Ian Weller — ianweller@fedoraproject.org
Contributor, Fedora Project
Intern and Doer of Stuff, Community Architecture, Red Hat
More contact information — College schedule — Blog
Background
I began contributing to the Fedora Project as a packager in late 2007 (I was sponsored in early 2008). I soon stopped being able to find packages that I knew how to work with and started diving into other parts of Fedora, notably the Art Team (now the Design Team). From there I became more and more involved and, as they say, the rest is history. (You may now remove your cliché-blocking sunglasses.)
I'm currently a freshman at the University of Kansas, majoring in computer science. I was the 2010 recipient of the Fedora Scholarship.
In high school, I was a prominent supporter of open source ideals, trying to use open source software in all that I did and explaining to those who asked what the benefits of the open source way are. I was a major part of the newspaper at my high school, acting as both the copy editor and webmaster ("the" being the most important word in that sentence — I didn't contribute as much as I liked to during my tenure on staff there).
Major stuff I did
- Helped with the transition from MoinMoin to MediaWiki for fedoraproject.org/wiki.
- Looking back on it, I didn't help as much as I would have liked to. At the time, I knew zero Python, but I was able to help Mike McGrath and others understand the paradigms of MediaWiki and its syntax. I then helped the Docs Project and others with their own use cases for the wiki. Some call me the "wiki czar" (see this mailing list post), but I hardly think I deserve that "title." I currently put a significant amount of my Fedora-related focus to keeping the wiki a good place for collaboration within the Fedora Community, helping out where I can (and understand).
- Designed the current business cards used by Fedora contributors and wrote an application to generate them.
- I produced new, standardized versions of business cards for contributors. Multiple versions were produced based on feedback from the community. I then wrote a Python application, fedora-business-cards, that downloads a contributor's data from FAS and automatically generates print-ready files for the front and back of the card.
- Provided a sane system for translations on the wiki.
- I ported some templates from mediawiki.org to aide translators in keeping to a set scheme of how translated pages should be laid out on the wiki. Before this change, pages were laid out in different systems depending on the language they were in. The new system makes translated versions of pages easier to find and easier to contribute to.
Major stuff I'm working on now
- Fedora brand guidelines update — User:Ianweller/Brand guidelines (draft)
- Running the logo@fedoraproject.org request queue
- Automating data analysis within free software communities — datanommer