I’m trying to get into better habits about blogging on a semi-regular basis, as it’s a good way for me to recap about everything going on around me and to help remember how I’m spending my time.
CommOps in Retrospect
Over the past few months, I have worked closely with the Fedora Community Operations (CommOps) team on a variety of tasks and goals as part of our mission to improve community infrastructure within the Fedora Project. This is certainly a broad and demanding goal, but broken into smaller duties, it is much easier to take on and slowly work towards. Several members of the team specialize in different areas, such as Ralph and Bee who work more on numerical-oriented tasks (i.e. metrics and improving software evaluating our community), Remy who (more or less) does it all, and then me focusing on improving areas of communication and messaging across the Project. Everything is still in early stages of progress, but it’s exciting and moving quickly, and I hope to share a bit more about what I’ve been working on.
Community Blog
As of now, this is where most of my time is going in terms of working on the CommOps team. Just last week, we officially unveiled the Community Blog (affectionately nicknamed the “CommBlog“) with the rest of the Project via an article on the Fedora Magazine. The CommBlog is an ongoing effort to centralize Fedora news in a single, specific place. The problem the CommBlog intends to resolve is that of disparity in where “Fedora stuff” gets shared. With a project as large as Fedora, there are all kinds of things happening every day in the different subgroups and teams, so it’s hard for any person to know everything going on all at once.
My role in the Community Blog is primarily as a content contributor and partly as an administrator of the WordPress panel. The most recent pieces I contributed to the CommBlog were things like an interview with Python maintainer Matej Stuchlik about the Python 3 Fedora Activity Day, news about the Fedora Magazine breaking view records, an announcement about the Fedora Developer Portal, and the introductory article to the CommBlog. I also helped establish basic guidelines for contributors looking into writing an article. Nonetheless, this is fully a group effort between members of the CommOps team, and these are created with collaboration and guidance of others in the team.
5tFTW
In addition to the happenings at the Community Blog, another goal of the CommOps team is to help bring more “heat and light” to the different areas of the Project, which then makes it easier to cherry-pick any number of news for other purposes. Already in existence is Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller’s (mattdm) series called “5 Things in Fedora This Week”, otherwise known as “5tFTW”. The CommOps team aims to make it easier for Matt to find the hot topics to write about. In the long run, the Community Blog will help carry this out, but for now, we are helping compile lists and summaries of topics to cover for each week’s “hot topic” list.
When I’m trying to find news about events in the Fedora Community, I will also have 5tFTW in the back of my mind, since they have intersecting interests. I helped compile the list of topics for 2015 11 06 and I am in progress of finding more topics along with the rest of the team. This upcoming week, some of the things we have on the list so far are the migration of the Fedora mailing lists to HyperKitty, announcing the Fedora Elections cycle, the Fedora Python 3 Activity Day, and Wayland being the default in Rawhide.
Other things
In addition to the tasks I’ve been working on with the CommOps group, I have also been continuing my work with the Fedora Magazine as part of the Marketing subgroup. These past few weeks were active publication weeks, including my “Upgrading from Fedora 22 to Fedora 23” article (viewed over 25,000 times as of present day) and “Never Leave IRC Again with ZNC“, a beginner’s article focused on explaining how to get started with ZNC (viewed over 5,000 times as of present day).
I’m also in the process of becoming a Fedora Ambassador, and I am now in the review period of my mentorship. This has been a personal goal of mine for close to two years, and I’m happy to finally be moving forward with this to (officially) become a representative of freedom and choice through Fedora.
I’m going to try to get in a better habit of quick, short blog updates to help document my progress and work in the FOSS community. And maybe I might even write about my time at my university at some time… hmmmm…
I think one can never values free software until he or she gets their hands dirty with contribution. It completely changes your views on how open source works and most importantly how to seek help from others and how to make them do what you want.
What’s your day job? Do you have any routine when it comes to open source contribution? What kind of time do you spend per week on such activities?
Becoming involved as a contributor definitely changes your perspective on a project and FOSS in general, especially if it’s your first project. I am currently a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. I’m still settling into a set routine, but as of now, I usually work in short sprints where I will work on a variety of things, and then I work on other things, like class work, labs, other responsibilities, etc. It’s hard to give a rough estimate of how much time I spend, but I feel like it’s between 15-30 hours depending on the week (including another FOSS project I am involved in).