintaining the Sway artifacts.
My current contributions are important to keeping Fedora first, not only in terms of package versions but also in terms of best practices and ways to reach our users.
Additionally, I served for the last two cycles (F41/F42) as a FESCo member, steering the community toward engineering decisions that were both sensible in the short and long term.

How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team?

I think disagreements are normal in communities. I have a few beliefs that guide me in entering and during any disagreement:

1. I always separate the person from their argument: this allows me to discuss the topic without being influenced by the person making the points.
2. I always keep in mind during disagreements that all people involved probably have a lot of things they agree on and a few they don't agree on (otherwise, they would not be part of the conversation in the first place): this allows me to always see the two sides of the disagreement as having way more in common than in disagreement.
3. During a discussion, I always hold the belief that the people arguing on the opposite side of the disagreement are trying to make sure that what they believe is right becomes a reality: this allows me always to try to see if there are aspects in their point of view that I had not considered or not appropriately weighted.

Thanks to my beliefs, I always manage to keep disagreements civil and productive, which often leads to a consensus. It is not always possible to agree on everything, but it is always possible to disagree in a civil, productive way.

What else should community members know about you or your positions?

Let's start with the fact that I'm a Red Hat employee, though what I do in my day job has nothing to do with Fedora (I'm an Ansible specialist, so I have nothing to do with RHEL either), so I have no ulterior motives for my contributions. I use Fedora on many devices (starting from my laptop) and have done so for many years. I contribute to the Fedora Project because I found in it and its community the best way to create the best operating system :).
I've been using Sway exclusively on my Fedora desktop since I brought it into Fedora in 2016. On the other systems, I use either Fedora Server, Fedora CoreOS, or Fedora IoT, even though lately, I prefer the latter for all new non-desktop systems.
I see the Fedora Community as one community within a sea of communities (upstream, downstream, similarly located ones, etc.). I think the only way for all those communities to be successful is to collaborate, creating a higher-level community where open-source communities collaborate for the greater good, which, in my opinion, would be a more open-source world.