By Akashdeep Dhar in Fedora Council —

Fedora Council Election: Interview With Akashdeep Dhar

After a hiatus on the Fedora Websites & Apps Revamp Objective completion, I am running for the Fedora Council to address issues of incentivizing persistent contributions and enhancing community health. I plan to collaborate across multiple subprojects and SIGs to organize events and establish docs.

Fedora Council Election: Interview With Akashdeep Dhar

This is a part of the Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Friday, 8 December and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, 21 December.

Interview with Akashdeep Dhar

Why are you running for Fedora Council?

Once the Fedora Websites and Apps community initiative was successfully completed with the release of Fedora Websites 3.0, I decided to go on a hiatus from community leadership positions to firstly, spend some well-deserved downtime with my family and secondly, to get back to the drawing board for identifying the aspects of the Fedora Project community that could use some assistance. Among all the issues I discovered with time, two of the most prominent ones in my opinion were incentivization and rewarding of persistent contributions and sustenance and improvement of community health. Working actively with project teams like Fedora Badges and Project Aspen in the past months, I began documenting my investigations [1] [2], designing the strategies [1] [2] and prototyping the game plan [1] [2].

To address the community health issue, I wish to utilize the platform to continue working with the various subprojects/SIGs to understand their perspective on community health, garner the statistical metrics that govern the current condition of a community and address the concerning findings to ensure that the community health is looked after. Alongside that, I wish to act as an exemplary conduit between sponsored teams and community teams to lead the work on the Fedora Badges revamp as well as help in organizing and running events that establish the community’s presence. With my attempts to enhance the contributor’s quality of life, my purpose is to radically progress in realizing the Fedora Project Strategy Goal 2028 of “doubling the number of active contributors over a given period of time“.

I think it is about time for me to come back from the hiatus.

What do you see as Fedora’s place in the universe?

Fedora Linux has been and continues to be one of the rarest upstream GNU/Linux distributions that provides its users with a balanced blend of unmatched innovation and stellar experience in a single package. An exceptional development like this can only be built by an admirable community like the Fedora Project that many other free and open-source software communities can learn from. We should not only lead in the forefront when it comes to the Features and First foundations, but we should also set a cardinal example of how contributors get onboarded on a mission, collaborate for a goal and are rewarded for the efforts, thereby also leading in the forefront in the Freedom and Friends foundations and creating what might not be the largest but most definitely the most active communities in the universe.

How can we best measure Fedora’s success?

The success of the Fedora Project is inherently connected with the health of the community. In order to ensure the excellent quality and timely releases of our GNU/Linux distribution offerings that define our success to the outside world, it is undeniably crucial to evaluate the conditions of the many subprojects/SIGs that form the overall community and ensure that the contributors behind our substantial areas are incentivized to put their best foot forward by lowering the barrier of entry for beginners ones and rewarding consistent contributions from the experienced ones.

Anonymous statistical metrics received about the contributors like but not limited to discussions in forums, meetings in channels, contributions in repositories, accolades in badges, footfall in events, releases in packages, perception in media, responses in surveys etc., and their trends with respect to time can be a concrete indicator of inherent issues with certain subprojects/SIGs and that in turn, should help us understand tasks that need to be fulfilled in order to ensure that the success of Fedora Project is not only maintained but is growing significantly with time.

The Fedora Council is intended to be an active working body. How will you make room for Council work?

During my participation in the community, I have always made it a point to keep some time aside to connect and collaborate with community members irrespective of whether I am in a community leadership role or not. One of the factors that have been remarkably favourable to my participation in the community is my employment with a community-facing team that works with the Fedora Project and the CentOS Project called the Red Hat Community Platform Engineering team. I am pretty sure that I will be comfortable with moving things around in my calendar to make room for the Council work.

This article was originally posted on Fedora Commblog on 08 December 2023.