What is your name (Given/First and Family/Last Names please)?

Aleksandra Fedorova

What is your FAS Username and Nick?

bookwar

What Matrix Channels do you tend to use?

Usually #council, #fedora-ci, #mine-with-fedora

What kind of experience do you have which might be relevant to the role? E.g Governance, leadership, etc.

For some time I was an admin of the Russian Fedora Remix services - maintained the site and the wiki. I also participated in moderation of some of our IRC, Jabber channels and forums, which gave me quite a lot of experience in dealing with the folks which are not necessarily IT experts and professionals.

I am also a proud survivor of the GNOME 3 and systemd debates there :)

Professionally I have worked as a support engineer, build/devops/CI engineer, team lead and product owner, which gives me a range of experience covering quite a lot of "non-coding but still engineering" topics. And I generally believe that there is a lot more in engineering than just writing code.

I also have been on the Fedora Council for some time now. I can not say I really know how to do this council thing correctly, but I am doing my best.

What do you see as potential opportunities and risks for the Fedora Project?

I believe that the general interest in Linux and Fedora in particular is on the rise, and we as a distribution currently are well placed to provide a lot of things people are looking for - stable base, variety of options, fast moving layers on top of integrated foundation and so on. It comes with the risk though as we just might spread too thin trying to cover all possible use cases, all the emerging technologies and all kinds of sometimes contradicting goals.

Our current project model, while open and community-driven, is still rather centralized.

As a big fan of the idea of federation, I believe that going forward we need to learn how to work with the wider ecosystem without necessarily pulling every connected piece into the same project hierarchy.

As a former Fedora Remix user myself, I see remixing(*) as one of the core ideas, which can help us turn a single distribution into a some sort of constellation of distributions. And while each remix may be managed by different groups and different rules, they still need to have a good collaborative relationship, a way to discuss and communicate changes, or to coordinate shared efforts. Of course they also need a way to communicate and share the load and costs.

(*) Here I use a word "remix" in the widest possible sense as in anything which uses Fedora content as a base, no matter what kind of content is added on top and what format of the deliverable is built from it.

What brought you to the Fedora Project?

Even though currently I work as a software engineer, I started to use Fedora not as a coder but as a user. I needed LaTeX to write my Master's and PhD thesis, and at that time the support for LaTeX(with Cyrillics) was really only working on Linux. Big thanks to Tom (spot) Callaway who still packages texlive for Fedora.

So essentially I chose Linux (and Fedora) because it was the easiest thing for me to use.

Of course the name also did play a role. The more common Linux distribution choices in my community at the time were Gentoo or Slackware. People were talking how "Linux is about choice" and that sort of thing. But once I learned a bit more about the ideas behind different Linux distributions, I really got hooked on the concept of an integration, rather than customization.

The Upstream First principle in particular was rather eye-opening for me. The idea that you should not just build a system for your own needs - that is what the local folks were doing - but that you need to share and contribute those changes back, or at least to discuss them with the original developers to understand their thought process and the choices they made.

I always looked at my Fedora system not as a thing to tweak for my personal needs, but as a path to become a part of a larger community.