This is a part of the Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Thursday, May 31st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Wednesday, June 6th, 2018.

Interview with Till Maas (till)

Questions

What’s your background in Fedora? What expertise do you bring based on past experience, and what projects are you actively involved in now?

Fedora Core 4 was the start of my Fedora journey. Initially I was a user but I started with packaging, soon. Whenever there was something that I could improve, I submitted patches. This made me also contribute to infrastructure projects and release engineering. When time permits I will also represent Fedora at conferences. Recently I served FESCo for a year and I am working on restructuring cleanup tasks for packages.

What do you plan to accomplish on the Council? What are the most pressing issues facing Fedora today? What should we do about them?

I would like to bring fresh thoughts into the Council and more competition into the election process. There are rarely new candidates so I decided it is my duty to serve. In the council I would like to make sure that we honor our Friends foundation. During my time in FESCo I learned that contributors were pushed away by the toxic behavior of usual suspects. I want to be available for our friendly contributors to stand up against the toxic members. In the news, there were reports about abuse cases in Hollywood were a lot of people knew something was off but did not do anything. It seems to me that we have a similar social problem in Fedora because I am confident that a lot of contributors think of the same people when considering who I am referring to. Therefore I will support hard actions against any toxic community member.

What are your interests and accomplishments outside of Fedora? What of those things will help you in this role?

I have a broad interest and an eye for detail. In the past I worked as a Penetration Tester and gained a lot of experience in analyzing a variety of systems. I love to work on my personal growth which helps me in every role. Also I like to try out new things, go hiking and being a father.