Fedora Ambassador Steering Committee badge 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 Jona Azizaj (jonatoni)

  • Fedora Account: jonatoni
  • IRC: jonatoni (found in #fedora-diversity, #fedora-ambassadors, #fedora-g11n, #fedora-mktg, #fedora-commops, etc.)
  • Fedora User Wiki Page

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

I have been part of Fedora Project as a contributor for three years now and an ambassador for one year and a half.  My first contributions consisted on promoting Fedora at Open Labs in Albania so more people know about it, use it, be part and contribute. That’s why the first team that I was part of  was ambassadors. Furthermore I’ve been giving talks on different conferences abroad (like DORS/CLUC, FAD in Prishtina, FLOCK, FSFE Summit, SFK, PyCon Cz, OpenFest etc) about Fedora and how to bring more people (especially women) to be part of our community. I’m a core member of Diversity team and on January during DevConf’17 in Brno, we (Diversity Team) will have our first FAD to discuss different problems that we have faced in open source communities and how we can improve and solve them so we can have an inclusive community.

Marketing and CommOps is connected with Ambassadors because it’s related with what we do in different events while we spread the word about Fedora so we need to document it on our personal blogs and Fedora Websites. Internationalization and localization are two other teams that I’m part of, because for me it’s really important to have Fedora in Albanian and to bring everything about Fedora closer to our community and also help/motivate other countries to do the same.

Recently I’ve been interviewed on Fedora Magazine regarding my activities within Fedora.

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

I love the community spirit that we have at Fedora – if you have an idea in your mind and you know how to implement it, in a community you feel free to express your thoughts and you will get all the suggestions and help you need so that you won’t feel alone. It is a fun, friendly and engaging environment which fosters participation and further development for anyone who wants to help, regardless of their technical skill level. But we don’t have many women as part of our community. That’s why lately I’ve been to different conferences talking about this part and how to improve it. Diversity team is doing a great job about this. As I mentioned we will also have our FAD to work more on this matter and how we can improve this part. For example surveys to ask people about it, conferences to share experience with other women and encourage them etc. Not only focusing on this group but also other underrepresented groups, how to encourage and help them.

What are three personal qualities that you feel would benefit FAmSCo if you are elected?

Being part of different open source projects has helped me a lot in getting different points of view on how to run a community and share my experience with new communities related to different strategies so I think I have the right experience. I am also a person always willing to learn from others and I’m open to new ideas, which is a very important thing in a community in my opinion. Also I know myself as an organized person, a quality I will need to help make our plans reality.

What is your strongest point as a candidate? What is your weakest point?

I think my strongest point is my experience within a community (at Open Labs Hackerspace) where the majority of the members are women. I want to get to share this experience with as many people as I can, to inspire as many people as we can and why not be a role model for other girls and women who want to be part of us and get to do with other communities what we have done here in Albania. As for my weakest point, I would say that I often get too much involved with my projects and what I am doing. Sometimes this is too much stressful and more than helping it actually gets on my way of getting things done.

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

One of the problems that I want to consider is that of having a lot of inactive ambassadors. We have as part of our team many valuable contributors that can still help the community, for example assisting and helping new ambassadors to get on board. The reason why it is so important to know the inactive ambassadors we have at each group is that we don’t really know how many of the ambassadors we have part of our projects actually promote Fedora on their countries and other conferences abroad. We don’t have specific statistics and metrics about this. We don’t know how the situation is in different Fedora local communities or which is the reason that they are not contributing anymore in our community. This is something I want to do and improve if I will be part of FAmSCo.

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

I don’t think that ambassadors as a whole group is disconnected because each sub-project is related with each other. For example when ambassadors will organize a Release Party they need to coordinate with other teams to know when will be the next release, which are the new features etc. If this coordination wouldn’t exist then ambassadors would have difficulties in doing their promotional events in their countries. All sub-projects are well-connected with each other. Not all team members are updated because unfortunately we also have inactive ambassadors. To solve the problem of inactive ambassadors we need to develop some rules and a plan for our group.

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

Any information that helps team to be updated in order to achieve the Fedora Project mission to lead the advancement of Free and open source software and content as a collaborative community.

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

During our Ambassadors meetings topics that we discuss are “Ambassadors Schedule” that includes Fedora 26 testing phase, alpha/beta release dates etc, also “Announcement” where we discuss different news happening around our community, so each ambassador can be updated. If they will miss the meeting they can read meeting logs on our mailing list. I think this is a good way to keep them updated. But if they are not active is up to them.

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

FOSCo role is to improve communication and collaboration among Fedora sub-projects and different teams that we have so they can coordinate better with each other. This being a very important thing within a very big community, it is important to have it, as they have a key role on making this happen, but there hasn’t been any consensus yet regarding FOSCo’s structure and objectives.

Give a list of goals you hope to have accomplished by the end of your term.

  • Give a solution to the inactive ambassadors problem.
  • Increase the number of women contributors / ambassadors.
  • Have new local Fedora communities in countries where there isn’t any yet.

Closing words

Good luck to all candidates who want to make Fedora project a better community for everyone.