 So, I was going to talk to you today about my journey with open source which later on resulted on my involvement with Fedora. I joined open source back in 2016. I was a student back then and so there is this open source community in my city where we foster all sorts of open source projects other than Fedora, like Wikimedia projects and Mozilla projects and LibreOffice and any other small personal project that someone might have and want to contribute to a broader community. The picture you are seeing is a group picture from a conference that we organize every year in May and a friend of mine talked to me and asked me if I could volunteer. At the time I had no idea what this was about. So I decided to give it a try and I became a volunteer and during the conference I met many Fedorians. If you were there in 2016 just let me know. I had no idea what the project was about but I wanted to be part of a Linux community and that Linux community that happened to be there was Fedora. So if there was another community there I would have probably joined that one. So if open source was there I would have been an open source contributor now. The thing is that when I was a student everybody was afraid of Linux and yeah, everyone was super afraid of Linux thinking of the terminal and you have to do anything with commands. I'm glad I'm here too Marie. So I decided to challenge myself and get into this while I do. So at first I installed it and tried to play around with it and coming from a Windows background I started using Fedora with Cinnamon not yet GNOME because GNOME was quite different from the Windows setup that I was used to. So in order to get a little bit more familiar for about six months I was using Cinnamon to get myself into the Linux world. And I was barely using the terminal which was very disappointing because I thought that the second that I will install Linux I will be a terminal, you know, competition and everything. It turned out it wasn't like this. There is a good interface. So next slide. So this was my first release party in July 2016. I remember that I was at the beach earlier for the release party and I came only for that I went back. I had no idea what these people were talking about but it seemed so nice. And I think this was a day or a week that I installed Fedora on my computer too. So yeah, the picture seems very blurry and small but yes, it is there too, but we can. So I will briefly would like to talk to you about what I have been doing so far with the Fedora project. So the first thing that I did as I said I was a student back then so my technical knowledge was very minimum. So I started doing localizations. Yeah I started doing localizations. I even created my past account during a conference where two Fedora ambassadors were having presentations. And I created it there so that was the very first thing I did and localization was actually some of the first events that I started organizing on my own. Just give me one second. I will open the presentation on my phone because I can barely see the screen because the text is very small. I have done in self-est, so we as I said in my community would be in organizing events and I have also helped other people install Fedora on their computers and sometimes where the machines are pretty old. You get to face many difficulties on the installation part and sometimes GNOME, which is a default, the sub-environment sometimes doesn't work because it requires more resources. So yeah that was one of the most challenging parts as a contributor. I have organized events either small or like and I think it is very important to be part of a community either than organizing but also attending events like this one. If you're a beginner this is the best place to get started because you also meet new people and you get to know where or whom to ask in case you have a question. I have been part of a booth, either smaller ones or bigger ones like Osloom for example is probably the largest open source event happening in Europe but I mean it's happening in Europe but it collects people from all over the world. We're talking about thousands of people so it's huge. I've held presentations like this one or a smaller one. I have also held presentations at my school when I was at my master's. I remember that we had an assignment to fulfill in center S and I managed to convince my professor to do it in Fedora server and everyone hated me so because I changed it in the middle of the assignments. I have also helped other people with anything that I could but why do this? So this is a question I get from a lot of people why I spend my spare time and my free time doing this. For me this is very important the sense of belonging. As humans we are social creatures and we like being among others and people who are the same out of certain criteria the same with us. So I really love the fact that I am here. We are 20 people in this session right now and you're all chatting so it's great to have people with same thoughts and interests and everything as you. You can develop your skills further. As I said I saw getting into a Linux community as a challenge to myself because I thought that I would become like a hack here, this stereotype that there's a guy in front of a screen in a dark room with a foodie yeah I thought I was going to become something like that. Of course you get to develop your skills further and you get to know what you can do. But it's not, you should not go by the stereotypes that exist out there. Yeah and of course with Fedora the thing that it is that you get to experience the very latest technologies I mean the short release cycle for many people this is a problem because they have to upgrade this way here all the time yes it might require some time to do the upgrade every now and then but I really think that it's really nice that we get to experience what is latest out there and of course other than your technical skills I forgot to mention you get to develop further your social skills so as tech people there is their stereotype that we are not the most social and yeah I don't know I am not the most social person on earth but still this is something that I enjoy doing so by attending events and being in the same room with so many different people with so many different backgrounds with so many different cultures so many different religious so many different outfits so our outfit indicates actually a lot of from our culture something that might be non acceptable from my culture it might be okay from another person and this develops further our mentality on you know communicating with other people which might be very useful on our day-to-day life other than the project so where is then today in 2020 in the virtual 2020 where everything is going on from our homes I I read the revamp announcement in case you have not checked it yet in July on the mind travel and I am very happy that Marie actually suggested me to call it this effort I was planning to apply as a volunteer and she but then I saw that I was proposed to become one of the colleagues so together with Sumantra which is in India and Marie I am helping revamp the ambassadors program I think this is a I think that had to be done the ambassadors program is one of the oldest ones that exist within the Fedora project and it has been successful for many years and a lot of people are part of it but I think it was time for a change and I always see changes as a good thing if you would like to discuss more and very found process I am here you can ping me on telegram or via email with my fast email and yeah this is what I've been doing pretty much so far so thank you very much this was a short presentation about me as a historian thank you that was great everyone can put questions in the chat I have questions oh my god how do people get involved in the community outreach revamp oh so we have a rebel who an issue sorry I need you on the mind travel on a cure I pronounce it as a cure everyone does it everyone differently this is my version of the cure sorry well you are is a French word that means snail so it should be sure it should probably be pleasure I don't know maybe someone else knows anyway keep going I'm gonna get a link for you yeah great so we have this rebel for everyone who like to join us we also have a telegram group chat yep that rebel for faster communication if anyone wants to join us we meet we have by week we meet meetings it was yesterday and the next one will be in two weeks yeah well we open here or with tasks on the board so if everyone wants to take one of the the tasks that are occurring they're going on cool so what what do you think like after you first or like oh Linux and then you had your first experiences with it like what was the main what was the number one thing that what was the number one reason that kept you here so my story so I like to throw a project and I started doing the only small presentations in smaller events like 10 people or less were attending and in 2017 at the conference that I made that I mentioned earlier I was again in 2017 a volunteer and I happened to sit in the same table one of those show social events with some fedorians and red hudders and I'm like I'm a fedora a contributor they were like you should apply to become an ambassador and I'm like okay maybe I don't think I'm eligible to do that or ready to do that so I applied and then I also applied to attend flock it was it was in the US I can remember where exactly so I applied for flock and surprisingly I got accepted and I became an ambassador literally a week before flock that's awesome yeah and I think even best Brian was not an ambassador at that time that's funny okay I have another cool one one thing was I'll probably talk about this in my session on Sunday but I think it was the friendships that I made that kept me in fedora and the reason was because I went to flock and I got to meet all of them in person yeah yeah you can organize events you can attend all sorts of events but flock is everyone who is doing fedora there like you have translators packages designers people's person writers like everyone is there yep and everyone is passionate about the same thing you know that's really cool we have another question in the chat okay what is something do you think that the global open source or fedora world could learn from a local community like open labs to run our Toronto's open source community what can we learn from your community that has is chock full of ladies so as I said I'm not the most person that I will never come and talk to someone I do not know personally so if you want to welcome more people on board I would say you know if you see someone who's not much involved just go talk to them you might think that you know I don't want to know with them but it might be their way of doing things so people who are in our newcomers and they don't know anyone you know physical or virtual room it is quite hard for them you know to to transfer as themselves so what I have noted on our bioinformatics for the revamp is that we present a task and if you don't say like Marie you want to do this and you will say yes but if I say who wants to do this no one will step up that is so true and also if you don't feel like you want to do something or you're comfortable with something just say that you you're not comfortable doing it it is very important as well yeah something we're doing with the ambassador revamp is we're trying to check in with the team you know how's everyone feeling about this process are we communicating are you burnt out try not to take on too much work one person you know whom talking about Alberta um very cool is if there's no more questions would you like to read a script to make the boot of like a Fedora women's day video okay so I'm gonna grab the script everyone can watch us do this hold on sec so here I am gonna put it in the chat if that works for you I'm just getting it real quick of course YouTube decided to open okay so copy and paste is not my friend right now I'm giving one second so it's gonna look like this during the presentation I was not being much of attention of the chat so I will go for it if I miss any question or anything I was looking for questions people were just saying you were doing a great job and then there was that one question that I answered for you alright I gave to you oh so question from Edward was English a problem for you when joining the community I would have to say no my case no I mean there might have been case where I did not understand a word or an expression or anything but I wouldn't call it other problems okay cool I think I'm quite liking this case I can understand that for many people it is a problem all right so in the chat I've put here the example so you'll say hi my name is Mariana I am from Albania I am a woman and I speak Albanian and I and I want you to do that in Albanian your language oh and then we're going to do the first part in your home in your native tongue and then the second part we are from different countries that part stay in English okay all right okay go ahead first and the idea when I'm Mariana when I'm going to Priya when I'm a family of the last ship we are all from different countries we speak different languages we're from different cultures but Fedora unites us all in different stores awesome thanks I miss it a little bit because I hey you could do it again do you want to do it again no I think it's fine oh you're also a native speaker of Greek yes yes so I was born in Albania but I was raised in Greece do you want to do you want to do a Greek version for us yeah okay are you recording this okay I guess I was Mariana in a couple like Mila link up we are all from different countries we speak different languages we're from different cultures but Fedora unites us all that was so good I loved it you're getting so many compliments in the chat thank you so much all right thank you oh we have the question from this year did you face any roadblocks or challenges while trying to contribute and find things to work on so as I've said many times through this presentation 2020 was quite challenging for all of us because one of the main things that Fedorians do is actually interact with each other in physical events so yeah I think that was 2020 was quite some of a challenge and the event process is actually a contribution which I love doing because I can do it for my home so yeah I still feel like I'm giving back to the community but I have also you know I don't have to travel somewhere and be out of town for a week or for four days so yeah kind of an ideal time to do it I'm not not trying to like say that like pandemic should go longer but like it's just like we're all home we get this kind of this weird pause from life or everything's going well quickly all at once but I'm so glad to have you here Mariana after our women's day and in fedora helping to lead the revamp and everything that you do so thank you I'm gonna jump off the call and probably go around in the networking area and just chat with people until the top of the hour okay thanks again bye