This is a part of the Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Thursday, 28 May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, 11 June.

Interview with Aleksandra Fedorova

Questions

Why are you running for the Fedora Council?

I am running for Council to achieve the goals, which I have listed below.

It is a big list, and I am not sure that those goals are achievable via Council. Thus, another reason to run for the council seat is to get a better understanding, how Council operates and how I can help to make it more transparent, than it is now.

Why should people vote for you?

I’ve been a member of Fedora Community for more than ten years. In those years I was mostly a hobbyist involved in the work of Russian-speaking Fedora user group. One of the goals of our group was to help people overcome the language barrier and become contributors, translators and package maintainers in Fedora and RPMFusion.

Recently I have joined Red Hat and got the opportunity to be more active in the project and spend more time working on it. I’d like to use some of this time to help Fedora and Fedora Council specifically.

Since I’ve only recently started to be involved in Fedora decision making process (I’ve got elected to FESCo last year), I still keep a freshman perspective and a freshman passion about many things happening in the project. Which sometimes leads to silly questions, but sometimes allows me to work without the typical historical baggage.

What do you want to accomplish as a member of the Fedora Council?

  • I’d like to add Integrate First concept to the core principles of the Fedora Project. — I think in last years Fedora Council went too far in the direction of adding freedom and flexibility to Fedora, if only in mission statement. While I support the goal of being flexible, i want to make sure that we keep integration aspect of Fedora distribution as our top priority.
  • I’d like to ensure that we recognize the value of the package management and package maintainers. — As a DevOps Engineer I am familiar with the tooling and practices used for containerized development. And I am aware that some people perceive package management as “old-school”. I am a strong opponent of this perception. I believe that we should not treat packages as old and containers as new, but rather learn how to use all available tooling to our advantage. And we need to work on a better promotion of the advantages of the package management.
  • I’d like to review the approach Fedora Project have taken on the use of the closed source tools and SaaS solutions. — Maybe we can be more restrictive and add certain preventive measures, so that we don’t lock ourselves in a particular service provider.
  • I’d like to add more transparency to the usage of the infrastructure resources
  • I’d like also to serve as a channel for fellow community members, who would like to raise certain topics with Fedora Council, but are not sure about them, or don’t have enough time to drive the conversation.