Council Election: Interview with Aleksandra Fedorova (bookwar)

Originally published at: Council Election: Interview with Aleksandra Fedorova (bookwar) – Fedora Community Blog

This is a part of the Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Friday, 21 May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, 3 June 2021.

Interview with Aleksandra Fedorova

Questions

Why are you running for the Fedora Council?

As an active member of local communities I would like to bring the non-US perspective to Fedora Council and bring the feedback I collect outside of usual Fedora communication channels.

What do you see as Fedora’s place in the universe?

I’d like Fedora to be the place for the curious, where people can learn and create new ideas, technologies and tools.

While I would like to extend the user base of Fedora, I believe that we should not be afraid of experimenting and trying something new or unusual and getting users outside of their comfort zone. Rather, we should develop ways to make experiments and changes in Fedora easier, without sacrificing the quality of the system.

How can we best measure Fedora’s success?

I think that there is no one clear metric which can define the success, but I would love to see more contributions and more features coming.

I also think that we should be building more connections to upstream projects or vendors, and find more use-cases for Fedora beyond the classical desktop Linux distribution.

We just completed our thirty-fourth Fedora Linux. That’s amazing! The tech world isn’t the same as it was in 2003, though. What do we need to do differently in the next 12-18 months so that we’re set up for another successful decade?

I’d like to see processes in the Fedora Project to be treated the same way as we treat features of the Fedora Linux distribution: we value the consistency and compatibility but we are not afraid of making incompatible changes when it is reasonably planned and justified. And we support each other in making such changes, developing tooling and compatibility layers to help with the transition.

I would like to see this approach extended beyond the content of the distribution. And I’d like Fedora contributors to feel that they can change how things are done in Fedora, given that they can provide enough reasons for it.

How should the Fedora Council balance our focus on the mission while also addressing the broader social concerns that affect the inclusiveness of our community?

I believe that Fedora Project (or any other project) is people more than it is code. So we can not really separate dealing with the code from dealing with people who write, test, describe or use it.

But I think we should acknowledge that addressing social issues is like dealing with any other bug: it comes with the cost. And as there are a lot of struggles we experiencing, political, social, cultural.., even geographical, we need to approach them carefully so that we don’t reach the point of the collective burnout by trying to solve everything at the same time.

Thus I think we need to focus on some practical and constructive ways where we as Fedora community can make real impact and improve in small steps.