This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Monday, 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, 30th May 2024.

Interview with Stephen Gallagher

Questions

Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?

I’ve been a member of FESCo for many years now, and it’s been a great experience. It gives me the opportunity to see a much wider view of the project than just the pieces I would otherwise contribute to.

As for steering the direction of Fedora, I think I would mostly just continue to do as I have been doing: pushing for Fedora to continue to be both the most advanced and one of the most stable open-source distributions in the world.

How do you currently contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?

Aside from my work on FESCo, I am also acting as the Lead on the Fedora ELN project, which is a prototype of what will eventually be the next major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We recently branched off CentOS Stream 10 from Fedora ELN, so we’re now looking to the future (and CentOS Stream 11!). Performing these activities in the public provides both an opportunity for the community to be involved with the creation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as well as painting a clear picture of Fedora’s value to Red Hat, our primary sponsor.

Additionally, I have been acting as a primary administrator for the CentOS Stream Gitlab instance and I intend to volunteer my experience to help with the upcoming dist-git migration discussions.

How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team?

First and foremost, I always strive for consensus. Most disagreements are not fundamental differences between people. Instead, they tend to be more nuanced. My goal (particularly within my FESCo service) is to make sure that everyone’s opinion is heard and considered; I then try to figure out how to meet in the middle.

Of course, not every decision can be resolved with consensus. In the event that a true impasse is reached, that’s the point where I usually advocate for calling a vote and proceeding with the majority opinion. On the whole, I believe that democratic decision-making is the best solution that humanity has come up with for resolving otherwise-insoluble disagreements.

What else should community members know about you or your positions?

Just so it’s very clear, I’m a Red Hat employee. My day-job at Red Hat is to organize and improve the processes we use to kick off development of the next major RHEL release. As such, my stances on FESCo will often represent my opinion of what will make that effort operate more smoothly. So, no matter how entertaining it might be, we’re not going to be replacing the entire contents of /usr/share/icons with the Beefy Miracle icon.