By Akashdeep Dhar in Fedora Council —

Council Election For FL44: Interview With Akashdeep Dhar

Fedora Project longtime member, Akashdeep Dhar, outlines experience in governance, infrastructure, mentoring and leadership. He advocates for decision transparency, proposal readiness sustainable processes and community engagement, while emphasizing for equitable collaboration in leading the charge.

Council Election For FL44: Interview With Akashdeep Dhar
Photo by Red Dot / Unsplash

This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.

Interview with Akashdeep Dhar

What kind of experience do you have which might be relevant to the role? E.g. governance, leadership, etc.

While I could not make it to the Fedora Council through elections in the previous term, I was chosen as a Mindshare Representative from the second half of the term. Besides bringing the interests of the Mindshare Committee to the Fedora Council Strategy Summit 2025, I also worked on further progressing the Fedora Forge Community Initiative with my work on the private issues and Pagure Migrator. Staying true to my volunteer first community agenda, I also worked on the documentation for the Fedora Project Contribution Model to encourage empathetic interactions and managing expectations in our mostly volunteer driven community.

Following the elector concerns from the previous term, I explicitly reinforced just how important it was for us to leverage objective community health metrics over arbitrary conditions that I voiced during the foundational drafting of the Fedora Verified proposal. With my inclination towards process sustainability, I have often voted for deferring decisions until we have accounted for most (if not all) feedback. I have had a hands-on approach towards major proposals like Fedora Forge, Image Mode, FedoraCVE trademark and Fedora Verified, by spending roughly around ten hours per week simply reading through the Fedora Discussion threads.

Besides my direct involvement in the Fedora Council, I am also working as an infrastructure architect, working on various projects in the Fedora Infrastructure and leading the Fedora Badges Revamp Project while mentoring an Outreachy intern. Being elected into the Mindshare Committee has also allowed for me to lead the logistics of various Fedora Project in-person representations at APAC events like DevConf.IN 2026 and FOSSAsia 2026, all while curating and guiding Fedora Project community events across the world. In my past life (or roughly five years back in human years), I also led the Fedora Websites and Apps community initiative.

What do you see as potential opportunities and risks for the Fedora Project?

One of the first things that comes to my mind about risks for our community is decision transparency. The discussions [1] [2] around the AI Developer Desktop Proposal were a valuable learning experience as they showed how much community members care about understanding why we vote the way we do, not just what we voted for. I see an opportunity here for elected members to share their reasoning with their votes on a given proposal, so others can follow the thought process. After all, I would want to vote for someone who engages with what the community has to say and is willing to show their work, even through various disagreements.

To dive even deeper, we also risk alienating the community members by deciding on a certain proposal before it is theoretically ready to be discussed. While a stopgap opportunity here might be ratifying a proposal readiness guidelines document that the members could refer to, in my honest opinion, being active around the Fedora Project community platforms just ends up helping a lot more. If this requires us to spend more hours around the desk, have more frequently organized synchronous meetings, include more electable Fedora Council seats or set regular Fedora Council social hours – then it is something that we need to account for.

Beyond transparency, I also want to champion process sustainability in our established processes. The end of an elected member’s term should not mean that their ongoing work disappears – it should be (or made) possible for incoming candidates or continuing members to carry forward and iterate upon that work. Similarly, we can reduce the risk of potential burnouts among elected members by effectively delegating to the enthusiastic contributors that our community is never short of. Good governance should outlast any single term, and I want to actively work towards building that continuity through documenting better handoff practices.

What brought you to the Fedora Project?

Video games. Back in early 2020 when we were isolated at our homes due to COVID-19 pandemic, all I had was a weak laptop and a Fedora Workstation setup to keep me from boredom. One of my first contributions had been to the Quick Docs. When I thought I was done with my contributing activities, friends like Ankur Sinha, Alberto Sanchez, Justin Wheeler, Marie Nordin, Nasir Hussain, Vipul Siddharth etc. just made me keep coming back for more. Then getting inspired from all the amazing stuff they got up to back in the day made me want to see if I could be of some help – and a huge reason why I am keeping myself busy even today is just that.

This article was originally posted on Fedora Commblog on 29 May 2026.