This is a part of the FAmSCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Tuesday, January 10th and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, January 16th. Please read the responses from candidates and make your choices carefully. Feel free to ask questions to the candidates here (preferred) or elsewhere!

Interview with Sirko Kemter (gnokii)

• Fedora Account: gnokii
• IRC: gnokii (found in #fedora-design #fedora-apac #fedora-de)
• Fedora User Wiki Page

What is your background in Fedora? What have you worked on and what are you doing now?

For more then six years now, I have been a Fedora Ambassador and during this time, I have been the event owner of many events in Germany, Austria and also Cambodia. I also organized some events for Fedora like FUDCon in Phnom Penh. Besides that, I am a member of Fedora’s Design Team. Since Fedora 18, I am handling the Supplemental Wallpaper Contest and made it more popular during that time.
I am working on the tasks I have in the Design Team, and besides that, I am helping the APAC community to grow. Two years ago, I started to build a community in Cambodia, and it has grown from zero to eight FAS accounts, and now has seven active contributors. Furthermore, I am trying to make it a more sustainable community. During the last year I already served as a member of FAmSCo.

What are the most pressing issues facing Fedora today? What should we do about them?

As I said already in the interview for the last election, the role of a distribution is different today. Once it was thought to bundle all the software together and make it easily installable. Today, there is more expected from a distribution. The different flavors of workstation, server and cloud are just the beginning.

I also can repeat here from last year, we want to be the leading distribution, and for that we always have to adopt to the situation on the “market”.
Implementing all those changes adds work and it would be necessary to have more helping hands for its implementation process. This means that we have to improve the way we find new contributors. This is mostly the task for the Ambassadors as they are our connection to the public.

Interest in traditional Linux events seems to be waning. The motive for a new round of FAmSCo elections was to retool FAmSCo in the new world of post-LUGs and installfests. How do you believe the Ambassadors should respond to this change?

I can here again repeat my statement from last year. Not the interest in this kind of events is waning, its more that there are to many of this events and the visitors gets distributed over many more events now.

Right now the budgetting is delegated to the regions, what leads into exactly to this kind, we go to this event because we always been there problem. Looking to the situation with its larger amount of different FOSS events and our limited ressources, we have to be more planful to which events we go and how we present there. We have to a general strategy where we should focus to present Fedora in order to find new users and later on contributors.

What are your future plans? Is there anything you can consider a “Mission Statement” as a candidate?

Yes, I still believe that FOSCo is a needed government body and I believe also that there is in future no other one for the Ambassadors needed. Most of the tasks FAmSCo once had, are already transferred to the regions. When the remaining are transferred or the process is reformed that they are not necessary anymore, FOSCo can replace FAmSCo.

Are the Ambassadors disconnected to the rest of the project? If so, what is your solution to fix the issue?

As group not, single individual Ambassadors are definitely disconnected, but it is also hard to keep up with all the changes the project as well the distribution makes today. There is no ultimative solution to fix this problem. To be informed about all aspects of the projects is to hard today, we can from our side only giving help and spread the information, to update it will always be the task of the person who is the ambassador. The only thing we could do is enforce it, through regulations with regularly examinations. The question is if we want that.

What kind of information should be exchanged between Ambassadors and other groups / sub-projects?

There is only one thing a must be on information which must be exchanged with the Ambassadors and that is how to become part of this group or sub-project. Everything else should be communicated to but I would like if the many subprojects or groups keep there join process up 2 date.

Are Ambassadors really up-to-date with the new features of releases? If not, how do you plan to keep them up-to-date?

Here the same answer as for if the Ambassadors are disconnected, some might not know about the newest features and some do. Well there is nothing what can be done, the Marketing group does a good job in communicating all features in several medias, its more up to the single Ambassador to keep his knowledge up 2 date.

What are your thoughts about FOSCo? How do you feel it should look like?

I repeat here again, I want FOSCo and I am not one who believes it must co-exist to another govermental body called FAmSCo, I thing it can be integrated. First of all more governmental bodies mean also more work and meetings for just a few people, who do this kind of job always. Second many Ambassadors are part of the groups the shall be part of FOSCo anyway.

FOSCo should unite all parts of the project which are near to the public so Ambassadors, Marketing, Design, Web and so on, it just has to be discussed how the best way is to integrate most of them. That was not done form the past FAmSCo some just had their picture of it in m

If a past member of FAmSCo, identify a negative factor you noticed while serving. How would you propose to improve on that for the next cycle?

Yes several, first we was over months not able to do anything as half of the elected did not show any interest of come to a meeting or tell what is with them. They showed up as, I requested to remove them. The first thing what happen then was turning back the decision about the chair to get somebody else elected. The next thing was getting somebody to become a mentor, even against the regulations! The first half year was FAmSCo complete useless through that. Nothing I can do against, just you as people who vote, should look a bit more into the meeting logs, who showed up how often, what has he done!