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 Nick Bebout (nb)

• Fedora Account: nb
• IRC: nb #fedora-admin, #fedora-noc, #fedora-ambassadors, #fedora-devel, #fedora-ops
• 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 involved in Fedora for many years (FAS says my account was created in 2007). I’m involved in several different projects in Fedora, primarily Ambassadors, Packaging, and Infrastructure. I also occasionally work on Design Team tasks and in the past have also helped with docs and websites. I’m also a provenpackager and an Ambassadors Mentor.

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 think we need to keep working on building marketshare. I think there is an opportunity now to promote how we do have mp3 encoding in Fedora, and we have openh264 easily installable. I’ve talked to some people in the past about why they choose other distributions and one of the main things they mention is that other distributions have mp3 and other codecs installed by default and we do not. Also, I think modularity will be a big benefit to Fedora once it gets fully up and running.

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

I work as a Network Technician at the University of Southern Indiana. I am also taking on more of a Systems Administrator role. In my work at the University I have seen how a few of our classes use Linux and I have seen opportunities that we could take to promote Fedora (and Linux in general) in the higher education market. I recently earned my LPIC-1 certification and am working on preparing for the LPIC-2. I also have a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and Computer Information Systems from USI and am currently a student working towards my Master of Business Administration degree here at USI.