This is a part of Fedora Council Elections interviews series. This is an important election, as two candidates will be selected as the Elected Representives, seats which carry full membership in our new top-level leadership and governance body.
Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The elections starts on November 18th and closes promptly at 00:00 UTC on November 26th.
Please read the responses from all five candidates and make your choices carefully:
- Rex Dieter
- Haïkel Guémar
- Michael Scherer
- Pete Travis
- Langdon White
Feel free to ask questions of the candidates here or elsewhere!
Interview with Rex Dieter (rdieter)
What is your background in Fedora? What have you worked on and what are you doing now?
I’m a long-time fedora contributor, packaging mostly. I have served on the Project Board (several times), FESCo, and Packaging Committee. Currently I’m an active member of the KDE SIG and generally try to help out anywhere I can, particularly by mentoring/sponsoring new contributors.
What does it mean for Fedora to be successful? What is “winning” for our project?
For me, it’s simple. Success means Fedora continuing to grow into a thriving, even more active community. Winning means continuing to be an ideal incubator for our vision of free culture and collaboration.
What are the most pressing issues facing Fedora today? What should we do about them?
I think it important to continue to empower those doing the hard work within the project, and to tear down barriers that get in the way of getting that valuable work done.
What are your interests and experience outside of Fedora? What of those things will help you in this role?
I work as system administrator in the Mathematics department at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. I also contribute occasionally to other (upstream) projects, including KDE and xdg-utils. I believe my experience in administration/deployment and upstream development give me some valuable and unique perspectives.
Care to share a screenshot of your Fedora desktop?
Have you used Fedora in a cloud or server context?
I currently use Fedora to power several web-based application servers (as part of my dayjob).
Anything else voters should know?
I’m an avid baseball fan, go Cubs and Astros (an odd pairing of favorite teams, I admit, but there you have it).
Leslie Satenstein
All of the above candidates are to my liking. I have dealt with Pete Travis in positive ways, and have watched the other candidates in action within the Fedora community.
Good luck to the winner. Too bad the position does not allow round robin allowing a quarter year for each.
My concern is that one of the above candidates helps change the perception that Fedora is a “Hobby Distribution” to a real “I want Fedora to be my permanent most favoured and reliable distribution”
Rex Dieter
Thanks Leslie. Do you have any suggestions on how to improve Fedora’s perception?