 Cool. So, once again, you're here watching the AMA with the Fedora Project Leader, Fedora Program Manager, and Fedora Community Action Impact Coordinator at the Fedora Linux 36 Release Party. I hope you came prepared with the questions or otherwise it's going to be an either boring or super awkward half an hour. So, I'll do my intro first and then we can pass it along. I'm Marie. I am the Fedora Community Action Impact Coordinator, our F-Cake, and I've been a part of Fedora for a very long time, and I've been supporting Fedora full-time since the very end of 2019. Matthew. Okay, I'll go next. And now I'm trying to remember numbers. I am Matthew Miller. I am the Fedora Project Leader. I have been doing this for a while. I've been the Fedora Project Leader since 2014, and I've been involved in Fedora since about 10 years before that. So, it's a long time. It's been interesting to see a lot of change and things are really positive right now, so I'm really, really excited about it. Ben. I'm Ben Cotton. I'm the Fedora Program Manager. I've been in this role for about four years now, four years next month, and I've been a contributor in the Fedora Community 12 or 13 years now, I think. It's been a while. I do want to point out that... Go ahead. I was going to just point out that Matthew, you are the longest-serving Fedora Project Leader by about four or five times the next longest at this point. Something like that. Yeah, I was going to actually ask, are you the longest-serving Fedora Program Manager at this point? Not yet. If I stick around through F37, then I'll have tied John Polstra. That's a long-running record he had there. How long do I have to be here? I think you have another year or so. Okay. I'm not sure I'm going to make it, guys. We have a question for Luna. What's the new functions and features you look forward to for F37 or any special change proposals you like? I'm going to push that to Ben. Ben's the one who pays attention to the change proposals until they're on fire. I copy and paste them. That doesn't mean I read them. That's a lie, by the way, for the record. It doesn't mean I retain them. How about that? We still have about another month and a half until the system-wide change proposal deadline for F37. A lot of times the most interesting both in the technical sense and also in the may you live an interesting time sense. Most of those proposals tend to come in shortly before the deadline. One thing that I do think is great is that it hasn't actually been submitted yet, but the cloud SIG is working towards bringing the cloud back to addition status. There's a little, not inactive, but a little more abundant, let's say, for a while. They're putting a lot of effort into really being active in curating the cloud experience and working with the cloud service providers as well. I think that's a pretty awesome sign for our community. Yeah, and there's a huge amount of growth in the cloud usage I've been seeing in our statistics. So, see my talk at Nest, there'll be more statistics. I have things. I'm excited for the wallpaper, as always. I'm also excited because during this next cycle, we're going to start seeing each other in person again. Hatches, and then also we hope to see in-person release parties for F37. Wouldn't that be awesome? So, these are the reasons I'm excited for this cycle. I do like the virtual release parties. I don't think we're getting rid of these, but I think it would also be cool if people could start meeting up in person for them. Yes, absolutely. That's how one of the ways we've reached new people. Matthew, there's a question. How long do you want to be the leader of the next 20 years? 30, 40? Well, I guess when people start getting pitchforks, it's probably a sign, but I haven't seen that yet. I could do this forever. Captain America, I could do this all day, I think. I'm really enjoying it. It's a very fun job. Great people, a lot of challenges. So, yeah, I don't know. If something really exciting else comes along, I might be interested, but it's hard to imagine anything as exciting as Fedora, really. All right. Dipple asks, what improvements do you want to see in Fedora leadership committees? How do they get involved more around the strategies that we are working on? I think it's hard for people to find the dedicated time that it would be nice to have for these things. It would be nice if people, the three of us here are here because we have the privilege of being paid to work on this, and so therefore we have time to do it. And a lot of people on the leadership committees, we don't want to restrict it to full-time employees paid to work on it, whether it's by Red Hat or anybody. We want it to be open to more people. It's going to be open to everybody in the community. A large amount of the community is not paid employees. So, we haven't made requirements for time, but it would be nice for people who are on the leadership committees to be able to do something more outside of just the meeting times, a couple hours a week kind of things. And I don't know how we can make that for people and still have it open to everybody. Marie? So, specifically to the Fedora Leadership Committees, it would be great if we could meet together in person again. I know that's going to be a common recurrence in this and talking about growing and investing more into our strategy, but it is really hard to do virtual face-to-faces. Like, it's growing. So, I'd love to see in the upcoming year a chance for, like, the council or the mind-chair committee to get together in person. I don't know if it will happen, but that is so my hope in my heart because, you know, coming together in person is just a different experience, and we can just sit there and we can focus on it. We don't have animals and kids and picking up groceries and all of these things, like, that kind of get in appointments, that get in between and we can just get together and focus. But that being said, we have discussion. And I just wanted to point it out. I put it one of the links in the chat, but both our committees and also just any Fedora contributor can be a part of forming Fedora's strategy, right? We're looking at a three to five-year strategy right now, and it's something that we want our committees to definitely be involved in that discussion. I actually had this crazy idea earlier that we should have a FESCO rep to mind-chair and a mind-chair rep to FESCO, but I don't know if anyone will be on board with me for that, but it was an idea that came across because there's just, you know, we're just not connected at that level, so a thought. That's an interesting idea. And to build on some of what Marie said from a different angle, you know, one of the things I would like to see is the community being more engaged with some of the leadership bodies. You know, Marie just shared the link in the chat to some of the discussions we've had about the Fedora strategy, and there really haven't been that many people offering their input. And on the one hand, I think that kind of means people aren't searching us out trying to, you know, tell us everything we're doing wrong, which is good. But also, you know, Fedora is community-driven, and we need the community input. And I'll give another pitch for the elections. You can nominate yourself for council, mind-chair, or FESCO right now. And, you know, if you get elected, that's a great way to participate. We usually have a few more nominees than open seats, but I would love to see that we get to the point where, like, wow, how am I going to choose from all these people when I cast my ballot? You know, I'd love to see more engagement both as candidates and also as voters. Yeah, and Ben had a great point that, like, if you don't think you're ready or don't think you're going to win, it's okay to run anyways. You'll get some experience in it. You'll learn from the process of doing it and people will learn about you, like the questions where you can put prompts for your ideas and what you can bring. A lot of new ideas are great. And also, to the point of the ideas of the community, in the Fedora council, our organizing charter, I'm going to just read a little bit, which is our primary role is to identify the short, medium, and long-term goals of the Fedora community and to organize and enable the project to best achieve them, which is very different from our role is to set the strategy. Our role is to find the strategy that the community has and set the community up to make it happen. So for that to really work, we need that input because otherwise, you know, we're guessing and we don't want to guess. The next question is, what do you like the most about Fedora? Marie, you want to go first this time? I was just thinking in my head, like, there's too many things that I love about Fedora, but I'm going to say the people, absolutely. I have, I'm friends with people that I met, like, I don't know, eight, nine years ago. I still work with them and talk to them every day. Really important people in my life. So really the connections that I've made with other contributors. Yeah, I think the intentionality of making a friendly community, like, that's why we put friends as one of our values. That community building is important to what Fedora is. It's not just an accidental community, but an on-purpose one where we work at being friends, even when it is sometimes hard, which is, it makes it almost like, this is scary, but it's like family in a way. Again, an intentional family that you choose and chooses each other. So that's, yeah. Yeah, not to belabor the point, but I love the community. We get to work with some really awesome people. Everyone's always very helpful. It's really a privilege to get paid to be a part of this, especially after being a volunteer for so many years. And just to point out again, all three of us came into this job from working in the Fedora community as volunteers. I'm going to skip up to a couple of questions up because it has a bunch of upvotes. Will we see more Fedora and OEM arrangements to get Fedora Linux on more computers? And will we start marketing this on our main site to make it more discoverable? I can answer the first part, but I'm not sure about the second. So for the first part, the answer is we'd love to, but it really depends on the OEMs rather than on, it's something that we can really control because, like, Lenovo came to us. They had customer demand and they wanted it to work, and they wanted to work with the community in the way we work. And if we go to a large OEM and say, hey, will you ship Fedora Linux on here? They're going to start, if they're not getting that demand already from their customers, they're going to start asking us what we will do for them. And honestly, the things we can do for them are fairly limited because we don't have a lot of extra resources to commit like a dedicated kernel development partner person to their thing, which a lot of OEMs would expect from our relationship like that. So that's pretty hard for us to do as a community. So it really takes people like Lenovo who are interested because they're getting that from their customers. So that's really where it comes from. And it's hard for it to work the other way around. I'd love for it to, but that's kind of the reality. Anything else to add, Murray? I don't have anything. Yeah, I guess for the website part of that becomes complicated also because then suddenly we're using their brand. And then so then we get into all sorts of different complicated other promotional sales. A lot of people suddenly become very invested in the way our website looks and maybe not the way that is the way we want it to. So I would definitely want to promote that those are available, but it's a hard thing to balance. So a related question is in the next 10 years, which platform do you wish to see Fedora Linux on? Hardware vendors, competitive gaming, education, business, etc. I definitely would like something Raspberry Pi like and that's something that's always been hard because the way Raspberry Pi is really structured on its very specific mission. Even though people use it for everything and that's made it really hard for they've got their own OS basically and then it's the same like we're trying to replace your OS on your device kind of thing. I would love to see an IoT device that has Fedora IoT on it out of the box and that the widespread. So I think I'm not just making this up. I honestly believe it is a much better technical foundation than the then Raspbian for a lot of what people are doing with it outside of that particular educational market the Raspbian is meant for. I also with the bias think that it's probably better for that too, but well, at least for a lot of things people are doing, I don't think Raspbian is actually the best choice. So I think a device like that would be exciting. Maybe risk five gives us the opportunity for something like that kind of a do over on things we've learned from arm, but we'll see if risk five as an architecture will learns those lessons as well. So I'm not sure if this is an answer to that question, but I'm going to give it anyway, which is nice. I would like to see Fedora use for more design work graphic design and UI UX work. Not just to bring people to the design team in Fedora but just as a valid way of doing design I wanted to become more and more mainstream I mean the other options are just very expensive. For design work so I really think it's a it's something that makes sense that I didn't get off the ground as a freelance graphic designer but I was, I did have projects, and I was able to do everything with free software. So, I would love to see the design suite spin, get more popular I guess. For me I'd like to see, you know, not any particular use case but I would just like to see Fedora Linux be the default when somebody writes up instructions for how to install their cool third party software package or when they're doing a demo of some, you know, cloud functionality or something. That's an area where we have the technical capabilities but I think, you know, a more concerted marketing effort which has been hard because historically our marketing has primarily been volunteer driven and volunteers don't always have the time and resources to throw at things the way, you know, corporate marketing departments do. Yeah, marketing resources so frustrating really. We had a few people say they were interested just during this release party so we need more. Yeah, everybody's saying that we're, let us know how we can support you. We even like, we don't have millions of dollars but we do have budget so if you need to spend money to do something like talk to mind share committee or the council depending on what it is, and we can, we can figure out some things if there's. It doesn't need, it doesn't need to be on a shoestring exactly, although I don't know what's the next step up from a shoestring. It's a fancy shoestring. Fancy shoestrings, yes, exactly. It's like those, those like spirally ones with like the glitter sort of. It's like we've through it, yes. Yeah, I was thinking maybe it's Velcro but. The next question is basically for me, it's how do you plan the release cycles and how do you coordinate across teams. And I've given a half hour or so talk on this so I'll try and condense it down to about a minute. But basically the planning is people who want to do the work step up and say hey I want to do this work. We have a process that we use. And so it's called the changes process. There's a community feedback stage where, you know, for example, you might say I'd like to drop bio support and the community says no, we don't want you to do that. And then, you know, people will refine their ideas. A lot of times the idea, it's more of a yes great let's let's do that. And then the fedora engineering steering committee votes, whether or not to accept the proposal. And then the people do the work. So, you know, the community, the coordination is really using the development mailing list and other venues to just communicate. Hey, here's what I want to work on. And then part of my job is to just check on the status of those as we reach critical dates in the release schedule. And I'm happy to talk to you more about it later on if you have much deeper questions. Saw another one with some votes. Can the Fedora project help to maintain GNOME more better on rel? It would be great to have the latest GNOME edition after upgrading to the next point release. I think I could take that. I talked to the GNOME team at Red Hat a lot. I think the answer is they are definitely doing the best they can. It is a fairly small team at Red Hat that does a lot of the work in GNOME upstream for GNOME on rel and in Fedora. We have some also non red hat people in the Fedora GNOME community, although we tend to keep hiring them. So it is a lot one team and it's hard to keep things updated and rolling in matching what enterprise customers need in a desktop. So I think it's probably going to be what you see is what you get. I think maybe part some of the improvements might be if a lot of the applications can get moved to flat packs so they can be separated from the base OS. So you could install the Fedora flat packs for the applications and get newer applications at least a newer base. But I think the base desktop is probably going to stay moving at enterprise needs pace. But I don't know that's really an outside of Fedora question. I am literally just speculating on other people's behalf here. All right. The next question is maybe we should have done this at the beginning, but can you elaborate on your specific roles a little more? Everything is my fault ultimately. I think that's my role. That was great. Yeah, someone else go first because your roles are better to find, I think. All right, sort of. Yes, I'll go first. So I am like, so I'm the Fedora Community Action and Impact Coordinator. That is a community forged title to say like community support person, right? Usually it would be like a community manager, but I don't manage Fedora. Fedora is an unbridled beast. Like there's no managing. So what I do is I support Fedora, right? I support Fedora in all kinds of different ways. I maintain the budget for Fedora and I make sure that we're using as much as the money as we can without going over. I directly support any and all events that are happening and I do that through Mindshare and a little bit just like independently. I do a lot of the NEST stuff without Mindshare, but Mindshare was involved in making decisions for the release parties and also providing input for NEST with Fedora. I also support projects and initiatives. So I basically do a little bit of project management for some teams. I help make sure they stay on task and get to where they're trying to go. I also deal with code of conduct. So I maintain the code of conduct to make changes to it. I'm working on new things to add on, supplemental documentation, some moderation guidelines. And I also deal with incoming reports from the code of conduct. So that's Matthew and I and we take that on. And I probably keep going with the end I do this and I do that. I said define not well bounded, I think. The FK does a lot of stuff. And Matthew, Ben and I joke that we're kind of like we have like 20 plate spinning and we're just like kind of running around making sure that they're like still spinning. So there's a lot of things that fit under my purview. We could probably legitimately have three full time people doing all the stuff that Marie is doing and not have them get bored, at least. Yeah, lots of people for NEST. So I guess since I'm talking, I'll talk about my role real quick. Basically, I'm the one that gets all the cats through the door for the release. So, you know, my core of my job is basically the release schedule and planning and, you know, following up on status and providing that coordination between teams doing work on the release. In practice, I tend to do a lot of things. I've accumulated a lot more repo permissions than I is probably healthy because being here full time. Sometimes, all right, well, this needs to get done. Nobody's here. I guess I'll do it. So I'm trying to slowly shed some of my permissions and responsibilities again so I can build up a new set. I learned that Ben has a like a dangerous fatal flaw, which is that if you have an idea around him that sounds good, it's very easy for him to accidentally think it is an instruction for Ben to do it. And then he goes and does it, which is somehow some a lot of that is awesome. But then I it's like too too many things. I didn't mean for you to actually do all of those things. Ben, I appreciate it, but it wasn't supposed to be instructions. Yes, exactly. So my job really, I think structurally it is to be the chair of the Fedora Council and to help that strategy that I talked about. Like that's the primary role. And in that to be the face of the project outside, I talked to the media, I talked to podcasts and whatever I talked to lots of people and to listen to our users, our contributors, and our other stakeholders including Red Hat. And I am ultimately responsible for the success for all of those things. Making sure that the project is happy, making sure that the project understands what Red Hat wants when Red Hat wants something and make sure that Red Hat understands what it means to want something. And what the community needs to be healthy so that Red Hat can continue to be successful in the way that it has been, which is very, very large part due to Fedora's success as a whole community that is bigger than Red Hat.