 I will just hold the mic in my hand. It's probably easier. So thanks everybody for showing up. I'm happy that you're here. I was a bit concerned about the scheduling, because we have the Mindshare session in parallel to this one. So people interested about the future or about what to improve in Fedora are probably in that session, while others might think this session is only about the past, about my decade in Fedora, while in fact it is not. I'm going to tell you something about the lessons I learned and the mistakes I made and the lessons I learned from that and also the lessons or the mistakes Red Hat or the Fedora governance bodies, various bodies or various people made and also the lessons we learned from that in order to not repeat the mistakes of the past. So I think this talk would have been an excellent opener for the Mindshare session, unfortunately they are scheduled in parallel. We'll do that better next year. Well, that's not my problem there. We'll just play the video. Yes, so this will probably be my last talk on a Fedora, well not on a Fedora conference, I hope to be back every now and then, just as I will be around in the greater open source community, but it will probably be my last talk with my Fedora head on. Yesterday I gave a talk about technical writing, this was with my Suzer head on or with my Suzer shirt on, while today I'm wearing the Fadkon Berlin shirt from 2009. That is the first Fadkon I attended and that's the oldest Fadkon shirt I have. So what are we going to talk about? We are talking about what I did for Fedora, the mistakes I made and the lessons I learned, various ways how to upset the community and at the end we are going to have some fun time. I selected a couple of photos. Unfortunately, leave office is very bad in scaling photos, so I didn't put the photos into the slides. So we will just see them at the end in no particular order, more or less random, not chronologically or something, as you might expect. I apologize that this talk won't have a consistent plot. I recently attended a storytelling training and presentation training and they said it's all about the plot, but this talk will rather be a collection of anecdotes and not-so-nice stories, so don't expect too much of a red line, but hopefully in the end it will make some sense. So first of all, why did I join Fedora? I have been as a student, so I originally come from a totally different background. So I studied linguistics, German literature, political science and history. So I got into Linux when I was working at a local ISP as a student. Somebody introduced me to Linux. I bought my first copy of SUSE Linux 6.1, I think, and a week later my flatmate by the time came around the corner with the Red Hat 6.0, which at that time was still a box product that you could buy at the supermarket, which seems very weird these days, right? Then I quickly switched, or I bounced back and forth between SUSE and Red Hat. Then I got into Debian. That's where I learned a lot of stuff, while SUSE and Red Hat worked pretty much out of the box in Debian, nothing did. That's why I had the steep learning curve, but it also helped me. I used Debian for quite a while until Woody was so outdated that it was hardly usable and they didn't have a new release. Actually, I wanted to join Debian. I was in the queue to become a Debian maintainer, but they had pretty much of a problem because the previous, I'm not sure if you're familiar with how Debian maintainers are, how they become maintainers or developers. You need to know at least ex other developers. You need to have your GPG keys signed by their keys and so on. The problem at that time was the person who was in charge of all the German Debian developers got into a fight with the rest of the Debian community. He left and he took all the keys and everything with him, so they couldn't accept any new Debian developers for over a year, I think. Then Red Hat announced they would make Fedora a community project and I immediately switched back. It was by Fedora Core 1, Beta 1 or something. That's when I also started contributing. I think my first contribution was a bug report about anaconda crashing when you make an accidental triple click somewhere. I'm not sure how I found that out, but that was my first ever contribution. I started building packages, mainly XFCE packages. At some point on the mailing list, I asked for a nice front and I had a repository of my own. I asked somebody, I know about create repo, but by the time there was no repo view yet, there was some weird pearl thing, I don't know. It was written by Konstantin as well. It's the brand assessor to read about you. I was writing an email to the mailing list how to get a nice web interface for the package collection. Torsten Lemus, you probably know him, responded and said, you can use this, but why not join Fedora? Just upload the packages to our servers and we take care of everything. Torsten sponsored me, which I'm very grateful for. That's when I joined Fedora. That was in September 2005. I joined as a package. I quickly became a package sponsor in a little over a year. In April 2007, I became a Fedora ambassador. We didn't have a real process. Actually, I became the Fedora ambassador for my state because I was the only Fedora ambassador in North Rhine and was failure by that time. That's when I started going to events and that's where I would argue that that's when my career started because it's all about the people. Go out and meet people, make friends, do some networking if you want to achieve something in the community, but more on that later. In 2010, I got elected into FESCO a year later. I got elected into the board and at the same time, I also became the FAMSCO chair, the first member and I think in the second year, the chair I've been serving on FAMSCO for I don't know how long, that's why there's no end date. I think it was like three years, four years in a row. In 2014, I became a board member again but this time not elected but appointed. I was the community or outreach representative and I remained in this role when we switched from the board to the council. But say a year later, that must have been in 2014 or 2015, I stepped down from the role because I could no longer do it. So what have I done or what roles did I have apart from these official title? I was in the XFC ESIC. Kevin and I were maintaining most of the XFC ESIC. Traditionally, he did XFC core while I was doing the XFC goodies. I was the member or founder of the LX ESIC, which was, well, the LX ESIC never really existed. It was just making a physical belief it does in order to get my feature approved. I was a member of the Spins SIG, of the Medical SIG. I was the Spins Rengler. I still am even though there is no Spins Rengler anymore. I was the... I still get mails every now and then about that. We should probably update this in the week. I was the EMEA media Rengler. That means I was in charge of media production for the EMEA region. I had like... I will show you a picture later. And I was also in charge of the SWAC production. I produced the Blue Ambassadors. There's no ambassador around here. I produced the Blue Ambassadors shirt not only for Europe, but because they were so good quality and it was actually cheaper to ship them. It's a bit weird. We shipped them to Asia. They were probably produced in Asia. We shipped them back, but it was cheaper than for them buying them there. So basically I took care of the global Ambassador shirt distribution and other SWAC. Yeah, I did a couple of features. As I said, I brought LXDE into Fedora. By the way, who is the program manager? No, he's not here with us. Oh, you mailed me about the LXDE's bin. Please kill it. Go die burning in a fire. No, LXDE upstream is dead or more or less dead. There's a Qt-based variant of LXDE which is called LXQt. There's a different spin, but the GTK version is dead. And please, off on the spin. I have no resources to test it. Please do burn in a fire. Yes, thank you very much. Well, unless somebody is willing to maintain it but if it's dead upstream, it's no use. Okay, then Kevin and I did XFC 4.6 and 4.8 later and I think we even did 4.10 and 4.12 together. I'm not sure if there were no features, but at some point I just stopped counting. Together with Gert Pokora, I did Rakudo. We packaged Rakudo for our six and later Rakudo Star and Successor. Together with Jörg Simon, I worked on the security spin. We had the multi desktop DVD together with Spot. Yeah, and the question is now why did I eventually leave Fedora? Well, on the one hand, let's start with the simple solution or the obvious answer. I joined SUSE a little over two years ago. My initial idea was continue with Fedora as a hobby and work on SUSE in a day job. But that didn't quite work out and actually I should have known that from the start because when I was in Fedora, I always was a very strong advocate of the community and I was really angry at Red Heritage who don't care about Fedora or who don't care about the community but just about their day job. So I was doing this split brain situation day job versus community. So I was angry at them and I wanted to do the same which was a really bad idea. So at the moment I'm not really in the open SUSE community. I probably will take over some packages. For example, XFCE because I know we could do better. They could be in better shape. Some packages like we had in Fedora and so on. But I don't have any intentions to become a member of the open SUSE board or whatnot. For me it feels like a game. I've done all the levels. I made it to the final boss and I don't want to start as a mere mortal again. So I would do my stuff. And also I simply don't have the time any longer. Life has changed. I now have a wife. Well, we are not yet married but I just call her my wife and she calls me her husband. And we have a little son now. He's four months old. Priorities change, life goes on and that's why I simply don't have the time. And that already leads me to the lessons I learned. So my motto throughout all these years was community first. I'm not sure if I'm... That was actually my slogan but nowadays it feels weird to say this because other people are using arbitrary combinations of word and first. I wouldn't say make Fedora great again or make the community great again. So yes. My advice for everybody who wants to have a career, if you will, in Fedora or in any other open source project is go out and meet people. I mean, I've been a Packager for two years before I first went to Linux Tag and Linux Tag was really when I got into the open source community. Meeting people is not really... No, if you don't meet the people who just communicate through mailing this or whatnot it's not the same. So people are sometimes quite different on mailing this than in real life. So that's also a lesson I learned and that's actually my next point. In 2001 was Fadkon Tempi 2009. I think it was 2009. 2010. Right, 11. 2009 was Berlin, obviously. 2010. I can look it up later. 2011 was my first US Fadkon. Berlin Fadkon doesn't really count, I would argue, because it was just a mini Fadkon and it was combined with Linux Tag which was a very bad idea if you want to get shit done because, well, you have a booth and you have to do booth service and on the other hand you have talk so there's this constant distraction. Our hope was that we would get Linux Tag visitors over to the Fadkon but that didn't work out. So for getting shit done, I think a location like this one, not necessarily in the city center and everything is closely together so that's the best if you want to get shit done. The interesting part for me about the Fadkon in Tempi was I finally got to know a lot of the American people that I only had been communicating through email with and what happened to me was that not only one but in fact three people approached me and they pretty much told me the same story oh, you're Christoph Wicker, now that we talk you're actually a nice guy but when I read your email on the mailing list I think you're a complete dick and that is a quote. So I learned a lot about the... a smooch said my mails sound passive-aggressive I didn't even know the word because we don't have well at least until I got to know my girlfriend but usually we don't have this concept of passive-aggressive as a German I mean we are active-aggressive we started two world wars, come on so we are active-aggressive and I was just an active-aggressive German trying to be polite and that for him sounded passive-aggressive but you will face the same cultural differences everywhere think of Asians I recall an Asian contributor who submitted a patch to GTK and the GTK upstream simply said oh that is an interesting patch where interesting can mean anything but they just asked him could you please slice it down into smaller chunks to address the individual problems and I mean that's a perfectly reasonable request but for him it was he felt refused and he never ever responded he never ever contributed to GTK again so go out and meet people it's easier but beware of the cultural differences it's easier to avoid these problems or the problems that arouse through these cultural differences if you're meeting face to face be careful with email in particular or be even more careful with IRC because when you're writing emails you still have the option of sending it later sleep a night over it reread what you have written I remind you everything you write usually shows up in some public archive of that mailing list so everybody will be able to read it again years later and when I read some of my emails back in those days actually I think the guy was right calling me a complete... yeah the next advice for new contributors is set your pace I've shown you the roles that I had in Fedora before and some of these roles can be very time consuming at some point I was in the board and in FAMSCO that makes say four hours of IRC meetings a week but then we have the EMEA IRC meetings of the European ambassadors which I was chairing and I was sending out the meeting minutes and inviting people and what not that add another two hours every second week every other week and yeah in the end I spent, I have no idea at least 20 hours a week on Fedora packed maintenance and what not there's nothing wrong with that if you can afford it I at that time could afford it because either I was still a student or I was working as a self-employed contractor or a consultant and if I didn't have any consulting gigs I invested time on Fedora and actually that helped me to gather a reputation which later got me various jobs so that is time well spent but please make sure that you don't burn out only do what you want to do as long as you can do it as a student there's nothing wrong if you have holidays between the semesters you can do a little extra work or so but don't do it in the long run don't do, yeah don't get overworked don't get burnt out and don't only do what you actually want to do don't do stuff because only because nobody else does it I found myself in the situation that nobody wanted to take care of this or that and I stepped up and I did it just because we needed somebody to do it but that's not healthy that's not sustainable in the long run and if nobody else is willing to stand up and do it maybe this is no longer necessary if the community doesn't feel we need this or that maybe, well so be it of course we do need somebody to send out all the media of course we do need somebody to take care of the ambassador polos or so on but if nobody volunteers then you need to find a different solution for that problem maybe Red Hat can help or whatever and actually sometimes stepping aside is a good opportunity we have seen that for example when I at some point I was I didn't get re-elected as FAMSCO chair Giri had become more active and they elected Giri at first I was upset but then I realized well he has done a better job throughout the last year and he is now doing a great job it was a great relief for me actually because it's good if you step aside because you give room for other contributors they get attention they get focus and in the end we ultimately need new faces new fresh blood every now and then because life goes on people get a family or whatever so a healthy community should always be able to replace you if it's some stupid routine job they will replace you with a shell script but if it's a people job thing somebody else will hopefully stand up then one thing that I would like to talk about is the situation of the spins because I've been deeply involved with that these are two quotes from the Fedora Devel mailing list and the funny thing is these are actually two quotes from the same person so first they tell me LXDE and KDE should be on the DVD they didn't want any spins and then they were no, don't put it on the disc so as a spin maintainer obviously you can't do right I know Dennis there it wasn't you that's I can all you can look it up who wrote it oh excellent you have a brilliant memory thank you well he had good strong arguments for his points arguments that I from my perspective as a spin maintainer I didn't see his arguments but from Mike's perspective as the infrastructure guy he did have valid points so but again that's something you need to well I think Fedora needs to think about carefully think about the spins about the future of the spins if they are obsolete or not it's not on me to decide it's on the Fedora community to decide I'm pretty sure this topic will come up every now and then again and yeah let's see what happens with it then another story I would like to talk about the Fedora objectives in 2011 that's the first time we started with with our objectives I think we didn't call them objectives but we called them goals I was very unhappy about this because I felt it was like a top-down approach first they had asked the individual groups projects like the ambassadors and the six and what not they had asked them for input but when they finally came up with a list of objectives which I will show in the next slide I felt like nothing that none of the input from the community was in these objectives alright that's actually that is already the slide with you so these were the objectives for 2011 these are all worthy goals they are nice and fair and I can subscribe to all of them but that doesn't mean that they are good goals because they are way too long there's no immediate action that results from any of them there's no way to measure your success and I think that's why we now call it objectives instead of goals the difference is you can actually measure it you need to measure the impact you can never really reach your goal because you're never there you can always improve and also you cannot enforce stuff when we revisited these objectives in 2012 and by that time I was on the board we realized nothing had really changed because why because nobody was championing them I mean it's easy to say go make it so I mean if you're captain of the car you can tell this to Ryker but you cannot tell this to the community right so what the board realized what our failure was we tried to enforce something but we didn't encourage or enable it or we didn't champion it I think nowadays the council is doing a way better job because the individual representatives in the council they all represent their groups and they drive forward their projects and we actually have the option that somebody joins the council to achieve this or that objective so that's a way better approach I think this is something that Fedora as a whole as a project has learned the lesson very well but we can all learn from that failure because whatever you do even as a single contributor pick your favorite project and champion it if you want to drive something in the ambassadors group go ahead and do it lead by example if you're good others will follow you period ok then the big topic of legal spot is not here with us unfortunately well yes poor spot that is very true but not only poor spot but also poor community I thought well spot was between the lines on the one hand you had rat it legal and on the other hand you had the community the the time where this really totally escalated was also in 2011 back in the old days we had a European entity we had a legal foundation Fedora EMEA EV with a known bank account it was a legal entity and we were actually allowed to accept donations they were tax deductible we had a bank account and Max as a community leader had granted us a non-exclusive license to use the Fedora trademark and then in 2011 Fedora already had changed its trademark policy and in fact Max was never in the position to grant us any license because I mean he was not the owner of the trademark we used it to produce swag with the Fedora logo on it with the old Fedora EV logo EV but yeah he was not allowed to do and actually the German EMEA EV received some funding from Red Hat and so the thing is we were no longer allowed to use the trademark and Red Hat had had to cut its funding I'm not sure if they had to if they wanted to increase the pressure on us but it resulted in the foundation the Fedora EMEA was founded at Fostem in 2009 I think and it had to be closed down in 2011 for these legal reasons so if there is a way to upset your community I think the number one is always legal stuff because there's nothing you can do against it not even math you can not even spot can I know back in the old days maybe Max went into somebody's office and yelled at people or whatever but that doesn't change a thing legal is legal period full stop you cannot change the law to try to avoid this wherever possible and in general try to avoid any red tape that is possible so if I were to give you the six key points I think it should be between five and seven so I went for six I think it's always community first it should be bottom up not top down set your own pace as a contributor avoid red tape I think FAMSCO was very good in creating red tape at some point they wanted standard operating procedures for everything which I can I can kind of understand that but if you have everything written down set in stone you're creating another hurdle yeah lead by example enable and don't enforce and hold on one thing that just came to my mind we have topics that pop up every other year again for example the topic of inactive ambassadors and then I as an old ambassador said come on we have beaten this topic to death we had this already so many times and the younger ones then come up again so my advice for everybody is if you are one of the old fans like I am make sure to write down why you made this or that decision it should be properly documented in the week not hidden somewhere in a mail on a mailing list or even worse in an IRC log you will never be able to find this again so make sure every decision you make is probably documented your rationale is documented why you made this or that decision because I think respect the elders the structure you find at least at some point served a certain purpose there is a reason why things they are the way they are so show some respect to the elders but also be willing to challenge them every now and then if we figure out this no longer works for the community maybe we need to rework that so document why this decision was made but feel free to question it later and of course like for every community thing show some if you are discussing show a minimal amount of respect for everybody ok now let's quickly switch to nope what it is last but not least some photos and so this is Kevin is that good that was not no that was so talk about this wouldn't be complete with a picture of I owe this man so much or we as a project owe him so much people who follow me on facebook or google plus now know that I am a very vocal activist for safe bicycle infrastructure we are going to have a referendum in Berlin and one of the reasons is yes that I am a passionate cyclist just like Seth was and in fact we talked a lot about cycling we exchanged private emails about this particular topic so yes I don't want to lose another friend in a in a deadly accident so let's all remember him speaking of remembering people that's max I'm not sure how many people of you still remember him and also there's a very young spot and there's a come on don't don't tell me there's also Jörg who is around here I'm very happy he's in the mindshare session so I'm very happy that chitlash is there so actually that was Fosdam in 2008 my first Fosdam and I'm glad to see that people are still around Francesco from Italy no longer is but yeah things times change but people yeah some people stick around here for example we have a very young I think he reminds me of Steve of Bill Gates doesn't he yeah they had the same problem I think she didn't know that was so that was a Linux talk in 2000 2008 yes that was my first Linux talk and you will see another picture of Linux talk that was that was the release party we had on the last day because it's they have a significant amount of Muslims in their population so it was a non-alcoholic release party but if you look at these pictures it's hard to to believe that they can have so much fun without alcohol we had a big cake fight they had these giant Fedora cakes and it ended up in a it was a giant cake fight this is again back to 2008 think of Linux talk how distributions have changed think of how our appearance on events has changed we have been at Linux talk with this giant booth you can see individual kiosks on every kiosk we had so we had GNOME, KDE, XSC and on the very right you can see the old PC which was a big deal so the Fedora presence at Linux talk was exceptional we had like 20 people there they called us the blue man group of the shirts and I think we were the most professional team there nowadays when we go to an event we go there with a much smaller team which is enough to take care of the booth service obviously but don't underestimate the impact it has on community building even if it's expensive to bring all these people to Berlin and even if the big booth and so on is expensive I think that was money well spent at least at that time events have changed Fedora has changed or the role of distributions has changed as Langlin pointed out for example Linux talk which was a giant event no longer exists it ceased to exist three years ago but it was a great time as you can see right this was also a Linux talk at one night when we had drinks I remember when we had drinks and we got up and we were already 20 meters away from the bar and the waitress came after us and we still had 200 euros open on the bill and yeah I think Max just read his credit card his read his credit card and it worked out in the end this is a photo by Tatika this is also Fadkon Tampi 2011 give back our distro who remembers this actually I remembered it but I didn't remember what it was about I knew that I was I have one of these buttons in fact I have it here and John gave it to me so I was obviously on the say opposing side in the opposition so well there were some concerns about changes on the one hand there was the switch to GNOME 3 with this new user interface that even your grandma can use longer the hackers desktop and at the same time we had certain changes in the design team and in the overall strategy we wanted to broaden our target audience and some people were well it was the girls scouts versus the hackers thing looking back well I can see their concerns but looking back I mean nobody has taken our distro away it still exists it's still a community thing it totally wasn't worse that the fight and I think we should have handled it better because we lost some good people left and right I don't think John is still active in Fedora Niko isn't either so these things will happen again in the future no matter if it's known for whatever it will be there will be conflicts and please try to solve them in a way that leaves nobody behind oh that's another very professional photo of me from Linovstak no Linovstak 2013 I think on a great panel my hair that's one of the nice things I like about being a community person so you get on stage people get to know you that's actually a professional photo by some photographer from a magazine and another thing that I like going to do these events open the doors that you usually never open this is at CERN the large Haydn Collider Gerrold so we have the FAT the Fedora Activity Day in Rheinveld Gerrold was the event owner and he knows somebody working there normally it's impossible to get there I mean they do guided tours but it takes years to get a free slot so I'm very grateful for everything that Fedora has allowed me to see and do and last but not least this is probably my favorite picture that was the my all-time highlight in Fedora I showed up with these that was FATKON MILAN so we had dinner I disappeared and showed up with a costume again and people totally freaked out they carried me on their hands through the restaurant that was incredible thank you Fedora community thank you this is media production and that was only part of it if you order 3000 DVDs make sure you're prepared for it because it's more than you think that's probably only 1000 so the guy shows up with a lorry and please make sure you have significant storage this is also one thing we shipped like 30.000 DVDs of Fedora 15 which was an achievement because I was also I'm writing for a police magazine and a magazine at the time that was really awesome but again it has gotten us into legal problems because they were not following the logo guidelines as you can see the multi-boot word mark doesn't really match the font of Fedora and whatnot and I think they didn't sign the cover bound agreement so again a legal problem at some point the good thing about this is the DVDs were already out there Fedora couldn't do anything about it by the time I announced it last but I think this is one of the last pictures of Fedora and Fed the group thing getting community building never underestimate community building and never underestimate the value of fun events like card racing here we have John Rose again and of course Biffy Miracle the Wiener mobile that was also in Fadkon Tampi this was Fadkon Milan I'm going to rush through these pictures these pictures now they come already over time no we are done so back again to my slides I still have a shitload of packages if you want some you can have everything just drop me an email I'm not sure if there's a procedure to mask off on them or well I could just off on everything but it's a shitload of work there's no mask off on button just give me a list I can do it thanks ok so long and thanks for all the fish I'm very grateful for these 10-11 years this more than a decade the time that I had spent in the Fedora community I think I have contributed a bit at least to the best that I could and yeah I would like to thank everybody for that