This is a part of the Elections Interviews series for Fedora Linux 38. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Monday, 29 May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Sunday, 11 June.

Interview with Neal Gompa

  • Fedora Account: ngompa
  • Matrix: Conan_Kudo, Pharaoh_Atem, King_InuYasha, Eighth_Doctor… 🙂
    • #devel:fedoraproject.org, #asahi:fedoraproject.org, #kde:fedoraproject.org, #workstation:fedoraproject.org, #cloud:fedoraproject.org, #centos-hyperscale:fedoraproject.org, #okd:fedoraproject.org, #budgie:fedoraproject.org, #admin:opensuse.org, #chat:opensuse.org, #bar:opensuse.org, #obs:opensuse.org, #RedHat:matrix.org, #networkmanager:matrix.org, #rpm:matrix.org, #rpm-ecosystem:matrix.org, #yum:matrix.org, #manatools:matrix.org, #lugaru:matrix.org, #buddiesofbudgie-dev:matrix.org
    • (There’s quite a bit more, but I think that sort of covers it. 😉)
  • Fedora User Wiki Page

Questions

Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?

As a long-time member of the Fedora community as a user and a contributor, I have benefited from the excellent work of many FESCo members before me to ensure Fedora continues to evolve as an amazing platform for innovation. For the past few years, I have had the wonderful privilege of serving as a member of FESCo for the first time, and I enjoyed my time serving to steer Fedora into the future, and I wish to continue to contribute my expertise to help analyze and make good decisions on evolving the Fedora platform.

How do you currently contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?

The bulk of my contributions to Fedora lately are on the desktop side of things. In the last year, I’ve been working steadily on improving Fedora’s multimedia capabilities, which included bringing in FFmpeg into Fedora and enabling a new range of applications, libraries, and services to be packaged and hosted on Fedora Linux. This even leads to enabling creative professional work for video and making video streaming possible with software shipped in Fedora. Most recently, I helped kickstart the Budgie SIG and assisted with bootstrapping the Fedora Budgie spin and Fedora Onyx. Finally, my newest effort is around the bringup of the Fedora Asahi Remix by the Asahi SIG to support Fedora Linux on Apple Silicon Macs. This is being done in close collaboration with the upstream Asahi Linux community and members of that community are now part of the Fedora community too.

Beyond the desktop and more into the clouds, I have been engaging with folks at AWS to bring them more into the Fedora community in a similar vein to how I helped bring Facebook into the Fedora community. This has also led to a proper revival of the Fedora Cloud Working Group and the Fedora Cloud Edition for Fedora Linux 37. We’re currently working on expanding our coverage of Fedora Cloud Edition in public cloud platforms, as well.

My hope is that the work I do helps with making the experience using and contributing to Fedora better than it was ever before and that Fedora’s technical leadership in open source draws in more users and contributors.

How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team?

I attempt to explain my viewpoint and try to build consensus through persuasion and collaboration. If there isn’t a path to consensus as-is, I try to identify the points of disagreement and see if there is a way to compromise to resolve the disagreement. Generally, this ultimately results in a decision that FESCo can act on.

What else should community members know about you or your positions?

To me, the most important thing about Fedora is that we’re a community with a bias for innovation. Our community looks to solve problems and make solutions available as FOSS, and this is something that Fedora uniquely does when many others take the easy path to ship old software or nonfree software everywhere. We work with tens of thousands of projects to deliver an amazing platform in an easily accessible and open fashion, built on FOSS infrastructure and tools. This makes Fedora special to me, and we should continue to hold ourselves to that high standard.

I’m also a big believer in community bonds and collaboration, which is why people tend to find me all over the place. I’m involved in Asahi Linux, CentOS, openSUSE, and several other similar projects in leadership roles as well as a contributor in order to demonstrate my commitment to this philosophy.