Originally published at: FESCo Elections: Interview with Tim Flink (tflink) – Fedora Community Blog
This is a part of the FESCo 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 Tim Flink
- FAS ID: tflink
- Matrix Rooms: ai-ml, quality
Questions
Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?
I want to be a member of FESCo because I think that the variety of experiences I have from around Fedora over the years can help make good technical decisions and I would like to continue working to help make Fedora better.
I don’t have much in the way of a specific direction I want to push Fedora in because I’m not sure FESCo has that kind of power. I’ve always viewed Fedora as a “do-ocracy” where things only happen by doing and if someone does the legwork to make it happen and unfunded mandates don’t have a great track record of success regardless of where they come from.
As far as the things I’m most interested in, I want to see Fedora continue to be a well tested and smootly operating distro that people want to use and work on. Beyond that, I do want to see Fedora be a good distro for AI/ML work and particularly open source AI/ML work. To be clear, that doesn’t involve forcing newfangled AI stuff onto people with no recourse – having some level of choice between “can’t you just add a checkbox to re-enable the feature to heat the CPU when space bar is pressed?” and “there is one way to do this and you will like it” is important to me.
How do you currently contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?
At the moment, most of my contributions are around the ai-ml sig – I run the bi-weekly ai-ml SIG meetings and I work on packaging and improving testing for the ROCm stack.
How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team?
Ideally, I’d work to find a solution that works for all parties but if that fails, I’d look within existing guidelines to see of there was a clearly better solution. If all solutions are equally within those guidelines, I’d probably go with the solution that I felt was the best choice.
It’s hard to really describe conflict resolution in a way that doesn’t sound like it came out of ChatGPT because in my experience, it usually comes down to the details for the exact situation you’re in. If there is a blindingly obvious single answer, 99% of people will go with that blindingly obvious answer and the situation wouldn’t need any mediation to begin with.
What else should community members know about you or your positions?
A lot of my background is around testing and test automation but that has included putting time into packaging, development and infrastructure. I started focusing on open source AI/ML tooling after finishing graduate work in AI/ML and I currently work for AMD where part of my job includes working on the ROCm stack in Fedora.