Grayson: Welcome to the "Fedora Podcast." This is the official Episode One of Season Two. You're listening to the podcast that's here to teach you about the Fedora community and what we're doing right now.

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    Grayson: Today, we're going to talk about some Fedora news. We're going to speak with Ben Cotton, the Fedora Project manager about the upcoming Fedora elections. Then, we're going to talk about our next episode, and we're going to talk with Marie Nordin about the Fedora 34 Release Party and the upcoming Nest 2021. Keep listening.

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    Eduard: Let's cover some news before we go on. There's a ton of Fedora 34-related stuff going on right now. We're setting and recording a whole list of interviews for you guys about it. Things like PipeWire, modern affairs, GNOME 40, and more.

    We only have a few [indecipherable 0:59] left but don't have an entire episode for that. One of those is our Fedora elections. To help us learn more about that, we have the Fedora Project Manager, Ben Cotton. 

    Grayson: Hi, Ben. 

    Ben Cotton: Hi, Grayson. 

    Grayson: My first question is, what positions are there in the Fedora community that are elected? 

    Ben: There are three groups that conduct elections after each Fedora Linux release. The first is a Fedora Council, which is the project's overall governance body. There are two council seats directly elected by the community with one-year terms, so each election cycle, one seat is open.

    Similarly, the Fedora Mindshare Committee, which oversees the non-engineering parts of Fedora, has two directly elected seats, again with the one-year terms. They have one seat open this cycle.

    Lastly, there's the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee, or FESCO. FESCO oversees the engineering aspects of the Fedora Project. It's entirely elected by the community for one-year terms, and four seats are open this cycle. 

    Grayson: Who is allowed to run for these different positions? 

    Ben: For Fedora Council and the Mindshare Committee, any Fedora contributor who has signed the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement, or FPCA, can run. For FESCO, they have an additional requirement that you have to be a member of the packaging group. 

    Grayson: Who's allowed to vote for the candidates? 

    Ben: Any contributor who has signed the FPCA can vote for Council and Mindshare. FESCO added additional requirement that voters belong to at least one other group in the Fedora Account System, and doesn't necessarily need to be an engineering group, but it does need to be a group beyond just having signed the Contributor Agreement. 

    Grayson: Could you give me a quick overview of what the process looks like for becoming a candidate? 

    Ben: Generally, candidates self-nominate by adding their name to the appropriate wiki page. There's one for each body. Then, there's a set of interview questions that they have to answer. They fill those out, I put them into the Fedora Community Blog, and publish those right before the voting period opens. 

    Grayson: What's the process for becoming a voter? 

    Ben: So long as you have a Fedora account and have signed the FPCA, you're set. When voting opens, you log in with your account at elections.fedoraprojects.org and cast a vote.

    The elections use what we call range voting, which means you assign each candidate a vote of zero through n, where n is the total number of candidates. You don't have to rank them, and in fact, you can give all of the candidates the same score if you want.

    If you don't like any of them at all, you can give them all zeros. If there are 10 candidates and you think they're all the best, you can give them all 10s. In reality, there's a spread where people tend to vote a very top or bottom end of the range, or in the middle if they're not sure about the candidate or don't know them very well.

    Basically, the sum of all of the votes is how the final vote is tallied. If there are 100 ballots cast and there are 10 candidates, then you can have up to 1000 points, basically, total at the end. 

    Grayson: When are our next elections going to start? 

    Ben: The nomination period for this cycle opened on 28 April and goes through 12 May. Candidates have a week to submit their interviews, and then voting begins on 21 May. Basically, we start the nomination process right after each Fedora Linux release. 

    Grayson: When will it close? 

    Ben: The voting ends on the 3rd of June, and then results get announced the following day. 

    Grayson: We will have all those links in the show notes, podcast.fedoraproject.org, and you can stay tuned to the Com Blog for more. Thank you, Ben. 

    Ben: You're welcome. Thank you for having me. 

    Grayson: Spoiler alert, guys, we have an interview for him about what a Fedora Project manager is. That's coming up soon. We haven't decided exactly when, but stay tuned for that.

    We're going to do a bunch more episodes, like Eduard said, on the topic of Fedora 34 and on some of the various Fedora spins. Our next episode coming up is with Wim Taymans about PipeWire. PipeWire, it's so exciting. We have to play you a preview of this next episode.

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    Wim Taymans: I'm a Belgian programmer. I started programming when I was young. 

    Grayson: What is PipeWire in comparison? 

    Wim: PipeWire is basically just a replacement for the two alternatives that we had, like PulseAudio and JACK. 

    Grayson: Interesting. 

    Wim: It's all very exciting [inaudible 6:01] .

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    Eduard: Now, we're going to talk with Marie Nordin AKA riecatnor. She's coming back to our podcast. She organized the Fedora 34 Virtual Release Party and now is working in Nest 2021. Hi, Marie. 

    Marie Nordin: Hi. 

    Eduard: Welcome back. 

    Marie: Thanks for having me. 

    Grayson: Marie, how did you set up the release party so that it was well-equipped to be virtual? I know that typically, we would have done them in local LUGs and sent out swag and stuff. How was it changed so that it could be done online? 

    Marie: This is our second virtual release party, the first one being the F33. We had some practice, and I had help from the Fedora Mindshare Committee to formulate and figure out what we wanted the virtual release parties to look like.

    At a local release party, folks would organize their own set of activities based on the interest of the local groups and probably do installation parties and [laughs] that sort of thing as well.

    This, we focused on the features and being able to give that information to people directly from the folks working on them. That was one of the great things about having it virtually was being able to bring that information to so many people.

    For the release parties, having a virtual event is something we hope could continue to in the future, because they've gone so well. 

    Eduard: That sounds great. For these kinds virtual events, normally, you need to await to interact with people, not having talks or people talking. What kind of activities did they have in this release party? 

    Marie: We use a platform called Hopin, which has fit well for the Fedora community. Of course, there's gripes with any piece of technology, and there's definitely pieces that could be improved there.

    Overall, I would say it's a great experience. For example, we have a chat for each session, so it allowed people to be super connected. Also, you can direct message folks. You can do polls and Q&A all in one side panel. That's a little bit about the format in which we interacted with the platform.

    We had informational sessions. We also had a couple of social sessions, one being a pub quiz with [inaudible 9:04] , our favorite, pub MC or trivia MC, and then on Saturday I did a Pictionary session, which was also [laughs] plenty of laughs.

    Our newest thing was something called Work Adventure. Work Adventure is a virtual space in which you can hang out with a group of folks. It is styled in 8-bit manner. It's something that you can customize using a software called Tiled, which is a multilevel platform editor. In the end, it's a JSON file. That's the final output.

    What I did was I put a design ticket out there and I said, "Hey, Outreachy applicants, try to come up with some maps, customized Fedora maps for this release party." They took to it wonderfully.

    We had five different Outreachy applicants working on custom Fedora Maps for this release party and they were all unique, different, and came out really, really awesome. That's an overall of what we had. 

    Grayson: You mentioned using the Hopin and the Work Adventure or virtual space. What do you think was the community's overall reaction to that whole setup? 

    Marie: Overall, it was positive. I think that they were surprised about the Work Adventure, and how interactive that was, and all the effort that was put into that. We did get the feedback that there was a little bit too much space in the Work Adventure maps, so for the second day, we cut down to one map so that we could bring people a little bit closer together.

    Overall, I got some emails from people, I got messages from people, I saw tweets all over. People seemed so excited about the release party, excited about the features, and excited about the release in general and being engaged with the event. I was super happy with the response. 

    Eduard: This experience in this release party give us some growth for Nest 2021. Anything in particular that you think we can use or even improve in Nest 2021? 

    Marie: One of the things I want to do is improve Work Adventure. It was a good experience of the Fedora community as a virtual experience, something different than what we've had so far. We've done these hallway tracks where it's a Hopin room and only one person can talk at a time.

    Work Adventure allows however many conversations to be happening at a time, or a big conversation. It depends on what you might want. I would say in some ways, it improves accessibility for folks to be able to connect with each other.

    There is some networking function in Hopin, which we used for the first Nest, and it didn't get that much traction. We only had a few interactions there. People don't understand how to use it.

    Work Adventure, on the other hand, is like playing a video game. Everyone knows how to walk around. I don't know if you know, but you can add a pet or a dog companion. Anything with animals, [laughs] like bonus points for kittens and puppies.

    Work Adventure is something we want to bring to Nest and we want to improve it. We want to include the sponsors. There's some sponsor areas into it, and we want to make maybe even some team spaces. We could have even a little podcast area where it looks like a podcast booth, something like that. It's a little bit open in that sense.

    Anything else from this that we might want to move over from the release to Nest, probably, we hope some of the same topics might come, but a little bit more in-depth. We only had half an hour sessions to keep it as party like as we could.

    Maybe some of those topics and folks might come back to Nest and talk about them a little bit more, give demos, or share some more information there, too. 

    Grayson: I support the idea of having a podcast booth. That would be fun. I also did enjoy running down the lobby with my dog chasing me [laughs] in Work Adventure. We did mention Nest and didn't explain that. What is Nest and what is Flock, its physical counterpart? 

    Marie: They are both Fedora's yearly contributor conference. Flock was an in-person. I want to say there was six or seven of them. Previous to that, we did something called Fund Counts. It's developed over the years.

    The main idea behind Flock or Nest is to bring together the Fedora community of contributors to talk, to be reinvigorated for the next year, to share what they've been working on, to socialize, and to have fun. Nest was the virtual version of that that came in this post-pandemic world we're living in. That's it. 

    Eduard: When your Nest is going to happen, do you have already some fixed dates? 

    Marie: We do. The dates for Nest this year are August 5th through 8th. Very comparable to years passed, including the Nest from last year and similar to the Flock dates that we usually choose. 

    Grayson: Nest 2021 is coming up. The call for papers is already open. What type of talks are you looking for, and what kind of Fedora contributors do you want in here giving them? 

    Marie: I'd say we're looking for lots of things. [laughs] We're also open to ideas, but there's some guiding thoughts that can be used as people think about what they want to submit. What gets you excited about Fedora? What have you been working on in Fedora in the last year that you might want to share with the community?

    Beyond that, we're seeing community growth. We're seeing that with the release party, the events, activity in channel revamps, there seems to be a ton going on and new contributors. We want those folks to feel welcome.

    We understand that a lot of these people might be showing up because it's pandemic time. They are at home, they're wondering what to do, and they've found their way to Fedora. Maybe they heard of it before and they said, "Now is the time to get involved."

    At some point, we hope things will go a little bit back to normal, but we don't want to lose those folks. We hope to keep them engaged and interested in Fedora and the community, because they're making it vibrant.

    For Nest this year, it would be great to focus on things that strengthen our identity as Fedorans. Experiences or sessions that can help new contributors feel welcome and understand how the project works, or how your specific project works, or how folks can get involved. Onboarding sessions, demos, those types of things, totally going to be a great thing to offer these newer contributors.

    A part of what helps folks feel connected to Fedora are those face-to-face interactions with the people who are developing Fedora as the core contributor group. We definitely want those core contributors to submit talks. The folks who we all know and love, but we want newbies there, too.

    We hope to have all different skill or experience levels with presenting. We want stuff that could be focused at higher-experience [indecipherable 18:29] , skilled coding as well. We have a goal of having 1,000 attendees.

    If we think about having 1,000 attendees, that's going to be a lot of new people who don't know so much about Fedora. They might know about this or about that, so we want to give them a really awesome experience there.

    If we look at some stats at core contributors, there's about 2,000 people who are contributing to Fedora on the regular. 1,000 is not that wild of a number, just based on that. With all the outreach that we've done, we're going to hit it, no problem. 

    Eduard: Let's go for this. I like it. Having this worldwide community and people from all over the world that probably want to say something, how people can submit these talks to the Nest, how they can contact you or the Mindshare Committee to submit the talks? 

    Marie: The way to submit talks from us 2021 is through a Pagure repo called Flock. Something that we've also recognized about these virtual conferences is the accessibility. The fact that so many more people can come means it's because it's virtual and people have access to it. It's something that we want to continue to build on.

    Our idea for the upcoming Nest was for regional areas to be able to set up their own mini track or track of sessions -- doesn't have to be mini, necessarily -- during their time zone using the Hopin platform. It'll be in the same thing, same event, and there would be other sessions.

    I believe that the Hopin platform is naturally in English, so I'm guessing it's translatable. I hope that the accessibility is there for folks and that the platform isn't a detriment to that. We are so happy to provide time and space in the event to folks from regional areas. 

    Grayson: You can find the link to that if you want to file an issue and all the other things we talked about, like the Fedora Release Party, the upcoming Nest, previous Nests, all that, in our show notes or at podcast.fedoraproject.org.

    We've just talked talks, but are there any other ways that people can contribute to this upcoming Nest and help you out? 

    Marie: Yeah, you can be a part of the planning for Nest. We have our public document. The Mindshare Committee when I say we. The Mindshare Committee has a public document, and I believe we have a ticket open as well.

    I would say another way is to reach out to me directly. A lot of the communications work comes down to me, but there are other tasks that folks can help me with or some kind of projects that folks can help out with. I'm like the main support person, so you can contact me and go from there or message on one of the tickets. 

    Eduard: That sounds great. People can come here and contribute in any way they can. Thank you, Marie, for coming again. I know you're busy, busy all the time, but taking the time to talk to the community is always awesome.

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    Eduard: Thanks for listening, guys. That was the Season Two, Episode One of Fedora Podcast. Please visit podcast.fedoraproject.org to find our chat room, send us email, list on other episodes, and more. I'm your host, Eduard. 

    Grayson: I'm your host, Grayson. Tricknology made our music, and we'll see you in a couple of weeks.