This is a part of the FAmSCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Tuesday, August 8th and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, August 14th. 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 Eduard Lucena (x3mboy)

• Fedora Account: x3mboy
• IRC: x3mboy (found in #fedora-ambassadors, #fedora-latam, #fedora-mktg and #fedora-magazine)
• x3mboy’s Wiki Page

Questions

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

I’m using Fedora since 2014, but I use linux since 2003. I attend the FUDCon Valencia 2012 (Venezuela), and before that I help organizing a lot of FLISoL Events. I knew tatica at that time and she is a really great person, and my inspiration to join the community. Right now I’m working  as Ambassador in Chile, the country where I live in, also working with the Marketing team and with the Magazine team, also I help with Spanish translations and a little bit with CommOps. I try to report everything I see is working wrong, since I’m a support engineer in my work, my passion is to see everything working right.

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

I think the bigger problem of ambassadors is communication:

• Regions are disconnected
• Countries inside the same regions are disconnected
• Ambassadors are disconnected from the project

The first idea that comes to my mind is to involve Ambassadors in other teams, I understand that being a people person we shouldn’t be technical experts, but that doesn’t means that we can be disconnected of the current work that the Project is doing. Modularity is something that is not being talk almost anywhere, and it’s one of the greater focus of the project right now. The ambassadors needs to reconnect their objectives with the rest of the project, and the only way I see this can work if involving the ambassadors in other teams.

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

1. Involvement, I feel that even when I’m not working directly with each team, I’m involved in a lot of areas, as part of the Marketing role, I reach a lot of teams and have feedback from them.
2. Connectivity. I’m online practically 24/7, that allows me to now what is happening all the time in the whole project.
3. Fearless, I don’t have any fears to talk with people and say things straight.

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

My strongest point right now is time, I have time to work with the project without work/job restrictions, and that allows me to be connected with what is happening in the Fedora World. My weakest point is that I tend to see things in black and white, looking the grays is sometimes hard to me.

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

My plan is to continue spreading the world. I want to see the Fedora Project reaching younger people, through the use of Social Networks and all the media resources available. I want to speak fedora to the world. My Mission Statement is: “Come to Fedora, no matter what you do: Not everything is about the code!”.

Is there a specific task or issue you think that FAmSCo should address this term?

Mentoring is being a long time issue that is solved in mid-terms. From my region, I understand now why is so important to have experienced mentors that can teach the people the way to work with the project.

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

Well, I answer this above. Yes, we are disconnected. My proposal is to make Ambassadors to be involved with other teams, not only with other Ambassadors. We need to make new Ambassadors to work in other sub-projects before being Ambassadors, that should solve the problem of the CLA+1 to edit the wiki: If an contributor works with other teams before joining Ambassadors, he will have CLA+1 at the moment of join Ambassadors group; also it will knows what is happening in other parts of the projects. Ambassadors is practically the only sub-project that is working alone.

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

Ambassadors need to know what is new in each realease, and this doesn’t mean only to know the “Talking Points”. This means that Ambassadors needs to know what is a blocking issue, how it will be solve, with issues we will carry on in the release to be quick fixed. Ambassadors are the face of the project, we need to now what is happening and what will happen in the project, in the short, mid and long term. Not only to now what’s hot in this release, but also to know what work is being done with new technologies in the future.

Also we needs to hear the people and provide solutions, ideas and involvement in the project. Maybe people wants to point to other kind of technology or any other way to work with linux, and Ambassadors are the ears, to communicate this to the project.

If a past member of FAmSCo, identify a negative factor you noticed while serving. How would you propose to improve on that for the next cycle?

I think that reports are the best way to let people know what are you doing and what you did. Each FAmSCO member should do a status report when they leave a seat. And if these reports are in a Pagure issue, it will be better to new FAmSCO member to revisit issues that are unsolved, fixed or/and incomplete.

The past term, FAmSCo did not have any representatives from NA or APAC. If a region isn’t represented this term, how do you hope to help include and support a region without representation?

This is a hard question, but again, is a problem of communication. The first idea is to let them now, via ML and in their meetings, that FAmSCO is there for them, that they can reach them anytime. Publishing meeting logs in all regions ML, not only in the FAmSCO ML or the global list. Also FAmSCO needs to be up-to-date with events around the world, to let Ambassadors to know that an event is coming and probably they can reach the organization and give a talk.

Closing words

In my region, it was discussed how important is to have rules written, and that’s one of the things I like to have, clear rules written in the wiki. Also I want to push the use of the wiki as contributor resources, not as documentation center. But on the most important thing we saw in our region is that we need to go beyond the classic “FLOSS 101” events, people need to see Fedora contributors giving talks about robotics, about modularity, about programming, packaging, new technologies, advanced topics to let the world now that our focus is in the future of the computing world, without let behind the final user that just need to send emails, see videos and listen music. A delicate balance, but nothing is impossible to accomplish.