Originally published at: Fedora Council Elections: Interview with Fernando F Mancera (ffmancera) – Fedora Community Blog
This is a part of the Fedora Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
Interview with Fernando F Mancera
- FAS ID: ffmancera
- Matrix Rooms: mentoring, nmstate, networkmanager
Questions
Why are you running for Fedora Council?
During my past involvement with Fedora Council as Mentored Projects Initiative co-leader, I learned a lot about the project governance and which areas need more support. I want to continue focusing on mentoring but this time internal mentoring and Fedora policies regarding it. How to introduce new people to Fedora kernel, infrastructure, DEI, applications and other SIGs.
In addition, there should be more guidance for council members, so they can contribute more efficiently. I want to contribute to such guides for the future council members. Last but not least, I think I have a good “get things done” mentality that helps to move forward topics with pro-active helping.
The Fedora Strategy guiding star is that the project is going to double its contributor base by 2028. As a council member, how would you try to help the project delivering on that goal’?
I think the participation and promotion of Fedora in mentoring programs and internal mentoring is crucial to achieve this goal. When people contribute to projects they feel rewarded and that encourage them to continue contributing. Internal mentoring creates alternatives for existing contributor to be able to contribute to another area of their interest. This is vital to keep them engaged in the community.
How can we best measure Fedora’s success?
Measuring a project success is a very hard task. In my opinion, a successful FOSS project are those that meet the user needs, adapt over time to new needs and all of these while having an inclusive and healthy community with open discussions.
I guess a more objective and easy way of measuring it is based on user base adoption rate and satisfaction.
What do you see as Fedora’s place in the universe?
I don’t think I will ever see Fedora out of the Solar System so that makes this answer much simpler. I think it could be or maybe is, the most popular Linux distribution and one of the distributions that could convince people to move away from proprietary operative systems.
The Fedora Council is intended to be an active working body. How will you make room for Council work?
Fedora Council work won’t be related to my day-to-day work. Although, a week has 168 hours, considering I want to sleep 56 of them and need to work another 40 of them.. I will have around 72 hours of free time per week (wow, this is quite depressing). I can probably take a couple of hours a week to work in the Fedora Council 🙂