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Election Questionnaire

Please place questions you would like to see candidates for the various offices answer. If your question is specific to one office (such as the Board or FESCo), please indicate that.

Questions

These question have been sent to the candidates:

Main

  1. If you could single-handedly change one thing about Fedora, what would it be and why?
  2. Please name three things you plan to work on and realize while being on the Board or FESCo!
  3. If elected, how will Fedora as a project be better as a result of your leadership? Or IOW: What strengths will you bring to the Fedora board/FESCo that are currently missing?
  4. What do you see as Fedora's greatest strength and weakness, and what will you do to improve upon that? Or IOW: Which processes have worked best in Fedora, and which processes need to be improved?
  5. What is Fedora's place in the larger community with respect to other distributions?
  6. What are you going to be doing in the Fedora Board that you cannot do outside of it or how would being in board/FESCo help in what you want to accomplish?
  7. What do you consider to be Fedora's raison d'etre? In the past the focus of Fedora has shifted from release to release. Do you see a long-term goal or a "target audience" Fedora should strive for? How do you define your role in helping the project reaching that goal?
  8. What are your unique strengths and what are your weaknesses?
  9. How will you make the work for in Fedora easier and more fun?

More

  1. Who is Fedora for?
  2. Should any steps be taken to make sure releases don't get as much last minute delays as in the past? If yes: which?
  3. How or to what extent would you say are Fedora's governance bodies responsible for protecting volunteers and volunteer based efforts against interference from within Red Hat by either person or policy?
  4. The Fedora Project suffers from a lack of communication. In 2009 for 8 out of 21 FESCo meetings no meeting minutes were sent to the lists. What would you do to improve communication between the different groups in Fedora and especially between FESCo, Board and the community?
  5. What would you do to cleanup and organize the Fedora project packaging guidelines, rules and other wiki pages to make it more consistent and easier for new contributors?
  6. There is a proposal out there to moderate fedora-devel. What should be disallowed? Racist or sexist speech? Profanity? At what point does a complaint against a small project become a personal attack? ie "Your idea is utterly stupid." Should we disallow trolls or posts likely to start flamewars? Who will decide the difference between intelligent debate and flaming?
  7. Please give three examples of other boards or communities you have participated in and the positive differences you made there.
  8. Simple question: Among the two, do you prefer Gnome or KDE?
  9. Do you think a Fedora Foundation is still worth pursuing? Why or Why not?
  10. Should kernel module packages be allowed in Fedora?

Answers

For easier reviewing we provide two version of the answers:

* text based (copy'n'pasted from the emails with the answers)
* in a openoffice table

Answers Wiki Table

1. If you could single-handedly change one thing about Fedora, what would it be and why?
http://spot.fedorapeople.org/spot.gif Tom Callaway (spot) If I could snap my fingers and have the world redraw itself around me, I would lift all the legal barriers preventing patent and DMCA encumbered FOSS code from being included in Fedora. RPMFusion does a very good job of keeping these packages maintained, but it would be much nicer to have these things properly integrated into Fedora. Of course, I realize this isn't likely to actually happen anytime soon. :)
Josh Boyer (jwb) If I could snap my fingers and have the world redraw itself around me, I would lift all the legal barriers preventing patent and DMCA encumbered FOSS code from being included in Fedora. RPMFusion does a very good job of keeping these packages maintained, but it would be much nicer to have these things properly integrated into Fedora. Of course, I realize this isn't likely to actually happen anytime soon. :)


2. Please name three things you plan to work on and realize while being on the Board or FESCo!
Tom Callaway (spot) 1. Simplifying the Fedora CLA: The existing CLA is a mess, and it is a

bit too broad for the needs of Fedora. I plan to work with Red Hat Legal and the Fedora Board to reword the CLA so that it is a minimal, easy to understand document with a smaller audience. Ambassadors and people who want to make wiki changes should not need to sign the CLA, for example. 2. Defining the primary Fedora target: This is a tough one, because I do believe that it is a good thing that Fedora has a broad community of users and developers, but it is also important for the Board to define who the _primary_ target of Fedora is, so that we can make smart design and development decisions. 3. Working on making it easier for people to participate in Fedora. I want to eliminate red tape and bureaucracy wherever possible and ensure that people are able to be involved and happy in the Fedora community.


Tom Callaway (spot) If I could snap my fingers and have the world redraw itself around me, I would lift all the legal barriers preventing patent and DMCA encumbered FOSS code from being included in Fedora. RPMFusion does a very good job of keeping these packages maintained, but it would be much nicer to have these things properly integrated into Fedora. Of course, I realize this isn't likely to actually happen anytime soon. :)


3. If elected, how will Fedora as a project be better as a result of your leadership? Or IOW: What strengths will you bring to the Fedora board/FESCo that are currently missing?
Tom Callaway (spot) Keeping in mind that I am running for re-election to the Fedora Board, I think that I bring a significant amount of experience with Fedora to the Board, having been involved with the project since the Red Hat Linux days. I also feel that as an active packager, I have a high level of appreciation for the pain that Fedora packagers feel, and I am a good representative of that aspect of the community.


4. What do you see as Fedora's greatest strength and weakness, and what will you do to improve upon that? Or IOW: Which processes have worked best in Fedora, and which processes need to be improved?
Tom Callaway (spot) I think our greatest strength is our community as a whole, we are

passionate and hard-working. There are a few key weaknesses that we still need to improve upon:

  • QA: We're making good steps here, but we still need to build automated

QA infrastructure.

  • Package Review: We need to streamline this process, and automate as

much of it as we can.