Originally published at: FESCo election: Interview with Fabio Alessandro Locati (Fale) – Fedora Community Blog
This is a part of the Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Monday, 9th December and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, 20 December. 2024
Interview with Fabio Alessandro Locati (Fale)
- Fedora Account: Fale
- Nick: fale
- Matrix Channels typically found in: #atomic-desktops:fedoraproject.org, #sway:fedoraproject.org, #golang:fedoraproject.org, #devel:fedoraproject.org, #coreos:fedoraproject.org, #iot:fedoraproject.org, #mobility:fedoraproject.org, #websites:fedoraproject.org, #fedora-arm:matrix.org
- Fedora User Wiki Page
Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?
I have been around the Fedora community for many years now: my FAS account is dated January 2010 (close to 15 years!), and I’ve contributed with many different hats to the Fedora project. In the beginning, I started as an ambassador, and over time, I’ve also become a packager and a packaging mentor, and I have joined multiple SIGs such as the Golang, Sway, and Atomic Desktop. For many years, I’ve been interested in immutable Linux desktop, Mobile Linux, and “new” languages (such as Go) packaging challenges, which are also becoming more relevant in the Fedora community now. Having contributed to the Fedora Project for a long time in many different areas, and given my experience and interest in other projects, I can bring those perspectives to FESCo.
How do you currently contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?
Currently, most of my contributions fall in the packaging area: I keep updating the packages I administer and try to find different solutions for packaging new languages and maintaining the Sway artifacts.
My current contributions are important to keeping Fedora first, not only in terms of package versions but also in terms of best practices and ways to reach our users.
How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team?
I think disagreements are normal in communities. I have a few beliefs entering and during any disagreement that guide me. First, I always separate the person from their argument: this allows me to discuss the topic without being influenced by the person making the points. The second believe I always have in mind during disagreements is that all people involved probably have a lot of things they agree on and a few they don’t agree on (otherwise, they would not be part of the conversation in the first place): this allows me to always see the two sides of the disagreement as having way more in common than in disagreement. The third belief I always hold during a discussion is that the people arguing on the opposite side of the disagreement are trying to make sure that what they believe as right becomes a reality: this allows me always to try to see if there are aspects in their point of view that I had not considered or not appropriately weighted.
Thanks to my beliefs, I always manage to keep disagreements civil and productive, which often leads to a consensus. It is not always possible to agree on everything, but it is always possible to disagree in civil and productive ways.
What else should community members know about you or your positions?
Let’s start with the fact that I’m a Red Hat employee, though what I do in my day job has nothing to do with Fedora (I’m a specialist for Ansible, so I have nothing to do with RHEL as well), so I have no alter motives around my contributions. I use Fedora on many devices (starting from my laptop) and have done so for many years. I contribute to the Fedora Project because I found in it and its community what I deem to be the best way of creating the best operating system :).
I’ve been using Sway exclusively on my Fedora desktop since I brought it in Fedora in 2016. On the other systems, I use either Fedora Server, Fedora CoreOS, or Fedora IoT, even though lately, I prefer the latter for all new non-desktop systems.
I see the Fedora Community as one community within a sea of communities (upstream, downstream, similarly located ones, etc.). I think the only way for all those communities to be successful is to collaborate, creating a higher-level community where all open-source communities collaborate for the greater good, which – in my opinion – would be a more open-source world.