Development/SteeringCommittee/Nominations

FESCo 2012 Elections

The nomination period is CLOSED. The nomination period ended at 23:59:59 UTC on May 15, 2012.

For the last election, see NominationsNovember2011

In the May 2012 election, there are 5 seats open. Open seats are currently held by: Kevin Fenzi, Bill Nottingham, Peter Jones, Stephen Gallagher, and Tomáš Mráz.

Questionnaire

The community has submitted the questions that it wants you to answer. The list of questions is here: F18_elections_questionnaire#Fedora_Engineering_Steering_Committee_.28FESCo.29

Please do not answer them on the wiki. Please email your answers to Ankur Sinha "FranciscoD" at ankursinha AT fedoraproject.org by May 22 2012. All the candidates' answers will be collected and put up together before the town halls.

Candidates and their introductions

Person Name (IRC nickname)

• Mission Statement:
• Past work summary:
• Future plans:

Peter Jones (pjones)

• Mission Statement: I'll continue to work to maintain a high level of technical feasibility and avoid micromanagement in decisions made by FESCo. I'll try to streamline our processes for developers, and to avoid processes that result in unnecessary work, or in duplication of effort. As I've shown in the past, I'll continue to try to guide our policy decisions to put the power and responsibility in developers hands rather than requiring FESCo's or other committee's intervention and participation at every level.

• Past Work Summary: I've worked on Linux for Red Hat for more than a decade in various roles including technical support and engineering. I'm one of the anaconda maintainers as well as the maintainer of (thankfully now deprecated) mkinitrd, and am or have been maintainer Fedora's packages for booty, cdparanoia, dumpet, gnu-efi, grub, python-pyblock, syslinux, and others. I've worked on many levels of our software stack, including implementing installation and boot support for iSCSI, UEFI, dmraid, from the kernel all the way up through userspace. I'm currently a member of FESCo seeking re-election, and have been serving in this capacity since the winter election of 2009.

• Future Plans: I'm currently focused on implementing and impoving UEFI support throughout Fedora, as well as supporting various storage technologies. As a FESCo member I'll continue to help ensure that developers have what they need to implement their features and bug fixes with as little hindrance as possible, and at the same time avoid unnecessary and wasted effort.

Stephen Gallagher (sgallagh)

• Mission Statement: Make Fedora THE platform for rapidly developing the next generation of free, open-source software.

• Past work summary: Red Hat employee since 2008, Lead developer of the System Security Services Daemon, participant in the FreeIPA project. Fedora Hosted admin maintaining ReviewBoard. FESCo member since June 2011

• Future plans: Continue to drive Fedora to become the best platform for developing exciting new technologies for the desktop and datacenter.

John Dulaney (j_dulaney)

• Mission statement: To promote Fedora in my role as an ambassador; to continue to develop test criteria for new features coming into Fedora and evolve the QA process as needed to fit with the evolution of Fedora. I will also strive to make sure that Fedora remains at the forefront of technology and to be the best Free distribution of Linux.

• Past work summary I am a member of the Fedora Quality Assurance team. I help write test cases for new features, I am a proven tester (testing critical path software updates), I test new releases starting prior to branching, and I help establish release criteria. I am also a Fedora Ambassador, especially within the Fayetteville region. I spread knowledge of Linux in general and Fedora in particular and inform people that they do have a choice for Freedom.

• Future plans: Strive to improve the testing of Fedora; both personally and collectively throughout the QA team, to continue to educate people on the advantages of Linux and Free Software, and to continue to test Fedora.

Kevin Fenzi (nirik)

• Mission Statement: To make sure Fedora continues to lead the way.

• Past work summary: Have been on FESCo a long time. Red Hat employee for 1 year. Currently head of Fedora Infrastructure. Active in many parts of Fedora to assist others and reduce roadblocks to getting things done and having fun.

• Future plans: I'd like to make sure we have a smooth on-ramp for bringing ARM folks into the fold. I'll work on adding more Fun back into Fedora and see if we can streamline some of our processes.

Keiran Smith (Affix)

• Mission Statement: Make fedora The distrobution of choice for aspiring developers and systems administrators
• Past work summary: I am currently a Fedora Packager and Ambassador. I Maintain NginX[EPEL], Amarok[EPEL], ZNC, Nagios and more. Was also a member Zikula Insights Team and FES
• Future plans: I would like to bring forward the effort to make fedora available on more platforms such as ARM and MIPSEL. I would like to see a world where fedora becomes the distro of choice, Where we can run fedora on a wide range of devices such as Routers, Phones, Televisions and alot more.

Tomáš Mráz (t8m)

• Mission Statement: Keeping balance between contributors making changes and stability and usability of Fedora as a distribution.

• Past work summary: I've been Red Hat employee and Fedora contributor for more than seven years working on packages related to security (PAM, OpenSSL, libgcrypt, GNUTLS, ...) in both Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I am one of the upstream maintainers of PAM. I was FESCo member for the past year.

• Future plans: Fedora must not stagnate and that means substantial changes in the core packages are always happening however we need to keep balance between those disruptive changes and the usability of Fedora as an operating system of choice for software developers and server related work (experimental servers, special servers where the latest software versions are required etc.).

Bill Nottingham (notting)

• Mission Statement: I plan to represent the Fedora community in FESCo with an eye towards maintaining the quality and standards of the Fedora distribution, including features, testing, stability, release engineering, and so on.

• Past work summary: Red Hat employee since 1998, developer on Red Hat Linux since 5.1, Fedora contributor since its inception, FESCo member, Fedora board member, Release engineering team member, and assorted other roles.

• Future plans: Continue to make Fedora the best freely available distribution anywhere. Work with those that show up to make changes, as, realistically, FESCo does not have a significant amount of resources to direct.

Josh Boyer (jwb)

• Mission Statement: I plan on helping the Fedora developer community accomplish the tasks and goals it puts effort into, while maintaing a well-balanced process and governing body.

• Past work summary: Linux user/developer since 2001. Fedora kernel team member. Fedora contributor long enough that I forgot when I started, former FESCo, Rel-Eng, and Board member.

• Future plans: Work with community members to ensure Fedora is a rapidly evolving yet high quality distribution.

Questionnaire responses

Peter Jones (pjones)

• What will you be able to accomplish if elected, that you couldn't as an unelected coontributor? Why this post?: Being on FESCo presents a different kind of involvement than just being a contributor does. It's an opportunity to help set direction and get directly involved with broader decisions, and to ensure that Fedora is headed in the right direction on a technical level.

• What can be done to get more features and make more progress? Have you participated in any features before?: I've participated in the "Feature" process as an end user, as a feature owner, as somebody working on features others own, as a FESCo member approving (or dis-approving) features, as an agent provocateur attempting to affect change in the process, and probably some other roles.

I think our biggest obstacles to more and better features are generally with the mechanisms we use to capture information from developers; we're heavy on demanding feedback, and light on doing so sensibly. In fact, the current feature process is still largely centered on "50000-foot" style progress reporting, with little room for nuance or understanding from whoever is receiving that feedback. It's a show, and it's discouraging to developers.

• What do you think about spins? Do we still need them or will they become obsolete once we have a new anaconda with better package selection?: I think they're a neat idea, but right now there's not a lot of attention that's been paid to how they're implemented. We definitely need more people

looking at this.

• Do you think the issues FESCo discusses and the decisions FESCo makes are effectively and efficiently communicated throughout the Fedora community? If you believe communication between FESCo and the Fedora community can be enhanced, what first steps or ideas would you propose? : FESCo makes an effort to assure that not just our decisions but also our deliberations and rationale are accessable to everyone inside and outside of Fedora, but at the same time, I think there's always room for improvement on things of this nature.

Stephen Gallagher (sgallagh)

• What will you be able to accomplish if elected, that you couldn't as an unelected coontributor? Why this post?: Having a voice in making FESCo policy decisions will allow me to act on my stated goal of making Fedora into a powerful platform for the development of open-source software.

• What can be done to get more features and make more progress? Have you participated in any features before?: I have participated in the development of multiple features (including two for the forthcoming Fedora 18). I think the best way to encourage more features is for Fedora as a whole to pay close attention to upstream work and call it out in the Features list when those deliverable dates line up with Fedora Feature Freeze. Progress is made when we are proactive about incorporating upstream enhancements and collaborating with those upstreams to take it one step further.

• What do you think about spins? Do we still need them or will they become obsolete once we have a new anaconda with better package selection?: I think spins will still have value in the form of live-media creation. There will always be groups who will want to produce a live Games or Disaster Recovery disk, and I think we should continue to provide them with the tools to do so.

• Do you think the issues FESCo discusses and the decisions FESCo makes are effectively and efficiently communicated throughout the Fedora community? If you believe communication between FESCo and the Fedora community can be enhanced, what first steps or ideas would you propose?: I think FESCo does a pretty good job of explaining its actions and decisions. Our primary communication method is the devel@lists.fedoraproject.org mailing list, which is read by the vast majority of our contibutors (and is searchable publicly for those who don't read it regularly). Our meetings are held in public and are announced in advance for those who want to attend and our meeting agenda is built from our Trac instance for those who want to add something to it.

John Dulaney (j_dulaney)

• What will you be able to accomplish if elected, that you couldn't as an unelected contributor? Why this post?: As a member of the Engineering Steering Committee, I am able to more directly influence future technologies that make their way into Fedora. I will also be able to add a different

and new perspective to the Steering Committee, having not served on it before.

• What can be done to get more features and make more progress?: We should actively search for new technologies that make good candidates for inclusion in Fedora, as long as they meet our guidelines. On the other hand, why not be the originator of some of these ideas? Fedora's contributors offer a wealth of knowledge that could be tapped to develop new technologies to meet emerging needs within the computing world.

• Have you participated in any features before?: Probably the most I've been heavily involved with is btrfs. I have helped write test cases

and guide feature owners through the process of getting their features QAed.

• What do you think about spins? Do we still need them or will they become obsolete once we have a new anaconda with better package selection?:

Spins are exceedingly useful pre-compiled collections of packages. I do not think that they will become obsolete considering that there isn't room on the standard install DVD.

• Do you think the issues FESCo discusses and the decisions FESCo makes are effectively and efficiently communicated throughout the Fedora community? If you believe communication between FESCo and the Fedora community can be enhanced, what first steps or ideas would you propose?: I really do not think the problem is in the system in place. The system that already exists allows fairly easy and painless communication between the community and FESCo. Just because the easy communication exists, however, does not mean that it is used effectively by either party. There is also the consideration that the committee may not decide in a way that the community member wants.

Kevin Fenzi (nirik)

• What will you be able to accomplish if elected, that you couldn't as an unelected coontributor? : I think I can provide direction for the various issues that come before FESCo, balancing history (I have been involved in Fedora a long time) vs new advancements (I love the fast pace of Fedora).

• Why this post?: I'm a technical person, so providing technical direction to the project is right where I want to be.

• What can be done to get more features and make more progress?: Gain more contributors. Make sure we keep our focus as the place that Features appear first. Strive to take more credit for the excellent work our contributors do.

• Have you participated in any features before?: Yes, I even have one currently for Fedora 18: Xfce 4.10.

• What do you think about spins? Do we still need them or will they become obsolete once we have a new anaconda with better package selection?: I would like to see some way to allow users to install a package collection + configuration (like a spin) via any install method. I think having the seperate images and installs weakens our testing efforts, but I absolutely want to have a way to get our users tested collections of stuff.

• Do you think the issues FESCo discusses and the decisions FESCo makes are effectively and efficiently communicated throughout the Fedora community?: Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't. I think we could do a better job of collecting input and announcing decisions.

• If you believe communication between FESCo and the Fedora community can be enhanced, what first steps or ideas would you propose?: A few things that I think would be great:
  • Start trying to get someone to summarize devel list threads, including any actions needed.
  • Make sure we send email announcements when we decide something.

Tomáš Mráz (t8m)

• What will you be able to accomplish if elected, that you couldn't as an unelected coontributor? Why this post?: Obviously as the policy decisions and Fedora features are voted on by FESCo to be able to have a direct vote in FESCo will give me better ability to achieve my mission statement.

• What can be done to get more features and make more progress? Have you participated in any features before?: I quite do not think that there are not enough features in recent Fedora releases. Rather I'd like to see the features to be more polished in the final Fedora releases and to be included in rawhide as soon as possible during the release development cycle.

• What do you think about spins? Do we still need them or will they become obsolete once we have a new anaconda with better package selection?: I don't have a strict opinion on spins. I do not use them personally as I am quite advanced user/developer/sysadmin so I can customize the installation on my own. However I can see their usefulness for less experienced users. We should decide based on statistics of spins download/use and also - and that is most important - based on interest of individual spins maintainers to keep developing them.

• Do you think the issues FESCo discusses and the decisions FESCo makes are effectively and efficiently communicated throughout the Fedora community? If you believe communication between FESCo and the Fedora community can be enhanced, what first steps or ideas would you propose?: I think the communication between FESCo and the Fedora community is quite good - the FESCo meetings are public, nobody is denied access to the meetings, also FESCo in case of substantial decisions almost always postpones the final decision after the subject was reasonably discussed on the Fedora devel mailing list (see f.e. the recent discussion about promoting ARM to primary architecture).

Bill Nottingham (notting)

• What will you be able to accomplish if elected, that you couldn't as an unelected coontributor? Why this post?: The point of serving on FESCo isn't so *I* can get stuff done, it's trying to help *others* get stuff done sanely. My goal on FESCo is to help make Fedora better by helping with policies and procedures, asking the right questions of features that are submitted so they integrate better, and so on. It's not directly related to work I might specifically be doing.

• What can be done to get more features and make more progress? Have you participated in any features before?: I have participated in features off and on in the past, and I am responsiple or adjunct for at least two F18 features so far. "Make more progress" is a little vague - make more progress on *what*, exactly? To have more features, we need more developers interested in doing new features, or coming up with new good ideas for features. The best way to do that is likely to try and grow our development community and Fedora usage by upstream developers; that is only tangentially related to FESCo. The other thing that would help make more 'features' would be to streamline the feature process so that people are more likely to submit their existing work as features.

• What do you think about spins? Do we still need them or will they become obsolete once we have a new anaconda with better package selection?: Spins will always obviously have a place as demo-ware ; it's much simpler to hand a user a disc/stick with "here, this does XYZ" rather than installation media with "here, click ABC and then you'll get something that does XYZ". I'd love to see more spins that are for more targeted purposes than just Fedora X + Desktop Y; a spin for a media server, or an OpenFiler like spin, would be two examples.

• Do you think the issues FESCo discusses and the decisions FESCo makes are effectively and efficiently communicated throughout the Fedora community? If you believe communication between FESCo and the Fedora community can be enhanced, what first steps or ideas would you propose?: I think we trend more towards the 'efficient' than 'effective'; we quickly disseminate logs & meeting minutes, we put information in the tickets, and so on. But that's still a pull mechanism for the users - they have to go to the meeting minutes list, go to the meetbot archives, or read the ticket info.

I would think the first steps for improvement might be making the meetbot archives more prominent, searchable, and easily found so people can find the information they need.

Josh Boyer (jwb)

• What will you be able to accomplish if elected, that you couldn't as an unelected contributor? Why this post?: Not much on an individual topic basis. The wonderful thing about Fedora is that it's a volunteer driven distribution, so contributors get to work on whatever they'd like. While I view that as an overall strength, it can mean that the direction of the distribution is scattered. I view one of FESCo's purposes as acting as a sounding board and provide oversight on the overall features to continue and present a consistent and coherent user experience. I enjoy looking at things in a slightly bigger picture, and being part of the steering committee allows that.

• What can be done to get more features and make more progress? Have you participated in any features before?: I'm not entirely sure we need _more_ Features. Our Feature list already runs quite large on a per release basis. I would instead like to focus on refining the Feature process so that our big ticket items are highlighted and sufficiently communicated during development. I think informing the community of the big Features that impact multiple things in the distro is important, and doing that early and often will help those Features land in a high quality way for the release.

As a former FESCo member I have been involved in the Feature process since it's inception, however I have not personally proposed or worked on a specific Feature.

• What do you think about spins? Do we still need them or will they become obsolete once we have a new anaconda with better package selection?: I think Spins, as a concept, are great. They allow sufficiently motivated parties to remix Fedora in ways they see fit and allow like minded users to easily install that particular flavor of Fedora. That being said, I think the current incarnation of that concept has become a bit cumbersome. Keeping a repository of spin kickstart files is a great idea, however I feel that focusing effort on producing those spins in an official capacity is misguided. I think Spins should be easy to produce by individual users, either by improving the existing tools or perhaps creating an on-demand spin service. Promoting a spin to an officially supported per release flavor should be extremely rare.

• Do you think the issues FESCo discusses and the decisions FESCo makes are effectively and efficiently communicated throughout the Fedora community? If you believe communication between FESCo and the Fedora community can be enhanced, what first steps or ideas would you propose?: I believe the communication FESCo does is as good or better than it has been since FESCo was created. Agendas and minutes are published promtply, tickets are tracked well, and the meetings are lively and fairly well attended by the electorate and community members. However, we might want to broaden the scope of where that information is communicated to. If our developer community is going to grow, we need to reach people that are interested but might not be on the devel list. Perhaps a weekly FESCo blog that highlights particularly interesting Features or technical issues and discusses progress and items that need help. More interaction with people on users list, etc.