Originally published at: Mindshare Elections: Interview with Akashdeep Dhar (t0xic0der) – 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 Akashdeep Dhar
- FAS ID: t0xic0der
- Matrix Rooms:
- Fedora Forgejo Deployment
- CentOS Pagure -> GitLab Migration
- Fedora Join SIG
- Fedora Mentoring
- Fedora Apps
- Fedora Infrastructure Team
- Fedora Mindshare
- Fedora Council
Questions
Why are you running for Fedora Council?
Since the past year, I have been deeply involved in both the investigation (community preferences between Forgejo and GitLab) and the implementation of the Fedora Project’s move from Pagure to Forgejo. One of my major focuses throughout this contribution was to ensure that we were making technological decisions and contributions as democratically as possible. Regardless of which subprojects or SIGs contributors hailed from, I ensured that their opinions were accounted for in the final decision on where the Fedora Project would collaborate. Beyond the recognition and learning, I believe it is crucial to ensure that members have clear pathways for contribution and a meaningful sense of impact. This helps ensure that contributors are not only motivated to continue, but also encourages existing contributors to mentor and support their growth.
With that being where I am coming from, I wish to utilize this platform to continue making technological decisions accessible to the various subprojects and SIGs that make use of our infrastructure services. I want to be able to devise pathways through which we can mentor prospective contributors without needing a scoped project or a formalized mentoring program. Alongside that, I want to continue my role as an effective conduit between sponsored teams and community teams, to understand the evolving needs of infrastructure applications – and potentially lead the creation of new ones as needed by the community or the Fedora Council. With my continuous participation in the Fedora Join SIG over the years, I also wish to contribute significantly toward realizing the Fedora Project’s strategic goal of doubling the number of active contributors.
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 have taken a statistical approach to onboarding, mentoring, and retention of contributors for several years now, and it largely remains the same – whether I am participating as a mentor in a formalized mentorship program or guiding a group of interested volunteers toward contributions. Following Ankur Sinha’s ideology of “seeking potential, not polish” in contributors (which has been ingrained in me for over five years), I plan on establishing pathways through which we can build a structured mentoring cohort without being constrained by the scoped projects and monetary requirements that often accompany formalized mentoring programmes. The ultimate goal is to create a positive space within the community where newcomers are encouraged to bring fresh ideas to the table, driving an innovative yet sustainable path toward Fedora Project’s growth.
How can we best measure Fedora’s success?
The strength of the Fedora Project lies in the people involved in it. These include contributors designing the next community mascot, members writing documentation on how to get NVIDIA drivers working, engineers ensuring maximum uptime in the infrastructure, individuals publishing posts about recent developments in our community, and our most esteemed users who make use of the technology we create. We all mutually derive energy from one another, and any deterioration in community health within a particular subproject or SIG tends to reflect on others as well in one way or another. Alongside the lived experience of contributing to the team, we can also make use of anonymized statistical surveys to gather metrics about discussions in forums, meetings in channels, contributions to repositories, attendance at events, and more.
What do you see as Fedora’s place in the universe?
Fedora Linux has been the distribution where I finally stopped distrohopping about six years ago, when I was looking for something that would run better than Windows on my aging laptop. I could go on about Fedora Linux being a balanced blend of unmatched innovation and stellar user experience, but I like to think we are more than that. With a range of downstream distributions like RHEL, CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux, Alma Linux, Amazon Linux, and others, our community empowers people with the technology of today that shapes the enterprise distributions of tomorrow. People not only get the opportunity to contribute to an inclusive community, but their contributions also flow into our friend projects like Podman, Ansible, OpenShift, Distrobox etc. – making us one of the most exciting and rewarding communities to be a part of.
The Fedora Council is intended to be an active working body. How will you make room for Council work?
I am grateful to be employed in close proximity to the Fedora Project and CentOS Project communities, and my organization i.e. Red Hat Community Linux Engineering team has consistently enabled me to connect and collaborate with the community members. I have always made it a point to set aside time – whether I am working on infrastructure development or simply hanging out with my Fedora Project friends. While time zones can make it challenging to connect with folks on the other side of the world, that has never stopped me from moving appointments around my calendar to make space for what matters to me most i.e. participating in the Fedora Council. Furthermore, I plan to commit a dedicated, scheduled time each week to proactively (not reactively) prioritize action items, while emphasizing delegation wherever applicable.