This is a part of the Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Wednesday, January 17th and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Wednesday, January 24th, 2018.

Interview with Jona Azizaj (jonatoni)

• Fedora Account: jonatoni
• IRC: jonatoni #fedora-ambassadors #fedora-diversity #fedora-commops #fedora-g11n #fedora-sq etc
• Fedora User Wiki Page

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?

I have been part of Fedora Project as a contributor for almost four years now. My first contributions consisted on promoting Fedora in my country, Albania. That’s why the first team that I was part of was Ambassadors. Furthermore I’m a core member of the Diversity team and I’m very excited to see what we have done/achieved in one year, trying to foster diversity and inclusion in Fedora community. Marketing and CommOps is connected with Ambassadors because it’s related to what we do in different events while we spread the word about Fedora so we need to document it on our personal blogs/Fedora CommBlog, “measure” how successful the event we participated and/or organized was etc. L10n is another team that I’m part of, because for me it’s really important to have Fedora in Albanian, to bring everything about Fedora closer to our community and also help/motivate other countries to do the same.

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

Our community is growing everyday, in this way we have more people joining us but we still face two “problems”. First one is that some of the contributors stay just for a period of time and then disappear and the other problem is that we don’t have – a lot of – people from under-represented groups part of our community. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have a friendly community because I love the spirit of the Fedora community, people are very friendly, helpful and everyone is welcomed regardless of their technical skill level. I know that outreach teams that we have like Ambassadors, Diversity team, CommOps etc are working on and helping to solve and make it better.

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

Outside of Fedora I’m finishing my studies on Business Informatics, working as a Marketing Specialist for Collabora Productivity and co-organizing events/ conferences together with other members at Open Labs Hackerspace. I’m also part of other open source communities as well like Nextcloud, LibreOffice, RGSoC etc. Lately I’m very engaged with FLOSS technologies and trying to combine my technical and non-technical background to contribute to open source communities. Being part of different open source projects has helped me a lot in getting different points of view and the experience I have gained would help me in this role.