Fedora Ambassador Steering Committee badge

Fedora Ambassador Steering Committee badge

This is a part of the FAmSCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Tuesday, August 8th and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, August 14th. Please read the responses from candidates and make your choices carefully. Feel free to ask questions to the candidates here (preferred) or elsewhere!

Interview with Eduardo Echeverria (echevemaster)

Questions

What is your background in Fedora? What have you worked on and what are you doing now?

I started using Linux in 1997 with Red Hat 5.0 (Hurricane), I started to use Fedora with FC5, but I stopped use it for test others distros, back in the year 2012, when the Fudcon was held in Valencia, Venezuela I joined to the Fedora community first as Packager, and after as Ambassador, I became in sponsor and proven-packager, Right now I continue with the package maintenance, and looking for new packagers that want join the team, also I chair almost all the meetings of the Latam region.

What are the most pressing issues facing the Fedora Ambassadors today? What should we do about them?

Ambassadors are the representatives of Fedora. Ambassadors ensure the public understand Fedora’s principles and the work that Fedora is doing. Additionally Ambassadors are responsible for helping to grow the contributor base, and to act as a liaison between other FLOSS projects and the Fedora community.

I think we have to retake this statement as a mission, some ambassadors are misaligned with the main objective of his work as ambassadors, I think the lack of communication between regions and the lack of mentors has been the cause.

We have to work in a mentoring framework in order to train the ambassadors for understanding the big picture of the project

What are three personal qualities that you feel would benefit FAmSCo if you are elected?

  • Leadership: I helped to many people the last years to join themselves the project, I mentored many of them, and some of them are people that have a lot of contributor background in the project.
  • Adaptability: I can adapt and understand why a decision is taken or not and working forward based on it
  • Problem solver: I combine the intuition and the logic to come up with solutions between people

What is your strongest point as a candidate? What is your weakest point?

My strongest point is commitment, my weakest point is want to solve everything

What are your future plans? Is there anything you can consider a “Mission Statement” as a candidate?

My mission is clearly stated on the wiki page and replicated into this post in the second question, we have to ensure that public understand the 4F, and that will continue being my mission statement

Is there a specific task or issue you think that FAmSCo should address this term?

Mentoring, without a good and tested framework for mentoring new ambassadors we will not resolve the issue of the misalignment of the objectives

Are the Ambassadors disconnected to the rest of the project? If so, what is your solution to fix the issue?

Communication from the Council to the regions, remove the noise of a mailing list and create posts in something more visible like Fedora Magazine.

What kind of information should be exchanged between Ambassadors and other groups / sub-projects?

Ambassadors need a basic knowledge about the releases, blocker issues, why this thing was included and why this not, this is the kind of question from the people in an event. For me this should be addressed as a shared effort from the marketing  and the ambassador group, making  “human readable” all the technical stuff that should be shared with the users of Fedora.

If a past member of FAmSCo, identify a negative factor you noticed while serving. How would you propose to improve on that for the next cycle?

We have to create retrospectives of our work, I think is the best way of to base ourselves in the work of others to improve.

The objectives of Famsco for every serving period should be measured and at least present a completion status

The past term, FAmSCo did not have any representatives from NA or APAC. If a region isn’t represented this term, how do you hope to help include and support a region without representation?

I think that a central site to manage the communications could be the way of

  1. Having a historical summary.
  2. Helping to regions without representatives to be up-to-the date and decide what information is applicable to their regions.

Closing words

It would be an honor serve as FAmSCo member, Thanks in advance