Article co-authored by Chris Idoko and Jona Azizaj

Today marks Day 4 of Fedora Week of Diversity (FWD) 2024! This exciting week-long celebration is dedicated to honoring the diverse voices, backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives that enrich our vibrant Fedora community. Throughout Fedora Week of Diversity 2024, the DEI Team will be showcasing the incredible stories and journeys of our members through engaging interviews and captivating social media spotlights. Join us in celebrating the unique contributions and talents that make Fedora Week of Diversity 2024 a truly special event!

Contributor Stories

Today’s Contributor Story comes from: Joseph Gayoso

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

My name is Joseph Gayoso and I currently contribute to the Fedora Project through the Marketing Team, which takes me all over the project!

I started using Fedora Workstation in the spring of 2022. I had only started my Linux journey a few months prior. After learning about how open source works and why it’s such an amazing thing for people, I bought into the idea and wanted to participate.

From there, I watched videos about Fedora and the Fedora Council meetings to learn more. The videos led me to the forum and various resources that showed what opportunities existed within the project. Because of my interest in marketing and experience in business, I figured the Marketing Team was the best spot for me and got in touch. Through lots of learning we got to the place we’re in now with regular social media posts, coordination across the project for promotion, and encouraging the development of features and offerings that get users excited and solve their problems while sticking to Fedora’s values and goals!

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

Fedora was the first open source project I ever got involved in. I stayed because the distro itself is a great OS to run!

Then I learned what a unique spot Fedora is in compared to other distros. Growing up I wanted to work for a place like Google to help develop awesome products that I believed in and loved to use. Fedora was an open door to do exactly the kind of work I wanted to do! No jumping through hoops and hoping to be grouped with the best of the best coming out of colleges I could never afford. In open source, I just had to raise my hand and say I’m available to help, and with that get access to the coolest technology in the world.

More than that, I get to participate with the coolest people in the world. I get to regularly talk with the developers of my operating system. We can discuss how things work, they help me understand, and I in turn can help promote their project so more people can use it. Technology aside, everyone I talk to cares about the project and each other. The folks who are invested in Fedora appreciate each other. We encourage each other to view ourselves as a community of people as much as a community about technology.

Usually, when you come across a community, their stated values are simple and out of the way. In the Fedora Project, you get the sense that everyone operates under the Four Foundations: Freedom, Friends, Features, First. It makes all the difference.

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

I have two main workflows for Fedora.

The most consistent way I contribute is through social media management. The Fedora Magazine and Community Blog serve as the primary sources of content to post. As I participate in the community I will come across other things or ideas to post and I will save them in an open tab or a bookmark. Then each day around lunch time I will look at the content backlog that I slowly produce, write a good hook to get folks to check out the linked content, and post. Some days there are events or time sensitive topics that will bump the prepared content I had planned. That’s how we’ve gotten content on the Mastodon most weekdays for over a year.

Then during the week in the evenings, I’ll work on getting up to speed on the news in the project and push forward different areas we’re working on. The Marketing Team is collaborative because we’re promoting what engineering is working on, so we have to understand what those things are to communicate about it effectively. We also coordinate with the non-technical side of the project to do some of the promotion, but in cases like with the DEI Team, we are linking up with a shared goal of promoting Fedora’s values.

We’ll move from project to project based on the next need that comes up. Most recently we helped with the Fedora 40 release, then we started on the Fedora Release Party, talked about what to do for Global Accessibility Awareness Day, then Fedora Week of Diversity, and then promoting Flock. That’s separate from the ongoing work closer to engineering to make sure we’re aligned as changes come through, which includes things like the bootc initiative, Fedora COSMIC, new potential spins, and other things that may become changes.

We have the short term social media management that aims to be valuable and consistent. That attention allows us to build an audience so that we when we have bigger announcements to share we can disseminate that information more quickly and to more people. So that means short term and long term tasks.

Image by Emma Kidney. CC BY-SA 4.0.