 Hi everybody, I am Matthew Miller. I am the Fedora project leader, and so actually the Fedora project leader doesn't have very many technical like actual like constitutional responsibilities or roles in the project mostly it's trying to convince people of things, but one of the official things is being the chair of the Fedora Council and the Fedora Council in turn is the leadership body for the Fedora project and in particular We do have some governance responsibilities delegating money and things like that But mostly the goal is to come up with and set the Fedora strategy for both long-term medium-term and short-term Based on you know community input not just setting things top down and then also help the project Actually, you know execute on a strategy. So my job is Organizing that mostly that's that's the that's what I do I've been doing that for a while now and normally I Over from my office part of the upstairs over there, but I'm having some problems with my laptop Which is you know happens to everybody I guess is what we're saying here And so now we're seeing me working from my treadmill desk area and the messy background Which I had not prepared for having in the background, but there it is different view of my life for this There Hi, my name is Marie Norden and I am Fedora's community action and impact coordinator My main role is to help support and grow the community So I am all over the project. I'm in the mind-chair committee. I'm on the council. I help with objectives I work with the code of conduct and incident reporting for the code of conduct And I'm just kind of generally all over to support and provide input on the council Hello, I'm the president my pronouns are he him I'm the DEI advisor to the council I mostly act as a DI voice in the community. You would see me working around for a week of diversity made a summit Surveys and a few more things Happy to be here Hey folks, my pronouns are he him. I lead the website maps team and represent the revamp objective into the council As my day job I work in the community platform 18 Sumatra Hey, I'm Shimantra. I work for the federal QA team other than that I do a few other things one of that includes revamping the community alongside Marie and Mariana and I go around with test days I'm sometime in further and I used to lead a lot of outreach efforts in India plus Asia and I Used to do a lot of mentorship activities including GSOC until recently That's me Here right and I think I'm last so I'm Ben cotton my pronouns are he him I am the Fedora program manager, which is sort of like the chief cat herring officer for Getting the release out every six months I will be your Dedicated moderator today But since we only have one question in the Q&A so far we'll have to do a lot of damping So please put questions in the Q&A so that we have things to talk about To answer your questions. This is really a chance for the community to directly interrogate the council Although we do welcome you to pop into the council channel on Element or into the council tag on Fedora discussion at any time There's just really not enough of those conversations happening. We'd like to see more of that So to start it off. How are you liking nest so far? I'm enjoying it. I I think I I've been having the problem of wanting to be at every session so far in two places Even I often have that problem, but it's really strong this year. So I guess that's that's good I've got a good lineup. It's fun to see everybody. I do really wish we could be in person I like that. There's the virtual connections are nice, but Yeah, missing the in-person still so hopefully next time Likewise, you know the talks have been going great The only thing that I'm a bit sad about is time zone thing It's a bit late in the day, but hop in dot to good platform I can always catch back recordings and I don't really have to wait for them to get to YouTube So, yeah, even though I would like to be in this talks when those talks are happening I can always catch them back later. Yeah, as we we're talking about in one of the other sessions. I think that Time zones like what if we do get people all together Obviously, it's harder and more expensive and a lot of more More work to get people from all around the world together But then we do get everybody all in one time zone and when you're you know working from when you're doing this from home You're not gonna shift to the time zone of the conference release. It's so that makes it really hard Whereas if we do it all in, you know, we do it all in, you know, the US or we We were talking about doing flock in India before things shut down and maybe we will still be able to do that so Trying to bring people there as many people as can and Yeah, that that makes it Global and then but obviously also having the You can tell by the number of attendees We have ten, you know five times as many people here as we would normally have at a flock conference This also does make it available to more people. So I don't know how to get the good of both of those things Without a lot more work But I don't know maybe a lot more work ends up being the answer just for not for Marie, but for the next person Yes, go So you do have a couple of More substantive questions. So unless anyone else wants to jump in with nest comments move on to those So the first question comes from Jerry who asks what do you see as the biggest barrier for would be new contributors to Fedora? Have a place to start at least Documentation Outdated documentation scattered documentation You know, we use the wiki for a very long time and there's a lot of outdated wiki pages out there I think that can be confusing for new contributors Not quite sure where to go. I think also it can be you know, depending on the personality or the person you'd be a bit intimidating to introduce yourself via mailing list or in a chat room so and and Depending on who's in that chat room. It's not always a hundred percent Fantastic interaction and that is something that we take seriously and we try to work on if people have those Types of not great interaction, you know, we're having conversations in order to improve that But I think, you know, we've talked to at least a couple people who haven't had like a hundred percent Great interaction on their first introduction. So those are the two that come to my mind first Yeah, I'll second both of those and I think add another thing which is sometimes There's no one there and then you know, there's not your interest in something It's an area that clearly needs help but Nobody's around to help lead you into where that is either either just nobody's there that day or weaker moment and then It's like the opportunities missed or just it's a group that needs help so much help that it's not even running This is part of the whole flywheel theory. That's kind of one of our central organizing things about How to keep a project running and so we've got some areas that don't have a flywheel. So I think that's That's a problem as well Yeah, and then I think maybe a little bit related to all that there's Not always easy fix easy things to jump into on a lot of different areas So it's hard to figure out what my what the first contribution is but the first step is we don't have those paths build out for a lot of areas and That's that's a lot of work to do and a lot of work to maintain But I think that's probably something that projects that on board people easily and successful have a lot of those Waiting for people and we don't always and we do in some some areas Like I think design team is a good example of places where there are some some of those there And it's easy to do onboarding, but other other areas Don't have that so much Yeah, and building on what you said, you know, I think having more mentorship You know both formally and informally the project would help the you know The joint SIG does a great job of helping people who come into the joint SIG Get situated and get going But we don't it's not the mentorship isn't evenly distributed across the project And if we want to double the number of active contributors, that's something we're really going to need to scale up in order to be successful Vipul, Sumatra, Akashdeep, anything you want to add here? No, well, I'll piggyback one Marie's point The thing that she mentioned out when people come into the community first So they require some special attention at that point in time So they'll be able to catch up later But when they're entering they have so many things to look into so many things to participate and so many things to be a part of That it becomes overwhelming and one-to-one mentorship in the long run can be tricky We don't really have so many people and so much time and we can't quite promise that so yeah mentorship more efforts to that and If we have a documentation right, that's the best thing that we can do and we have been doing that So absolutely hundred percent on all the points one more thing is I look at retention of contributors as one of the biggest challenge after they're onboarded and one of the ways that we solve that is try to Reward as much as possible and not push contributors to burnout So that is one of those things that probably mentorship While we are mentoring somebody can be instilled in them that if you feel burnt out at any point where you need help No, if I don't don't just keep doing whatever you are doing for so long that you Totally exhausted and then there is nobody to pick up after you That's that's one thing probably that should be talked about a lot and probably and help us Figure out better ways we can manage the load between contributors new folks who are coming I have nothing to add. Thank you Well, perfect because Sumantra's answer leads into the next question. What do you think that or as great as challenge is? So many challenges. It's hard to pick I Think Dapting to change and doing big changes Wow, you know kind of keeping what we are is a ongoing theme of something that we have a hard time with And you know computing world is always changing. So that's that's a pretty big meta challenge. I guess I Definitely feel Under-resourced I guess constantly like not enough people to do the things I think We ought to be doing and you know people often show up with great suggestions of what we should be doing and I'm like, yeah, you're right So I don't know I feel I Guess I Don't know it would be nice to have Just you know a lot of people with a lot of free time to do whatever and you know We don't have that in the world. So I guess that's kind of a challenge as a volunteer You know a project that mostly depends on volunteers who are passionate about that Making you know making easy space for those people to do things and making it exciting and fun and useful so that we can have Growing community guess that's a continually big thing. I would raise my hand, but there's no raised hand function To add to Matthew's point It's not just the tech that's changing all the time also the way that we have to do things through mindshare like Supporting providing resources to the community is kind of also constantly evolving. There's always new things that we have to consider You know, we're trying to especially with coven people safety different policies that go into effect around Fedora's funding and The quickness in which those things change It's difficult for our community to adapt and to understand them as quick as they're actually happening so I think that that can like You know disenfranchise people disempower people sometimes when they're like I thought I knew how to get this thing done and now I found out that it's a totally different process and I don't know where to start. I also think that burnout is one of the biggest challenges Across, you know Fedora, especially for the core contributors That's why one of the things that we want to focus on is mentorship, you know, like We're chatting with Alexandra and this in the channel like stop doing all of that work yourself and start teaching other people How to do it, right? Like this is something I've been doing with design for a long while Like I don't have the time to do design And do all the designs in Fedora that I would like to see done But instead I've interned I think are mentored for Outreachy interns in the last couple years to do graphic design So, you know, I'm investing an hour or two a week in somebody else's, you know growth Steel development and attachment to the Fedora community instead of trying to take on all of that design work myself Yeah, and that's a hard thing to learn to do because I mean sometimes it's it it doesn't you know It doesn't always pay off right away, right? And sometimes it sometimes it never pays off you may spend your time, you know, maybe teaching, you know Four or five people you know the things that you think would be useful for them And then, you know, the return you get back into that isn't necessarily It's not guaranteed that that you're going to I'm putting it, you know, in kind of crass economic terms, but like Doing that may benefit the people and not actually give you somebody to delegate to a lot of the time Which is also its own value But it makes it a really hard thing to do if what you're really feeling like is cramped for time and things It's hard to do that even though I think it does pay off in that way too, but it makes it hard sometimes It just I'll just do it. I don't have time for you know, getting other people up to speed on this So figuring out how to make that easier for people and encourage that and make that a default practice is something we need to work on You know big piggybacking on your point Matthew retention of contributors because Like Maddie mentioned that when you teach someone something a certain stack a certain design principle something of that sort we kind of Open the back of our minds and they'll stay back contribute in the community. Maybe do the mentorship like we did it does not always happen sadly and The mentorship forward thing is something that we would really like to see as something That we would want to make happen, but then again not the easiest thing in the world for a challenge. I Don't know about challenges, but I have few wishful thinking again I like to think federal is in a good state Especially federal Linux has got a lot of good pairs and community also feels very attached to what we do It would be great to have some community matrix to along with our good feeling of where community is going a bit better Sustainability matrix to see our happiness and where we are going with things just to again It's come matrix are just quantity when without insight into community it's useless but we have that and Pairing it with some numbers would help us make better decisions. I feel so community matrix more accessibility and thankful Thankfully, it's become one of our priorities to look into now. So But we can always do more around documentation and accessibility and More informed decisions. So these are some of the wishful thinking that I have I Actually also want to add something over here. So the way I look at one of our major contributor bases Anyone who is willing to develop a skill set learning what Linux is somebody who is very new to Linux doesn't know anything about Linux And in that in that case having freshman year students Actually contribute to Fedora can actually benefit them while they are there for four odd years In their college and they can sustainably grow the community as well for like 34 years taking a lot the mentoring one of those segments can actually help us retain a lot of contributors however, we have We don't have a clear program But it would be really good to actually have some of that in our program where we can go out to colleges and You know speak to students and get them on board at the Fedora in such a way that they stick around for four odd years And in that way we just don't get to double up our contributors But you also get to retain these contributors for a longer period of and as a result They can pass the data on to their juniors and so on so that way. It's a revolving new I think for us I see our biggest challenge as being What that's just talking about, you know doing what we're doing and more of it and better You know, we are really good at doing things with North America and Europe right now We as far as I know have almost no contributor base in Africa you know, we have pockets in and India and in part of East Asia, but you know, we're not nearly as geographically representative of the world population as we'd like to be so how do we You know grow those communities both just in number and in You know just in our reach and our ability to coordinate and work together when we are truly, you know globe spanning all of the time How do we Have more asynchronous work. I think we do a good job of it now But we're gonna have to do better in order to meet our goals Which I didn't mean to do this, but talking about working a synchronously there The next question is about synchronous communication Are there any plans to have matrix be the default mode of chat for the project think matrix bridge IRC rather than IRC bridge to matrix? I'll answer that one. I think that is the plan and I think Honestly, I would like to get to the point where we're actually disconnecting some of the IRC channels because I think the bridge is Brings it down to The lower level and limits what you can actually do and I think there's some pretty useful things that matrix provides that we should Be getting people to do I know people are fond of IRC and it has some there's some there's some good things about it And also we had our matrix post down a little bit the last week, which was annoying But it's not perfect, but there are some things, you know Just like I'm using your reactions rather than a lot of plus ones and things Makes really for a nicer conversation Some of the things with poles and more advanced features. Those are those are nice to have And I also think that the moderation is better. We can easily delete things. I think there's some good things there And we also have units to my RC channels where some of that unfriendliness that marine was Bringing up are just kind of the IRC cultural norm and it gives us a chance to reset some of those norms and with the bridge as it is We kind of have a hey, this is our channel that's been this way for 20 years Why are you coming in and telling us our channel should be different just because it's bridged? Well, if that's the case then maybe unbridging ends up being the answer for some of those But I think the part of the problem right now is this is again I want to send people to the I mean maybe part of my problem is I trying to get this organized on a as a Async or this discussion on the discussion platform. There's a matrix tag there And we don't really have a matrix admins group. We've got random people who help set it up I am one of them. I would actually like to stop being a matrix admin because I It's a lot of I Don't want to have to wake up at four in the morning to delete spam because there's nobody else around to do it We need people are all around the world who are interested in being on a matrix moderation and admin team I can take care of that and we haven't really had people show up interested in doing that So that's a if you're interested in matrix. I'm finding those threads on the discussion forum And honestly take take over because I do not want to be in charge of it, but I would like it to happen I actually want to dispute the premise of the question a little bit just in the sense that Most of the time there really isn't the project in terms of fedora, you know, it's really a collection of semi-autonomous, you know affiliated sub projects And you know the council has explicitly decided over the years that you know teams should be able to use the platforms that work best for them So, you know, there was a lot of telegram usage and especially before we had, you know an official matrix server available Because it had the lower barrier to entry and that's sort of where people were I don't think the council I'm going to speak for all of us here based on previous discussions But I don't think we really have much interest in trying to mandate to the entire, you know community This is the tool. I think we want it to be the default that people choose but still have freedom to You know differ to change from defaults When it makes sense for their community, although we hope that That was a rare cases Okay, I'd like to add in one point here, which is different people find it different chat platforms Accessible or not And I love something we're focusing on but the DEI team was just talking about this and you know There was someone who's vocal on the team about telegram being more accessible for them So we put the bridge back up and so now matrix telegram and IRC are all bridged again So, I mean, I think there's the ideal way to do it Maybe in our minds, but then I think also thinking about who's actually using these and Who wants to be on them and Wanting to be accessible to more people. I don't have the solution for this. I really don't but I do think that allowing teams to make the decision as Individual teams makes a lot of sense Yeah, I don't know that's it's a It's a challenge because of that problem of things being disconnected and aware to go a little bit There's definitely some appeal to saying We've got this is our chat platform come here. This is where you'll find things that this is our get repository place It is here. This is you know, like a centralizing things a little bit more Can kind of help with that can like that confusion and sprawl about where to go and where to get help And what we're to talk to people is also a problem So yeah, it's a balance because I hear what you're saying about that as well and The bridging again like them that the telegram bridge can also really be confusing as well because of the way it happens to work Where people on telegram may think that they're notifying people and they're actually not and you don't realize that you're not getting notified and then you Disconnects in people's expectations of what that meant So sometimes and sometimes the bridges can tie things together, but they also require a little bit of extra Understanding that you are working through a bridge. It can't be if people think that it's invisible, but it actually has artifacts Then that can make the community some problem for us Matthew I'm gonna ask you to refresh real quick your audio is apparently kind of Not great and we'll see if anyone else wants to contribute while Matthew is reloading. Okay Well, then while Matthew is refreshing I will jump up to a question that I don't know that he would be the only person with input on but This is gonna make Marie cry. Do we have any roadmap for getting discourse totally on boarded? That's actually something that Matthew has been working on Thanks to him But yes, we are working on it. We are In process of bringing discourse on board so as many of y'all heard us through The process of bringing element on board. It took us a little bit over a year so we are approaching that mark with this course, but It's it's a complicated process because this is this means bringing a vendor on to red hat, right? So it's the door doesn't have an entity to bring vendors on So it means working through red hats processes and You know kind of explaining our needs because they fall outside of red hats, maybe normal business You know standard business needs. There's quite a bit to navigate there. So Matthew and I are both working on bringing discord on our discourse, excuse me on board and Hoping that's happening within the next three to six months All right Anybody else want to go in there? Is it better? for now So Kind of a little bit of a loaded question here, but I'll read the whole thing for context Flatpacks have many downsides compared to RPMs. For example, hugely increased storage But print memory usage and startup times outdated bundled libraries Driver mismatch issues and desktop integration And then there's the commonplace displacement of the much advertised security sandbox Which means there's a little or no gain at huge costs compared to RPMs Why is Fedora still trying to push flatpacks as the future of the software delivering mechanism? I Wonder if that question is a little bit leading the witness or Has There are a lot of things in there, which I think are very disputable there in Some cases there's more storage usage, but since it deduplicates things it isn't necessarily the case Startup time shouldn't generally be that much larger Updates should be can be much smaller because if one tiny file changes just that just that file can be updated so there are a lot of things that can be advantages and Yeah, I've duplicated libraries that that can happen But on the other hand that also solves some problems where It isn't actually possible to have a unified library and have everything get along it decouples things in a way that Makes your system more flexible and usable And I think that actually one of the reasons we should work on this in fedora is The kind of default way to do it is basically everybody rolling their own and pushing it to flat hub Maybe building on a flat hub Whereas if we can actually do a really good job of generating flat packs in fedora We can bring some of the strengths that we have as a distribution of consistency of making it so that You know our standard libraries our compiler flags that are security based You know are all there and we can actually maybe bring some Intelligence to making sure those updates and libraries in the ones that are under control get updated So if there's a security problem we can identify Which flat packs might need a particular update and handle that so doing that in fedora actually brings a benefit to people There was I gotta say in the user survey. I I didn't actually see the slide here about it, but There there was a lot of Comments in favor of flat pack there as well. Although yeah, I know people are skeptical of it I'm not sure I remember all of the objections there, but I think there's a lot of advantages A other one was like the security sandbox a lot of so To summarize that basically flat packs can be wrapped like they're in a container But if they do that some of the applications Expectations like don't work cuz they're like is expecting to access your whole home directory and suddenly it can't and it acts weird And that's confusing to users So a lot of applications are not really very strongly Bubble-wrapped basically they're not protected from the system or the system isn't protected from them, whichever way So like what are the advantages of the question? And I think part of this is What there's there's a thing about building Linux distributions that one of the Debbie and people said a while ago Which was that to make a Linux distribution? You've got to be able to accept tepid progress for the somewhat better like things don't have to be immediately Like ah, this is solves our problems now and so In order to get to a place where we have nicely integrated applications that do have those protections Like something like flat pack that does the decoupling is an important first step Even it doesn't though doesn't solve the problem It gets us closer to that and having that so that's a that's a fundamental first step in getting there Yeah, there's a comment there flat packs Makes sense only on something like silver blue. I think that maybe is partly true, although I Think there are things on a non Ostrich non silver blue based system where it there are some advantages as well But yeah, I think it maybe does make the most advanced most sense on something like silver loop But I also think that that approach silver blue coral ass the Ferrari T thing is a good way to go So I think that can those both can be true Anyone else want to offer input on this topic? We'll move on to the next question I'd like to I got right Matthew All right, so there's a comment here that the runtime is duplicated with system libraries Yeah, that that can be a duplicate Duplicated we can also do the duplication of that if that's an issue, but yeah Having a runtime that's duplicated is there is more space. That's true It's a thing. It's a cost that you pay in order to get the advantages the work to advance to this that I thought of having flat packs in first place is because It's a good middle ground. There are software libraries that don't quite keep up with the updates that we have in Fedora First as one of our foundation so we you can pretty much expect that the dependencies that we maintain Very up to date It does not happen to be the case for the softwares that we make use of a lot of times So flatback has a system in the ground, you know, even with some older libraries, which are still supported Might not be in the grand distribution, but we can have it pack is inside of the flat and that is how You know this slow times was something that was a case in 2020 according to the article But I don't see I think it's the case right now. It is not in my use Hi, so we'll move on to another question Back to Ben's answer for the geographical user-based challenge. How can we grow this? What about the idea of potential Fedora folks doing some type of volunteer mission in these places to help spread the awareness of Fedora locally while teaching the opportunities within open source and helping grow their knowledge or some type of collaboration with local organizations To go at cement, right? I think you're gonna talk about ambassadors, right? Yes, so eventually So this was this problem was supposed to be solved by introducing this program called ambassadors and Advocates the advocates were these people who would not have any commitment to Fedora But can go to any event under hundred dollars and then reimburse it from Fedora and that can be either install fast General awareness session, you know a day with Fedora Linux something like very easy Non-fictional people with a windows laptop can step in get a you know life good Fedora Play around learn No, that that was the original idea behind that The revamped program is currently successful One thing that happened with a lot of these geographical challenges as they happened where we got Embargoed with a lot of country the recently with the geopolitical scenarios there were a bunch of places where we could not operate anymore and That's because red hat couldn't operate in you, right? So we had to go step down and say these are these places just cannot support it As a result, you know our contributor base pretty much declined that's fine, but With the coming days, I think one of the key areas which we can focus on is basically getting the awareness up and running and that Requires us to have Some efforts from the marketing team and like Matthew mentioned even if a lot of contributors would love to come and join marketing team There should be somebody to show around the place It's like entering a new Airbnb. You still need directions to the place You still need what what's happening and somebody to host you, right? And then that's that becomes one of those challenges that has always been Something we try to solve That's my input on You know apart from ambassadors had has been something that was a bit too Divided sure but we were able to connect with people who belong to those areas You know representatives from those places from India from the places where these evens took place a Lot of contributors a lot of users who are not necessarily contributors. They came they went But in these talks, they were a part of discussions as well And when they left they had this thing in their minds that well There was something that they would want to be a part of so Yeah, there are a lot of things that we are doing towards it And I'd like to see more of that happening down the line Matthew look like you're about to answer. I'm trying to not be cynical. I guess I some some of this feels like the Great ideas, but not enough people to do it thing that I was lamenting a little while ago Because I think it would be great for fedora to have people volunteer in to do these things so Yes, please but and I actually that's a little bit flip I think this is something we identified as part of if Our strategy that we're going to build out and so I think it is something we want to invest in as well So, yeah, it's a good idea. All right, so we'll move on to the next question Where do you think we are on focusing about silver blue? I'm not entirely sure of the context of that question. I probably should have asked a follow-up, but I Think this is kind of a are we are we gonna make silver blue the default which I kind of said I would like to go in that direction. I think part of it is It's not something that we've really put a huge investment into as a Project and this is again, you know people showing up to do things people are pretty excited about it I think that if I look at the comments on the on the survey and just like see social media things reddit comments Like it is an outsize impact in enthusiasm and people in bringing people in which is good I think we need to figure out how to turn those people into contributors into helping build silver blue more part of it also is I don't think Honestly, this is you know peeling back the corporate things Red hat for the red hat rel workstation Which has a very different use case from the fedora stuff is not completely convinced that that's what something something Customers want for what they're doing Customers tend to be very very conservative about how things work and would actually prefer everything to go back to GNOME 2 and you know not ever change from that please so That means that like the desktop team at red hat it doesn't have like that It's a labor of love for everybody working on it. I guess that's that that's the thing so Maybe maybe there'll be more investment there depending on where that where that goes at red hat But I think it's mostly really up to people who are interested in the technology and think it's a good idea to work on it And I think that's that's where it will go in the meantime I think it is kind of like all of our different spins and offerings We'll see where it's going and what energy it's picking up by itself and we're not and I don't think we're at the point Where we want to like push our fingers on the scale as the council yet and see what that is because Obviously the more traditional way of putting together an OS is working pretty well as well and I don't want to mess that up Right before I read out the next question. I realize maybe we should have explained a little bit how the council is structured So I'll set the context so the council Members are a mix of people who are hired by red hat to be in certain roles, which is Matthew Marie and me And we also have people who are selected to represent the Groups within the community. So the engineering steering committee the mind share committee and the diversity equity and inclusion team We have our objective leads which are people leading a Generally 12 to 18 month effort to do a larger You know change either technical or community related within the within fedora And then we have two people who are elected by the community directly To serve on the council for one year terms. And so the question was Is there a minimum requirement to run for the council and Sumatra had indicated that he had something to say so I'll let him go first So one thing I have been running for elections for quite some time both mind share and council So one thing I wanted to explicitly I noticed this as a pattern and I wanted to explicitly talk about it At least bring it up is when we write Council interviews for mostly people to read and consume before the vote. That's mostly an ink Now we are a very diverse community Which means a lot of our contributors also come from places which where English is not probably the Number one language of the most spoken language, right? So constructing a lot of huge heavy sentences containing meanings dramatically correct and syntactically right putting that as a part of an election Interview might become a challenge for a lot of contributors Which made which has a resultant decline on how people have Never submitted interviews because they they just thought it's a lot of work Plus this is not my language accepted only in English So I wanted to really understand how the council feels about at least having a texture of this thing in any language, which is not English making the community more Cohesive about how they can submit a part of the there what they want to do To be in their language more be more comfortable that with them or force them to write in a pattern where they are not So I will say if it makes you feel any better I don't think the interviews actually matter all that much Just comparing like the number of votes cast to then to the page views on the interviews I think it's pretty clear that a lot of election Just like in political and any other group elections a lot of it comes down to name recognition And you know, so, you know the best thing you can do to help your candidacy When you are running for an elective position in fedora is to be active in the discussions and to not be a jerk You know if people recognize your name and they reckon kind of associate you with You know thoughtful input that tends to Correlate pretty well with You know, how many votes people get, you know, I spend a lot of time just Working in channels and on mailing lists And so I kind of have a sense of who the active participants are and I feel like I can generally Guess at the relative rankings of elections based on that before the results actually come out To answer the question directly before we sort of sidestep into some mantras questions, I think it's a good one basically the requirement is to have a fedora account and Currently to have Signed the fedora project contributor agreement There is some open discussion about whether or not that will continue or and in what sense But other than that we welcome anyone to run. There's no, you know, must must be this tall to ride you'll have more success if you've been around a while and have established a name for yourself probably but You know, one of the ways that you can make yourself more well-known is to put your ideas out there by You know standing for election So I'm thinking about what your mantra shared a little bit and yeah I'm gonna put the English as a language of fedora aside for just a second and come back to it So setting aside English. I do think the ability to write and communicate clearly Is a essential Ability for being on the council. I don't I think that's that is vital. So again Come back to language, but just being able to write and do the interview and being comfortable with that you should be able to do that and If people are not feeling comfortable with that bar interested in leadership in the project I think maybe some mentoring like that's an area We're mentoring in you know, that kind of communication would actually be useful to help people feel comfortable in that way So I think even though like Ben says the maybe what you actually write isn't so important I think being able to do it is is a good sign because that's what you'll actually need to do to participate in the project as well And then yeah, the language like English like so I you know, I have some high school level German I couldn't can't really put a complicated sentence together anymore and other than that, you know, I only speak English So I'm coming from a very American place in in that But yeah, but but some of the right conjunction here there are a lot of languages in the world and there are dozens of languages in Fedora and we kind of need some Unified way to talk and communicate and so mostly before America centric reasons, you know We've picked English as the language of the project in a lot of places, you know It is kind of a language of the internet again very American centric, but there is there's English is is a common language in the project and so that's Where it is I and I opened ideas for how we could make it more multilingual in a way that still Makes us all able to communicate together You know, Star Trek translators would be nice or we could all learn Esperanto To be all equally disadvantaged Yeah, I don't I don't know a good answer I would like to not make it I would like to make it so that being a fluent English speaker is not a requirement But I also think that practically it it really is right now So yeah, I don't know Open to thoughts on that So one thing and we don't really have time to decide it now, but I think I'll action myself to start a discussion thread Historically I have done basically no editing other than formatting in election interviews because I am very conscious of Not wanting to you know be seen to you know put my thumb on the scale as it were On the other hand I happen to think I'm a fairly decent editor and you know as a native English speaker I can often at least be like hey this sentence doesn't really quite You know English the way maybe you meant So you know that could be something that the council sort of decides like should Like what sort of level of editorial, you know Should you know the program manager give when interviews are coming in should we stick with you know Hey, does the formatting look correct and nothing else or you know, should there be some involvement should we have other? You know other people who you know have less official titles in the project to be able you know Come in and help people. I think you know death. There's definitely You know, there's no no prohibition against having somebody else say you know Giving your answers to somebody else to say hey, can you help me refine this and I would encourage it You know even for negative native English speakers, you know, do my ideas that I'm expressing make sense You know find a friend and ask them You know even before you you know stand up as a candidate, you know Look things over So maybe there's ways to tune the process a little bit. I'm gonna add something Alexandra said here that English is kind of a language and technology That Yeah, I think you cannot go far without English in it right now or anymore and it is okay We should expect simple English though not overloaded with idioms and cultural references I think that's maybe something we can be sensitive about I know Watching some of the red hat things over the years as red hat grew into a global company There's a tendency sometimes of business people to make metaphors involving baseball and American football and Sometimes those don't translate around the world. So being careful about those things You know, sometimes those don't translate to me because I have no idea what that football reference was but Yeah, like being careful about that something we could be conscious about I think that's a really good point Yeah, and there was actually some also some reading back here about Making making me cringe and one of they one of the things I brought up on the discussion site because I has the ability to edit things On the static exchange sites. There's a pretty strong culture of editing people's poor English into Standard English or English that the person who's at doing the editing liked better and you know basically changing people's voice to be more of a Generic English voice I guess and so talked about you should we do that on ask fedora on fedora discussions we you fix people's errors and Pretty strong consensus that no we should let people you speak as they're speaking and leave it to be their voice So that's something It is time for everyone's favorite event the pub quiz. Oh, yeah So I'm just gonna thank everyone and please continue to have conversations with the council in the council channel on Chat or in the council tag and fedora discussion and hopefully we'll see you all in the pub quiz