This is a part of the Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Friday, 8 December and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, 21 December.
Interview with Akashdeep Dhar
- Fedora Account: Akashdeep Dhar
- IRC/Nick: t0xic0der
- Matrix Channels typically found in: Fedora Join, Fedora Badges, Fedora Social, Fedora Infrastructure, Fedora Documentation, Fedora Network Operations Center, Fedora Release Engineering, Fedora Zodbot Development, Fedora Diversity, Equity & Inslusion, Packit, Fedora India, Fedora Marketing, Fedora App, Fedora Council, Fedora Websites and Apps, Fedora Design, Fedora EPEL, Fedora Mentoring, Fedora Badges Development, Fedora Community Operations, Fedora Mindshare, Flock To Fedora, Fedora Ask
- Fedora User Wiki Page
Why are you running for Fedora Council?
Once the Fedora Websites and Apps community initiative was successfully completed with the release of Fedora Websites 3.0, I decided to go on a hiatus from community leadership positions to firstly, spend some well-deserved downtime with my family and secondly, to get back to the drawing board for identifying the aspects of the Fedora Project community that could use some assistance. Among all the issues I discovered with time, two of the most prominent ones in my opinion were incentivization and rewarding of persistent contributions and sustenance and improvement of community health. Working actively with project teams like Fedora Badges and Project Aspen in the past months, I began documenting my investigations [1] [2], designing the strategies [1] [2] and prototyping the game plan [1] [2].
To address the community health issue, I wish to utilize the platform to continue working with the various subprojects/SIGs to understand their perspective on community health, garner the statistical metrics that govern the current condition of a community and address the concerning findings to ensure that the community health is looked after. Alongside that, I wish to act as an exemplary conduit between sponsored teams and community teams to lead the work on the Fedora Badges revamp as well as help in organizing and running events that establish the community’s presence. With my attempts to enhance the contributor’s quality of life, my purpose is to radically progress in realizing the Fedora Project Strategy Goal 2028 of “doubling the number of active contributors over a given period of time“.
I think it is about time for me to come back from the hiatus.
What do you see as Fedora’s place in the universe?
Fedora Linux has been and continues to be one of the rarest upstream GNU/Linux distributions that provides its users with a balanced blend of unmatched innovation and stellar experience in a single package. An exceptional development like this can only be built by an admirable community like Fedora Project that many other free and open-source software communities can learn from. We should not only lead in the forefront when it comes to the Features and First foundations, but we should also set a cardinal example of how contributors get onboarded on a mission, collaborate for a goal and are rewarded for the efforts, thereby also leading in the forefront in the Freedom and Friends foundations and creating what might not be the largest but most definitely the most active communities in the universe.
How can we best measure Fedora’s success?
The success of Fedora Project is inherently connected with the health of the community. In order to ensure the excellent quality and timely releases of our GNU/Linux distribution offerings that define our success to the outside world, it is undeniably crucial to evaluate the conditions of the many subprojects/SIGs that form the overall community and ensure that the contributors behind our substantial areas are incentivized to put their best foot forward by lowering the barrier of entry for beginners ones and rewarding consistent contributions from the experienced ones.
Anonymous statistical metrics received about the contributors like but not limited to discussions in forums, meetings in channels, contributions in repositories, accolades in badges, footfall in events, releases in packages, perception in media, responses in surveys etc., and their trends with respect to time can be a concrete indicator of inherent issues with certain subprojects/SIGs and that in turn, should help us understand tasks that need to be fulfilled in order to ensure that the success of Fedora Project is not only maintained but is growing significantly with time.
The Fedora Council is intended to be an active working body. How will you make room for Council work?
During my participation in the community, I have always made it a point to keep some time aside to connect and collaborate with community members irrespective of whether I am in a community leadership role or not. One of the factors that have been remarkably favourable to my participation in the community is my employment with a community-facing team that works with Fedora Project and the CentOS Project called the Red Hat Community Platform Engineering team. I am pretty sure that I will be comfortable with moving things around in my calendar to make room for the Council work.
Hey @t0xic0der, congratulations on your new term as a Fedora Council member for the Fedora Linux 40-41 cycles. As we work on onboarding you in 2024, I had some questions to prime upcoming discussion.
How do you think the Fedora Council could help address these two areas? Or, how is the Fedora Council able to address these in a way that a contributor not in the Council could not?
I ask to better understand how we can identify resources and support to start addressing these things.
If we could only choose two metrics to start looking at first, what do you think we should look at first and why?
This seems to have flown under my radar, both literally as well as metaphorically but I wish to answer your questions now in the hopes of those being helpful.
I attended CHAOSScon EU 24[1] with an agenda to begin addressing these questions by leveraging modern tooling like GrimoireLab[2] and Augur/8Knot[3] and by understanding how other communities approach this problem. I did not have to separately share my findings[4] with you as even you were there attending the event with me and participating in the workshops with me.
To understand how we can proceed with community sustenance and contribution recognition, we first need to understand what a contributor lifecycle[5] looks like. Hence, at the moment, my primary focus as a Fedora Council member is to facilitate everything[6] that the Community Operations 2.0 initiative needs from the infrastructure to work on the data-centric outcomes.
Being a governance body operating at ~10k feet and with a near-defunct[7] Mindshare committee, I like to believe that the Fedora Council has not been able to get a qualitative understanding of the subprojects’/SIGs’ community health. Establishing an objective self-evaluation rubric to be filled by the team representatives[8] could help change our status quo.
Now that’s a difficult question haha.
Lettuce start with “meetings in channels” (or “discussions in forums” wherever the meetings are not available) and “responses in surveys” to begin with. This helps us target the human factor of the contribution and leads us to understand the trend of participation concerning time and the changing of community outlook across various releases of Fedora Linux.
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As well as my disappointments with the findings ↩︎
Timeline ranging from when they made their first contributions to when they made their last one ↩︎
Or pointing in the right direction to keep up the momentum should I be unable to be of assistance ↩︎
Representatives should do more than just voting on budget requests in my honest opinion ↩︎
Not necessarily the leads of the said subproject/SIG ↩︎