Article co-authored by Chris Idoko and Jona Azizaj

Today marks Day 5 of Fedora Week of Diversity (FWD) 2024! This exciting week-long celebration honors the diverse voices, backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives that enrich our vibrant Fedora community. Throughout Fedora Week of Diversity 2024, the DEI Team will showcase our members’ incredible stories and journeys through engaging interviews and captivating social media spotlights. Join us in celebrating the unique contributions and talents that make Fedora Week of Diversity 2024 an extraordinary event!

Contributor Stories

Today’s Contributor Story comes from: Adrian Edwards

What’s your Fedora story? Take us back to your beginnings with Fedora!

My personal history with open source goes back all the way to the beginning of my interest in programming. While I didn’t understand what “Open Source” was at the time, some of the first lines of code I ever wrote were using the Arduino platform to get an LED to blink. Coming from a more hardware-oriented “let’s take it apart and see how it works” world, programming seemed like a much easier way to make an impact on the world around me, unconstrained by the limitations of making physical goods. From there my interests grew and led me down a path of using resources available online (thank you Stack Overflow!) to slowly learn about particular errors I faced as I moved on to various projects in areas like iOS app development and web development.

My first major introduction to the Fedora project was from Justin Flory. While I’ve known Justin for quite a while through various meetups in the FOSS community at RIT, I really got a chance to see what his job involved during FOSSY 2023 (Software Freedom Conservancy’s first annual conference) in Portland, OR. It was at this conference, specifically the social events afterward, where in addition to chatting with Justin, I also got to observe other conversations that were happening with other community members from Fedora (and FOSS in general).

Fedora’s appeal and your contribution style: Tell us both!

I think the main thing about Fedora that stood out to me was when I learned that Fedora was upstream of RHEL, not the other way around. This was also around the time when the Red Hat community was still reacting to some of the CentOS Stream changes, which seemed to be the biggest news in the Linux community at the time. With all the speculation swirling around about what was happening, I was glad that there was an open, community-driven community providing a resource that everyone, including large companies such as Red Hat, could rely on.

The main driving force behind my contributions is a desire to use and bend technology in a way that helps people. The more I learn about open source the more I find interesting connections to concepts and wider societal problems like the Tragedy of the Commons, or how to collectively fund Public Goods that further strengthen my belief that, somehow, Open Source can bring forward meaningful solutions to these problems that may have a wider impact on society, even among people who have never heard of GitHub.

Fedora day-to-day: A walk-through of your Fedora involvement

Most days begin with a few meetings, the content of which varies. Recently, I’ve listened in on Fedora Council discussions about AI policies, met key community members, and helped plan events like the Fedora 40 Release Party and Fedora Week of Diversity.

I’m naturally drawn to automation projects related to these events. For example, I’ve been working on ways to automatically add online event registrants to the relevant Matrix chat rooms.

My favorite automation project involves processing live event streams. I timestamp, trim, and edit them with thumbnails (and hopefully captions soon). I then re-upload these polished videos to the Fedora YouTube channel for everyone to enjoy. Thanks to my efforts, the Fedora 40 Release Party stream was fully processed within a week of the event’s conclusion. I’m eager to apply this process to other events and document it for future use.