This year the annual Flock to Fedora conference was online again and known as Nest With Fedora. Even with the situation around COVID-19 and without the option to meet others in person, Nest was still an awesome conference with plenty of things to do. The conference was hosted on the Hopin platform, which allowed organizers to provide conference wide presentations and smaller sessions for other talks. There were also some social activities, like booths or meeting others in Work Adventure. You could also invite anybody for a private talk. The Community Platform Engineering (CPE) Team was there and gave quite a lot of talks.

5th August – First day of Nest

On the first day of the conference, the CPE Team was part of seven sessions. These sessions were really wide in the audience, from beginner’s guide for Fedora newcomers to CentOS (yes, CPE Team is also working on CentOS) and collaboration with AlmaLinux. As you can see, there were plenty of sessions to visit to see the CPE Team on Thursday.

Fedora Council Town Hall

Time (UTC): 14:00

Recording:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGS1EJ3bH1A

Speakers: 

  • Matthew Miller (mattdm)
  • Marie Nordin
  • Ben Cotton (bcotton)
  • Tom Callaway
  • Aleksandra Fedorova (bookwar)
  • David Cantrell
  • Alberto Rodriguez Sanchez
  • Sumantro Mukherjee
  • Mariana Balla
  • Ramya Parimi
  • Akashdeep Dhar (CPE) (akdhar, t0xic0der)
  • Vipul Siddharth (CPE) (siddharthvipul)
  • Ant Carroll

Akashdeep Dhar:

Started with a general introduction for the council members, then followed that with questions and answers from the community folks on the governance side of things.

Vipul Siddharth:

Participated as Diversity and Inclusion advisor to the Fedora Council where we answered questions from the Fedora Community

Meet CPE + Discussion

Time (UTC): 15:00

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIq-DyOf88s

Speakers: 

  • Ant Carroll (CPE) (acarroll)
  • Vipul Siddharth (CPE) (siddharthvipul)

Ant Carroll & Vipul Siddharth: 

We gave a short presentation on the CPE Team: who we are, what we do, where we are, and how to interact with us. This covered the main tasks of the team, the different sub-teams and included the basic steps of the process on how to submit an initiative to the CPE Team. Towards the end we had some stats from the community feedback survey and the changes we’ve been able to make in order to implement the feedback from the community so far.

Fedora Websites and Apps Objective Overview

Time (UTC): 16:00

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zISLB-D5Hc

Speakers: 

  • Akashdeep Dhar (CPE) (akdhar, t0xic0der)
  • Sayak Sarkar
  • Onuralp Sezer
  • Ashlyn Knox

Akashdeep Dhar: 

We started with demonstrating the team structure and other teams that we extend to. Then, we moved on to the progress that we have had so far during the time of the objective and explained about the websites that we maintain with the modules that they make use of. We talked about the applications inside the Fedora umbrella and the dependencies that they need – asking folks to reach out should they be interested or find familiarity with the listed stuff. Furthermore, we discussed the new upcoming revamp for GetFedora websites and elaborated upon how folks can reach out to us. In the meanwhile, we kept posting poll questions and kept answering the questions from the Q&A panel.

The PinePhone: Hardware, Software and Next Steps

Time (UTC): 18:30

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuEL_GJ1Y2s

Speakers: 

  • Kevin Fenzi (CPE) (nirik)

Kevin Fenzi: 

I had some technical issues at the start, but things went well after those got sorted out. It was a pretty high level overview of the phone industry and where a Linux/open source phone could fit in. I then went over the hardware and software available currently for the PinePhone (a cheap, open phone). Someday the PinePhone may be running well enough to be a daily driver for at least open source folks, but currently the big holdup is getting drivers upstreamed to the normal upstream kernel. Once there’s some kind of connectivity in the mainline kernel, we can start making daily fedora images for it and iterate on improving things faster. In the meantime we have a remix with a 3rd party kernel that has pretty good support, at least allowing userspace improvements.

What’s New in the Realm of Release-monitoring.org?

Time (UTC): 18:30

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpPwyNCB6H8

Speakers: 

  • Michal Konečný (CPE) (mkonecny, zlopez)

Michal Konečný: 

This was a similar talk to what I had on the previous Nest, just a little upgraded. I wore my wizard hat on this talk to proudly represent the mage council of release-monitoring.org. I started with showing some numbers (maybe I can turn them into graphs next year) and followed with the new additions. Because the Anitya 1.0.0 was released this year there were plenty of changes I could talk about. I went through the changes that happened in last year and talked about future plans for release-monitoring.org.

Not many people attended this talk, it looks like PinePhone talk was more attractive. But there were a few good ideas, although no questions. 

Finding Your Path: a Beginner’s Guide to the Fedora Community

Time (UTC): 19:00

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbpAFCRWZQ4

Speakers: 

  • James Richardson (CPE) (jrichardson, jamricha)

James Richardson: 

As a new contributor to Fedora (and CentOS), I found that it can be very confusing being a beginner in this community. There are various docs which one can find which will help, but I felt that they needed to be explained and highlighted. 

This was designed as more of a coaching session rather than a technical “how-to” session. If I was attending Nest as a “first-timer” how I would like the information to be shown to me. Links at the end of the presentation would show a new contributor the docs they would need to read, how to start on IRC, and which meetings to attend to start to get a feel for the community and how to best move forward. 

CentOS and Alma: Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

Time (UTC): 20:00

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsSsZUaDlKI

Slides: https://carl.george.computer/nest-centos-alma/

Speakers:

  • Carl George (CPE) (carlwgeorge)
  • Jack Aboutboul

Carl George:

I’ve spoken at in person conferences before, and I attended Nest last year, but this was my first time speaking at Nest. I co-presented with Jack from AlmaLinux about the collaboration we have in-progress and planned for our distributions. After I gave a quick refresher on the changes in the CentOS project, Jack gave an introduction to Alma. Considering it was a Fedora conference, we wasted little time before talking about EPEL, a neutral playing field for the entire RHEL family of distributions to provide the collective community with extra packages.

Then I gave more details about the Stream contribution process to get changes into RHEL, which is how Alma contributors can fix bugs in Alma. Jack gave a few examples of contributions in progress. We wrapped up by discussing our plans to onboard the Alma community to CentOS SIGs, so they can avoid duplicating effort recreating the same SIGs. The presentation went well and we had a substantial Q&A session, which we were able to gracefully segue into the next session, the AlmaLinux Office Hours.

6th August – Second day of Nest

On the second day of the conference the CPE Team took part in 4 sessions. CPE Team members were part of two bigger sessions. We had one talk containing Beefy Miracle. And the last one was an awesome fun quiz.

Mindshare Committee: what we do and why!

Time (UTC): 15:30

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL_cAmxQ8ys

Speakers:

  • Marie Nordin
  • Alberto Rodriguez S.
  • Máirín Duffy
  • Nick Bebout
  • Onuralp Sezer
  • Petr Bokoc (CPE) (pbokoc)
  • Rick Elrod
  • Till Maas
  • Vipul Siddharth (CPE) (siddharthvipul1)

Vipul Siddharth:

After a brief presentation by Marie on who we (mindshare) are, It was mostly a panel where we answered questions that community members presented us with. Our discussion involved a lot around community happiness, sustainability and how we can improve engagement cross sub teams in Fedora.

Fedora Join SIG Ninjas

Time (UTC): 16:00

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFbrDfboWfM

Speakers:

  • Vipul Siddharth (CPE) (siddharthvipul)
  • Alberto Rodriguez S.
  • Akashdeep Dhar (CPE) (akdhar, t0xic0der)
  • Andi Artz

Akashdeep Dhar & Vipul Siddharth:

There were some technical difficulties at the end of some speakers and some slides were moved from the allotment of one speaker to another. We started with explaining about what our goals are and how the newcomers can feel at home with the community. Then we elaborated upon certain statistics about classroom, documentation, Q&A forums, welcome tickets on how successful our initiative has been so far. Furthermore, we explained about the badges which are being designed by one of the Outreachy interns, Dhairya Chaudhary to incentivize participation in the Join SIG and throughout the community. Finally, we explained about how a newcomer can get started with contributing to us – before we moved on answering questions, taking polls and surveys and sharing contact details.

Fedora Trivia Pub Quiz

Time (UTC): 16:30

Speakers:

  • Aoife Moloney (CPE) (amoloney)
  • Marie Nordin

Aoife Moloney:

It’s always a pleasure to speak at any Fedora event, and to contribute to this year’s Nest through their social path is right up my street! For this year’s (now annual) pub quiz, FCAIC Marie Nordin and I teamed up to bring attendees 40 questions of Fedora facts. After some technical issues with my audio, assistance from the always-helpful Vipul to troubleshoot the issue with me, and a few expletives that were lip-readable only, I was able to properly connect and the quiz finally got underway. A fun, personal observation about the Fedora community: extremely welcoming and kind, but very very competitive!

Marie and I took the participants through a flurry of Fedoran trivia with Matthew Miller remaining in the top spot throughout the entire quiz – no huge surprise, I mean he is the project leader after all. The leaderboard was pretty consistent throughout the quiz though with CPE teammates like Nils and Vipul holding their place and community members like Jonathan and the mysterious ‘Not Aoife’ filling out the other spots. In the end though, victory remained in the Fedora Project Leader’s grasp and he secured the title of Pub Quiz Champion 2021. 

Putting the RHELish on the Beefy Miracle

Time (UTC): 18:30

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQaY02xRmps

Speakers: 

  • Stephen Gallagher (CPE) (sgallagher)

Stephen Gallagher: 

In this session, I walked my audience through some of the hardships that we suffered when we bootstrapped RHEL 8 and how we determined that this would be unsustainable going forward with the new three-year RHEL release schedule. I noted the difficulties of converting Fedora packages into RHEL packages, such as when it is preferred that they reduce dependencies or compile out experimental features.

This led me to talk about our new plans to develop the next version of RHEL in Fedora, perpetually. The goal would be to maintain the RHEL-style changes upstream so that when we eventually make the fork to CentOS Stream N+1, it should go much more smoothly than in the past.

In the last part of my presentation, I covered how ELN is perpetually moving forward. The day that Fedora 34 split from Rawhide, ELN immediately switched to preliminary RHEL 10 support. After that, I fielded questions from the audience ­— many of which were pleasantly of the “how can we get involved?” variety.

7th August – Last day of Nest

On the last day of the conference the CPE Team participated in 8 sessions. Three of them talked about the situation with EPEL. Another three were big sessions that the members of CPE were part of. Another one was talking about one of the CPE initiatives and the last one was about Fedora graphs.

Examining Fedora’s DEI: Panel Discussion

Time (UTC): 14:00

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4KvLK-TI8M

Speakers: 

  • Kimla Lee
  • Ron Brown
  • Matthew Miller (mattdm)
  • Marie Nordin
  • Mariana Balla
  • Vipul Siddharth (CPE) (siddharthvipul)
  • Aleksandra Fedorova (bookwar)

Vipul Siddharth:

We have been organizing Fedora Women’s Days for a while in Fedora where we celebrate efforts from inspiring women all over the community and more. The D&I group introduced an evolution of our inclusion and belonging culture by changing Fedora Women’s Day to Fedora Week of Diversity (FWD) where we will celebrate the diverse nature of our community. Our goal is to Understand and appreciate interdependence of humanity, cultures, and the natural environment. We hope that it will enable us to practice mutual respect for qualities and experiences that are different from our own.

Fedora Graphs!

Time (UTC): 15:00

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wc-svVjjEs

Speakers:

  • Onuralp Sezer
  • Akashdeep Dhar (CPE) (akdhar, t0xic0der)

Akashdeep Dhar: 

We started with sharing the information about the Apps directory which was created by Fedora contributor Ralph Bean and how it is a central location for all applications and websites that the community uses. Then, we explained about the certain shortcomings of the current version of the Apps directory and how we plan to improve upon it by rewriting it.

We moved on the progress that we have had so far by talking about the technologies used and explaining two ways with which this was implemented – one by pinpointing positions using a JSON file and the other by using a custom-built SVG file with element labels. We headed into sharing our respective screens for a demonstration on how much of a rewrite we have done so far for both the JSON method and the SVG method. Once we were done with the demonstration, we explained to folks how they can reach out to us to contribute to the rewrite and other contact details – followed by answering questions at the Q&A section and asking polls and surveys.

Tell your Fedora Story: Fedora Week of Diversity

Time (UTC): 15:00

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pZd409H6pw

Speakers:

  • Vipul Siddharth (CPE) (siddharthvipul)
  • Marie Nordin
  • Jona Azizaj
  • Eduard Lucena
  • Grayson Penland

Vipul Siddharth:

In this session, we wanted to hear inspiring stories from our community members. Listening to stories from all sorts of life made us realize we are truly on the right track to become an even more inclusive society. We asked folks to tell us their stories and we would showcase those stories during Fedora Week of Diversity.

Fedora Summer Coding Intern Social

Time (UTC): 16:30

Speakers:

  • Vipul Siddharth (CPE) (siddharthvipul)
  • Akashdeep Dhar (CPE) (akdhar, t0xic0der)
  • Mark O’Brien (CPE)
  • Marie Nordin

Akashdeep Dhar: 

After some minutes of waiting for folks to join, we started with the introductions of the members in the panel and for the interns who had spent time with us for their Outreachy term. We continued on with the demonstrations of the tasks done by the interns – first with the intern working for the Automated Metrics Project, Josseline Perdomo, then with the intern working for the design team, Dhairya Chaudhary and finally with the intern who worked on setting up the Docs CI pipeline, Richard Gregory. We answered questions regarding future participation of the community as a mentoring organization and for folks to contact us, as well as, had multiple fun poll questions.

Vipul Siddharth:

A fun social chat. This session’s intention was to make our mentored project interns comfortable in the community and showcase their efforts in a non-formal (or as they say, casual!) way. We had some fun discussions about food, anime, weather and some great insights on how different educational systems in different parts of the world empower Open Source (or lack thereof).

State of EPEL

Time (UTC): 18:30

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCdFfAWUt_Y

Speakers:

  • Troy Dawson (CPE)

Troy Dawson:

This was an overview of what has been happening in EPEL over the past year, followed by a Q&A with some members of the EPEL Steering Committee.  There were several initiatives that happened this past year, so there was plenty to talk about.  We also had lots of fun graphs.  I’m very curious how those graphs will change by this time next year.

Automatic RPM Release Fields and Changelogs Are a Thing!

Time (UTC): 18:30

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JfwiJVCcxY

Speakers:

  • Nils Philippsen (CPE) (nphilipp)

Nils Philippsen:

This was my second time presenting at Nest, a follow-up from the previous one where Pingou and I talked about the prototype of rpmautospec we worked on earlier that year. In this talk, I presented the problems we wanted to solve (manually maintained RPM release fields and changelogs and how this makes various workflows more cumbersome), who benefits from it, our design objectives, what the different pieces are we implemented, how what we finally deployed in production differs from the prototype and what’s still left to do. We concluded the talk with a lively round of Q&A.

What’s next in EPEL NEXT?

Time (UTC): 19:30

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naxvolMewgA

Speakers:

  • Mohan Boddu (CPE) (mboddu)
  • Carl George (CPE) (carlwgeorge)

Carl George:

This was my second talk at Nest this year, as well as my second time doing a talk with two speakers. I like this format, as it keeps the presentation more conversational and less rigid.  Mohan kicked things off with an overview of what EPEL is. He handed it off to me to describe CentOS Stream and how it differs from the traditional CentOS model.  I continued with introducing EPEL Next and described our efforts standing up the initial epel8-next repo. I handed things back off to Mohan to give a status update on epel9-next and to give a preview of our plans to leverage epel9-next to get epel9 ready faster than previous EPEL releases. We wrapped up with some Q&A and a call to action to encourage more Fedora packagers to get involved in EPEL.

KDE Plasma Desktop in EPEL

Time (UTC): 20:00

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRk9p5hb888

Speakers:

  • Troy Dawson (CPE)

Troy Dawson:

This talk gave a brief history of KDE in RHEL, and why it is now in EPEL8+.  The most important part was the information that KDE in EPEL would be updated once a year.  Per EPEL policy, updates like this need to be announced, and I’m trying to announce it everywhere I can.

The funniest part was doing a demo of KDE on Wayland, on CentOS Stream 8.  It works great.  There are one or two cosmetic bugs, mainly due to the older wayland in RHEL/Stream, but other than that it works pretty good.

Epilogue

As you can see we had plenty of fun at the Nest and we will for sure be at the conference next year be it in person or online. Looking forward to seeing you next year!