Home is a suitcase 🔗

I began the third year of my degree and moved for the fifth time in two years when I made it back to Rochester in August. This time, I found somewhere to ideally live longer than only a few months of the year. I moved into a house with a few other roommates with more space than I’ve had before. For the first time in a while, it’s somewhere I’ve made to feel like home.

This move came months after I ended a semester of a study abroad program and lived in a city for an internship. Most of 2017 made my suitcase feel like a home, but it afforded many unique experiences.

Croatia: Study abroad 🔗

From January to May 2017, I participated in a study abroad program with my university to Dubrovnik, Croatia. RIT has full campuses in both Zagreb and Dubrovnik. This made planning the semester abroad easy, but also encouraged me to go somewhere I might not have gone otherwise.

My choice to study in Croatia was well-rewarded. On paper, I earned 12 credit hours, but I took away more than what I learned in class. My most important lessons came in the form of midnight bus rides to Albania, photograph exhibits capturing genocide in Sarajevo, and hugs from normally faraway friends in Czechia. My time abroad began a process in finding myself that has continued since my time in Europe.

DevConf 2017 / Fedora Diversity FAD 🔗

At the beginning of the year, the Fedora Diversity Team held a “Fedora Activity Day” (FAD) event in Brno, Czechia. If you’re outside of the Fedora community, think of a FAD as a focused, in-person team sprint. Together with our team in-person and remote, we mapped out our goals and plans for 2017 and set out to continue the work we began nearly three years ago.

In addition to the work we accomplished together, it was fulfilling for me to see my teammates that span three continents. I spent a week with not only my teammates but also my friends. The days we get to spend together are a privileged few in the year, and it was fulfilling and motivating for me to spend some of our time together in a way that wasn’t Pagure tickets or IRC meetings.

Read more about our team sprint in this event report:

https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/fedora-diversity-fad-2017/

FOSDEM 2017 🔗

In February, I attended the Free and Open Source Software Developers European Meeting (FOSDEM) for the first time. FOSDEM is the largest open source conference in Europe, bringing together over 8,000 open source enthusiasts, contributors, and leaders from around the globe.

I had the privilege to attend as a member of the Fedora community, so my time was between the Fedora booth to meet the community and catching interesting talks. I also gave a talk of my own on the main track, What open source and J.K. Rowling have in common! I gave this talk to a smaller audience at DevConf, but the FOSDEM audience was considerably larger.

In retrospect, my original talk topic is relevant but I have ideas on how I could have delivered my message more effectively. Regardless, it was a learning experience for me to present in front of a new audience. Public speaking opportunities filled my youth, both in theater and in presentations, but I had never presented to a technical audience before (let alone on a non-technical topic). The experience at FOSDEM helped build my understanding and I hope to return with a new topic someday in the future.

Exploring the Balkans 🔗

Outside of open source and Fedora, my time in Croatia included a lot of time outside of Croatia. When many of my roommates went to explore the wonders of Western Europe, I lost my heart in the shadows of the Balkan mountains. My spring break was a solo trip split between Sarajevo, Bosnia and Hercegovina and Tirana, Albania.

Sarajevo 🔗

The three days I spent in Sarajevo were short but significant. I was truly alone on this visit and it was up to me to make the most of it. Originally, I was skeptical to go alone, but I knew that I would never have a better opportunity to go. My fascination with Sarajevo stemmed from a year of studying European history in high school, and knowing the cultural significance of Sarajevo as a meeting point of western and eastern cultures. In the end, I decided to go, and I was rewarded for it.

Most of my trip in Sarajevo consisted of museums. I visited various museums, ranging from eighteenth to twentieth century history. The most rewarding for me were the Galerija 11/07/95 and the Tunnel of Sarajevo. The gallery documented the Srebrenica genocide in July 1995 by the Serbian armed forces. The exhibit was eye-opening and perspective-shifting. The Tunnel of Sarajevo, sometimes called the Tunnel of Hope, is another perspective-shattering experience. The museum introduces the tunnel used during the siege of Sarajevo during the 1990s, when Serbian forces surrounded the city for an almost four-year siege. The tunnel was the only way for citizens and resistance forces to contact the outside world and keep the resistance alive. A small part of the tunnel is preserved, and the other artifacts make it a gripping experience (not to mention it’s a short drive out of the city, so you also have a chance to mentally prepare and later unpack the experience).

Tirana 🔗

I visited Tirana, Albania four times on my trip abroad. In Tirana, my heart was captured by the people there. For years, I read about the Open Labs Hackerspace community based in Tirana and I always imagined an opportunity to see it in person. I actually remember my first encounter with their community was an Ada Lovelace Day event report. And somehow, the circumstances shifted where I was able to meet their community and immerse myself in the culture, if only for a short time.

During my times in Tirana, I participated in the first-ever 48 hour hackathon to support the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the first edition of Linux Weekend, and the annual Open Source Conference Albania (OSCAL).

https://fedoramagazine.org/students-fedora-linux-weekend-2017/

India 🔗

At the end of my study abroad experience in Croatia, a unique opportunity presented itself to me. I did not buy my return airfare back to the US before I left for Croatia. When price-checking for my trip back, I noticed it was a few hundred dollars extra if I decided to spend a week in India before flying back to the US.

I booked the tickets.

The last day of my classes finally came, and the next day, I was traveling further east, to Mumbai (or Bombay, if you prefer). I had the great fortune of having two great friends who invited me to the homes of their families during my trip. I visited Bee in Mumbai and Amita in Pune, all split across a single week!

My trip to India was eye-opening. For years, I’ve had a fascination with Eastern culture and philosophy, but it was something completely different to experience. Bee and her family took me to the Global Vipassana Pagoda, a personally fulfilling experience for me. We visited the Bandra–Worli Sea Link, Shree Mahalakshmi Temple, and several other places in Mumbai. I remember walking through the streets more than anything.

In Pune, Amita and her family showed me their favorite places. I had a chance to meet many other Fedora friends in Pune too. One of my favorite memories of Pune was a historic gurdwara. Amita took me and the others in our group to visit. For a moment, I finally got to see something I’ve only read about right in front of my eyes. The history and reverence in these places was absorbed into my mind.

I never expected an Indian visa stamp in my passport in 2017, yet it happened. I’m equally filled with wonder at how the circumstances unfolded as I am grateful this experience sneaked into my year.

Chicago: Urban experience 🔗

After my semester abroad and visiting India, I was whisked back to the United States, only to pack up once again for another new experience. From June to August, I lived in Chicago, Illinois to work an internship at Jump Trading. Chicago had a feeling of nostalgia for me because much of my father’s family has origins tracing back to Chicago. But I would find myself losing more of my heart in Chicago than I realized.

The internship 🔗

I worked with a fantastic team of people on exciting projects. Professionally, my time in Chicago was motivating and empowering. I was provided the opportunity to learn and also contribute. I walked in with a dreadful feeling of imposter syndrome and left feeling more confident in my own learning abilities. Docker, Kubernetes, and time-series data became a part of my daily work life, when I had little to no knowledge before then.

By the time my internship finished, I helped contribute to our team’s goal of standing up Kubernetes and contributing a few patches in Kubernetes projects like Minikube. I have great mentors to thank for not only direct, technical assistance but also motivational mentorship and empowerment too.

Everything else 🔗

There was more to Chicago than only the work too. Before long, I felt like a true Chicagoan, traveling the subways into the Loop, catching free concerts in Millennium Park, and indulging in the Chicago tradition of deep-dish pizza.

Unlike other cities I’ve visited, like New York City, Chicago felt easier to integrate into. The culture was notably “slower” than the fast-pace life of NYC, London, or Washington DC. I discovered Middle Eastern markets that became a regular part of my weekends, made friends with the baristas at a local coffeehouse, and had the privilege of hosting friends from three continents for short stays.

I left Chicago and was offered a new contract for the following summer in 2018. I’m looking forward to be back in June again.

Year of Fedora 🔗

2017 was full of time and effort spent in the Fedora community. In addition to the Diversity FAD, I was elected to the Fedora Council (on my third attempt), attended the annual Fedora contributor conference, Flock, and also narrowed my scope for contributions.

When I began contributing to Fedora, I was contributing to many things. Marketing, community operations, Fedora Badges, Fedora Magazine, Ambassadors, Games SIG, Join SIG, the Diversity Team, and maybe a few more things. After a while, I realized my contributions carried great width but poor depth. In 2017, I “reconfigured” my time in Fedora to focus in on the areas where I felt my time yielded the highest impact. This is Fedora CommOps and the Diversity Team.

I resigned as Fedora Magazine editor-in-chief and also formally stepped down from other teams. It made me sad, but I knew it was the right decision for me. I’m happy to spend more time working in fewer projects at a greater depth and focus than I had before.

Flock 2017 🔗

Flock, Fedora’s annual contributor conference, was held from Aug. 29 to Sep. 1 in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Every year, Flock is an empowering experience for me because of the face-time I get with the people I spend much of my year working with remotely. This year was no different, and many new faces were mixed in with the old ones.

The highlights for me were in three forms: the CommOps session, the Diversity Team session, and the Fedora Magazine session. Together with Sachin Kamath, we led the CommOps session. You can read more about our session here:

https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/metrics-docs-flock-2017/

The Diversity Team and Magazine sessions were also valuable for both teams to get feedback from the rest of the community. In the Diversity Team session, we had many active participants outside of our team that reminded us the importance of narrowing our focus for higher impact. I also attended other interesting sessions held by the community, like the future of fedmsg by Jeremy Cline.

CommOps FAD 🔗

Towards the end of 2017, I worked together with our team in CommOps to organize our own team sprint, or FAD, in 2018. We successfully planned the event and organized it in Brno, Czechia, similar to last year’s Diversity FAD.

More details on this will be found in its own event report!

ListenBrainz indie study 🔗

In my fall semester of 2017, I took on an independent study to further explore the ListenBrainz project. ListenBrainz is an open source social platform to document the music you listen to over time. If you’re familiar with Last.fm or Libre.fm, it’s a similar concept, but the focus is more on the data than the social features. ListenBrainz is supported by the MetaBrainz Foundation, also the guiding body for the more well-known MusicBrainz project.

In my independent study, I had a chance to contribute documentation and community tools (like issue / PR templates), as well as explore how the project gathers and builds metrics. I didn’t make my original milestone of major code contributions to the project, but I better understood the community and tried to help in the areas of low coverage, like documentation.

The experience was insightful for me and provided me an excuse to work on something that I am genuinely passionate about. Music is a powerful part of human culture, and the MetaBrainz Foundation takes a serious approach to documenting music, especially in a technical sense. ListenBrainz represents an opportunity for us to better explore and understand ourselves through our music listening habits. I hope someday that ListenBrainz will be a platform for data journalism and research about music. That’s my dream.

Opensource.com community moderator 🔗

At the beginning of 2017, I was brought on board as an Opensource.com community moderator. Together with other community moderators and site staff, I help contribute new content and source new writers to the site. My invitation to the community moderator team came shortly after the announcement that I received the 2017 People’s Choice Award. When Rikki Endsley invited me to the team, it felt like a natural alignment to my passion for storytelling.

All Things Open 2017 🔗

I was invited to All Things Open, an annual open source conference in Raleigh, by the Opensource.com team. The day before the conference, I met the rest of the team and other community moderators at the Red Hat HQ in Raleigh. We spent the day locked into a room together to hash out plans and goals for the next year. It was a productive opportunity for the team to work together and also a great opportunity to meet the other members of the community.

Some of my best takeaways from this experience were catching coffee with other community moderators, meeting Jim Whitehurst to talk about Opensource.com, and giving my talk, What open source and J.K. Rowling have in common, for the final time.

I hope I have the opportunity to go again next year to meet the awesome team behind Opensource.com. (If you haven’t considered before, come and write for us too!)

Happiness Packet Challenge 🔗

Another unusual milestone for my 2017 was the first rendition of the Happiness Packet Challenge. I was introduced to the Happiness Packets website in 2016. Happiness Packets are an easy way to say thank you to someone who has had a positive impact on you. I came up with a challenge to my friends and network to write one Happiness Packet a day, every day, for a week.

I followed up with the team behind the project to evaluate the impact of this idea, and I was pleasantly surprised. Here’s the number of messages sent for the two weeks prior to the Happiness Packet Challenge, followed by the week of the challenge:

• Week starting 2017-03-27: 2 sent
• Week starting 2017-04-03: 35 sent
• Week starting 2017-04-10 (challenge week): 72 sent

You can read more about the challenge in my original blog post. Keep an eye out for it again in 2018.

https://jwfblog.wpenginepowered.com/2017/04/happiness-packets-challenge/

Living openly 🔗

Earlier in this post, I alluded to how I felt like I began to find myself when I was abroad. My study abroad experience was the beginning of a longer process that leads into present day.

In April, I went public with my depression, both to help take a weight off my shoulder and to be a voice for others who are afraid to speak up. I was always concerned of the reaction from publishing something like that, but I was met with nothing but loving-kindness from friends and strangers. It gave me new confidence to live more openly and wear my values in the open.

The story continued in October, when I decided to delete my Facebook and Instagram accounts.

https://medium.com/@jflory7/cut-the-plug-deleting-facebook-and-instagram-6cbe7c86d9c9

I considered this for a couple of years before, but I pulled the trigger in October. Like many others, it felt almost too much of a task to disconnect myself from this huge network of people and friends. But the negative impacts of it were draining me and trapping me. Since I deleted my accounts, I’ve noticed a positive impact in overall levels of happiness and awareness. However, I don’t think the social media accounts alone are the reason for this.

In the near future, I hope to do a follow-up post to my decision to cut away from the Facebook and Instagram machines. Keep an eye out for more.

2018 🔗

It’s already February in 2018 when I finished this post. This year, I thought it would be the year when I get the post out closer to the new year, but somehow I always slip. In either case, it gives me a chance to take in some of the new opportunities and excitement of the new year before reflecting and looking back.

This year, I’m working an internship with UNICEF to help lead on open source community engagement and supporting the non-technical areas of their MagicBox platform. In the one month I’ve been doing this, I feel like I have tens of articles I could write about, but the experience is still maturing for me.

I also have another round in Chicago to look forward to over the summer. I’ll get to work with the same team as last year on similar projects, and I’m looking forward to going back.

As for the rest, who knows what’s to come? So many things that made 2017 what it was were the things I didn’t expect. The surprises in life are the salt to the regiment of daily life, and add flavor and spice in unexpected ways. I have no idea what my 2018 Year in Review will look like, and that’s okay. I’m looking forward to seeing what will make it in.

Thank you 🔗

Above all, every year, I think back on the people who positively impacted my life and contributed to the “flavor” of my year. A close friend reminded me recently that we all stand on the shoulders of giants. And isn’t it true? We all have our great mentors, great friends, and unexpected sages that help us find our own footing on this great path of life. We become ourselves from the various pieces impacted on us by others.

I’m thankful for all of the people who have made my year into the experience it was. The list is too long to write and I fear I would leave someone out – even significant impacts were made by people who had a short-term role in this last year.

A long time ago, my open source experience was jump-started by someone who did something kind and exceptional for me. It was a continuing trend since that moment. My only aspiration is to pay forward the good will that so many have bestowed unto me.

Thanks for making it this far down, and I hope to see you in 2018. Or who knows – maybe it will just be me reading this far down for next year, when I go to write my next year in review. Hi future me!

Past term 🔗

In this past election, the Council encouraged the new FAmSCo to retool themselves. They should support the Ambassadors in a new age of Linux outreach and events. And they have done exactly that. Clarifications and improvements to the mentorship policies are taking place, the Fedora Ambassadors Membership Administration (FAMA) was reformed, and a Fedora Activity Day (FAD) for the LATAM region was successfully planned and executed. As a voting Ambassador, I am proud of all FAmSCo members and happy to see the progress they have made this term.

One concern 🔗

However, one thing stood out to me the past election. All of the representatives on FAmSCo were only from the EMEA and LATAM regions. Part of the fault is that there were no NA candidates and only one candidate from APAC. Therefore, the benefit of this was that EMEA and LATAM communities were more in touch with FAmSCo, since members in their meeting included elected representatives. In NA and APAC, this was not the case.

For Ambassadors in these regions, we did not have an attendee in our meetings to share news with FAmSCo. If we wanted to keep up, we would have to dig deeper. In March, I filed two tickets to suggest opening the mailing list to public participation and establishing an IRC channel presence. Consequently, FAmSCo has improved on being more accessible and transparent for all Ambassadors.

However, there is still a disconnection when your region doesn’t have an elected official to help represent the unique needs and perspectives of your region. In NA, I thought it would help to have a representative. This past June, I traveled to India and met with some Ambassadors in Pune, India. My discussions with them led me to believe that APAC needs representation in FAmSCo too.

Looking ahead to the next FAmSCo 🔗

Three seats are open for this coming election in August, leaving four (fantastic and well-qualified) FAmSCo members from EMEA to serve another term. Therefore, this leaves one region of the world well-represented by the Fedora Ambassador leadership body. Seeing as there are three seats up for elections and three regions that could be represented, I encourage voters in the next FAmSCo election to remember how big the Fedora community is.

The planet is big, and it’s hard to know what’s happening in different countries, regions, and continents. While we are all united as Fedora Ambassadors, there are unique challenges that our Fedora friends from one region may face that others may not. There are cultural, language, and currency differences. Some communities have a better foundation while others need guidance and encouragement to grow. I encourage all participating voters in this next election to remember our friends around the world and to help keep everyone included and involved in the conversations that drive the project forward.

Open source projects are built online and a lot of their community members are placed all over the world. Even though projects have people from around the world, this doesn’t stop ambitious community members to organize open source conferences or events in their own cities. Whether they’re focused generally to open source or for a specific project, you can find a variety of conferences, hackathons, workshops, or meet-ups all over the world. Fedora benefits from having Ambassadors to attend these events to introduce Fedora and spread the word about the community. It’s not uncommon to see Fedora participating in these events, and Linux Weekend 2017 in Tirana, Albania was not an exception.

From March 25-26, 2017 in Tirana, Albania, nearly 130 people attended the first-ever Linux Weekend 2017. Linux Weekend was organized by Open Labs Hackerspace at the Universiteti Politeknik i Tiranës as an introduction to Linux for beginners. Throughout Tirana, universities have a strong focus on Windows or macOS operating systems and little focus is given to Linux. Open Labs community members wanted to organize an event that would promote Linux as an open source alternative and demonstrate some of its benefits over proprietary environments. The event collected representatives from various communities, including Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, NextCloud, MusicBrainz, and more.

Organizing Linux Weekend 🔗

The Open Labs community is not unfamiliar to organizing open source events in Tirana. Their portfolio includes Fedora release parties, OpenStreetMap map-a-thons, Wikipedia edit-a-thons, and Fedora community meet-ups. However, these events have been targeted towards people who already had prior interest or knowledge about open source communities. The organization and planning for Linux Weekend began in the middle of January as an idea to introduce Linux to complete beginners.

Planning and organizing Linux Weekend was a community effort. Jona Azizaj is a board member of Open Labs and a Fedora contributor, and was involved as an organizer for the event. “This was the first edition of Linux Weekend, so the main focus is to raise awareness about Linux and open source. We wanted to educate beginners and spread the word about the choices that are available,” Azizaj explained. The two tracks for the event were full of talks and workshops to introduce attendees not only to Linux, but also various software and applications of what someone can do with Linux.

Many of the attendees were students who had either heard of Linux in their classes or from their peers. Other attendees included industry professionals or other open source community members. Several representatives of Fedora from different parts of the community were in attendance as well. Ambassadors, designers, and translators were available to answer questions and teach newcomers about Fedora.

Albanian students learn Linux 🔗

Since the focus of the event was to teach newcomers about Linux and how it can be used, Linux Weekend was organized to be an introduction to various parts of the Linux ecosystem. Representatives from Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, OpenSUSE, Linux Mint, and elementaryOS gave introductions to the operating systems and their communities. In addition to distributions, there were also sessions on open source licenses, NextCloud, text editors, MusicBrainz, and more. The benefit of these sessions were demonstrating the different ways Linux can be used to accomplish various tasks.

In addition to the various sessions during the weekend, there were three community booths for Fedora, OpenSUSE, and Mozilla. Attendees had a chance to get swag from each project and also talk with representatives about their own experiences or how to get started using their project.

Sidorela Uku was both an attendee and a speaker at Linux Weekend. Her talk, “Programming in Linux, editors, and tools”, introduced various text editors and other tools to help customize any Linux distribution to someone’s needs or personal preferences. In addition to sharing her own knowledge, she was also excited to discover new things. “I wanted to attend the talks and workshops to learn as much as possible. I also wanted to figure out the next steps to find a project and get involved as a contributor,” Uku explained. “I also wanted to share the things I know with others to help them get started with Linux.” This was Uku’s first time speaking at an event and she looks forward to more open source events in Tirana in the future.

Fedora contributors introduce community 🔗

Various members of the Fedora community were also in attendance. Some of the Fedora presentations over the weekend introduced the project to newcomers, detailed the translation efforts to bring Fedora to Albanian, and also guided attendees on how to make their first steps as contributors. The Fedora presence aimed to help give newcomers a taste of the operating system but also to show the impact someone can have if they decide to contribute.

Mariana Balla was one of the first speakers on Saturday morning with her talk titled, “Introduction to Fedora Project and how to be a part of the community”. She started with localizing Fedora into Albanian in early 2016 and more recently started to become an advocate as well. “Fedora is one of the most used distributions, and it was great to have Fedora here to spread the word and show what our community is all about,” Balla said. “One thing I hoped to show in my talk was that technical skills aren’t required to contribute to Fedora. There’s so many things that aren’t code that people can help with!” One of the highlights of Balla’s presentation was breaking down the different sub-projects in the community and how they contribute to making Fedora what it is. One site that was mentioned was whatcanidoforfedora.org, a site anyone can click their way through to find an area that interests them.

One key contribution area that was important for the local community was localization. Many attendees and speakers alike thought it was important to have software translated into their native language. Anxhela Hyseni is a Fedora Ambassador and led the workshop on “Translation of Fedora”. “It’s important for Albanians to have software in Albanian because we are Albanians!” Hyseni laughs. “People are better able to understand Fedora and it makes it more accessible for us to have it in our local language.” She hopes that attendees left Linux Weekend with plenty of new contacts in the open source community and a better idea of what Linux is all about. She and others also helped Linux newcomers install Fedora 25 as a dual-boot or for virtual machines in the installfest on Saturday morning.

Wrapping up 🔗

After two days of talks, workshops, and hallway discussions, the final talk finished around 4:00pm on Sunday. Azizaj closed out with some final words of encouragement and thanks for attendee participation.

The presence of Fedora, open source software, and its philosophy was present during the entire weekend. Between stickers, install media, and brochures from community tables and the various presentations during the weekend, participants and organizers felt the event was worthwhile. “We had limited time to plan, but it was important to bring Linux to people to introduce the philosophy, show them how to use it, and also how they can give back,” Anxhelo Lushka, an event organizer and Fedora contributor, explained. “We hope attendees had new experiences and learned something new and useful for the real world, for jobs or studying. We also hope we convinced them to contribute and give back, even if in a small way.”

Now that Linux Weekend 2017 is finished, the organizing team is switching their focus to Open Source Conference Albania (OSCAL), the largest open source conference in the region.

Find Fedora near you 🔗

Open source events are happening all around the world, and Fedora might be closer to you than you think! Check for local user or meet-up groups near you to get involved in some of these events. Meetup.com is a great way to find local events happening in your community. You can also keep an eye on what Fedora is up to by following us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or Instagram.

We hope to see you at an event in the coming future!

Preface 🔗

When I started writing this in January, I read freenode’s “Happy New Year!” announcement. Even though their recollection of the year began as a negative reflection, the freenode team did not fail to find some of the positives of this year as well. The attitude reflected in their blog post is reflective of the attitude of many others today. 2016 has brought more than its share of sadness, fear, and a bleak unknown, but the colors of radiance, happiness, and hope have not faded either. Even though some of us celebrated the end of 2016 and its tragedies, two thoughts stay in my mind.

One, it is fundamentally important for all of us to stay vigilant and aware of what is happening in the world around us. The changing political atmosphere of the world has brought a shroud of unknowing, and the changing of a number does not and will not signify the end of these doubts and fears. 2017 brings its own series of unexpected events. I don’t consider this a negative, but in order for it not to become a negative, we must constantly remain active and aware.

Secondly, despite the more bleak moments of this year, there has never been a more important time to embrace the positives of the past year. For every hardship faced, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Love is all around us and sometimes where we least expect it. Spend extra time this new year remembering the things that brought you happiness in the past year. Hold them close, but share that light of happiness with others too. You might not know how much it’s needed.

First year of university: complete! 🔗

Many things changed since I decided to pack up my life and go to a school a thousand miles away from my hometown. In May, I officially finished my first year at the Rochester Institute of Technology, finishing the full year on dean’s list. Even though it was only a single year, the changes from my decision to make the move are incomparable. Rochester exposed me to amazing, brilliant people. I’m connected to organizations and groups based on my interests like I never imagined. My courses are challenging, but interesting. If there is anything I am appreciative of in 2016, it is for the opportunities that have presented themselves to me in Rochester.

Adventures into FOSS@MAGIC 🔗

My involvement with the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community at RIT has grown exponentially since I began participating in 2015. I took my first course in the FOSS minor, Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Development in spring 2016. In the following fall 2016 semester, I became the teaching assistant for the course. I helped show our community’s projects at Imagine RIT. I helped carry the RIT FOSS flag in California (more on that later). The FOSS@MAGIC initiative was an influencing factor for my decision to attend RIT and continues to play an impact in my life as a student.

I eagerly look forward to future opportunities for the FOSS projects and initiatives at RIT to grow and expand. Bringing open source into more students’ hands excites me!

I <3 WiC 🔗

With a new schedule, the fall 2016 semester marked the beginning of my active involvement with the Women in Computing (WiC) program at RIT, as part of the Allies committee. Together with other members of the RIT community, we work together to find issues in our community, discuss them and share experiences, and find ways to grow the WiC mission: to promote the success and advancement of women in their academic and professional careers.

Also, hey! If you’re a female high school or university student in the Rochester area (or willing to do some travel), you should seriously check this out!

Google Summer of Code 🔗

Google Summer of Code, abbreviated to GSoC, is an annual program run by Google every year. Google works with open source projects to offer stipends for them to pay students to work on projects over the summer. In a last-minute decision to apply, I was accepted as a contributing student to the Fedora Project. My proposal was to work within the Fedora Infrastructure team to help automate the WordPress platforms with Ansible. My mentor, Patrick Uiterwijk, provided much of the motivation for the proposal and worked with me throughout the summer as I began learning Ansible for the first time. Over the course of the summer, my learned knowledge began to turn into practical experience.

It would be unfair for a reflection to count successes but not failures. GSoC was one of the most challenging and stressful activities I’ve ever participated in. It was a complete learning experience for me. One area I noted that I needed to improve on was communication. My failing point was not regularly communicating what I was working through or stuck on with my mentor and the rest of the Fedora GSoC community. GSoC taught me the value of asking questions often when you’re stuck, especially in an online contribution format.

On the positive side, GSoC helped formally introduce me to Ansible, and to a lesser extent, the value of automation in operations work. My work in GSoC helped enable me to become a sponsored sysadmin of Fedora, where I mostly focus my time contributing to the Badges site. Additionally, my experience in GSoC helped me when interviewing for summer internships (also more on this later).

Google Summer of Code came with many ups and downs. But I made it and passed the program. I’m happy and fortunate to have received this opportunity from the Fedora Project and Google. I learned several valuable lessons that have and will impact going forward into my career. I look forward to participating either as a mentor or organizer for GSoC 2017 with the Fedora Project this year.

Flock 2016 🔗

Towards the end of summer, in the beginning of August, I was accepted as a speaker to the annual Fedora Project contributor conference, Flock. As a speaker, my travel and accommodation were sponsored to the event venue in Kraków, Poland.

Months after Flock, I am still incredibly grateful for receiving the opportunity to attend the conference. I am appreciative and thankful to Red Hat for helping cover my costs to attend, which is something I would never be able to do on my own. Outside of the real work and productivity that happened during the conference, I am happy to have mapped names to faces. I met incredible people from all corners of the world and have made new lifelong friends (who I was fortunate to see again in 2017)! Flock introduced me in-person to the diverse and brilliant community behind the Fedora Project. It is an experience that will stay with me forever.

To read a more in-depth analysis of my time in Poland, you can read my full write-up of Flock 2016.

Maryland (Bitcamp), Massachusetts (HackMIT), California (MINECON) 🔗

2016 provided me the opportunity to explore various parts of my country. Throughout the year, I attended various conferences to represent the Fedora Project, the SpigotMC project, and the RIT open source community.

There are three distinct events that stand out in my memory. For the first time, I visited the University of Maryland for Bitcamp as a Fedora Ambassador. It also provided me an opportunity to see my nation’s capitol for the first time. I also visited Boston for the first time this year as well for HackMIT, MIT’s annual hackathon event. I also participated as a Fedora Ambassador and met brilliant students from around the country (and even the world, with one student I met flying in from India for the weekend).

Lastly, I also took my first journey to the US west coast for MINECON 2016, the annual Minecraft convention. I attended as a staff member of the SpigotMC project and a representative of the open source community at RIT.

All three of these events have their own event reports to go with them. More info and plenty of pictures are in the full reports.

• Going to Bitcamp 2016
• HackMIT meets Fedora
• SpigotMC goes to California for MINECON

Vermont 2016 with Matt 🔗

Some trips happen without prior arrangements and planning. Sometimes, the best memories are made by not saying no. I remember the phone call with one of my closest friends, Matt Coutu, at some point in October. On a sudden whim, we planned my first visit to Vermont to visit him. Some of the things he told me to expect made me excited to explore Vermont! And then in the pre-dawn hours of November 4th, I made the trek out to Vermont to see him.

Instantly when crossing over the state border, I knew this was one of the most beautiful states I ever visited. During the weekend, the two of us did things that I think only the two of us would enjoy. We climbed a snowy mountain to reach an abandoned fire watchtower, where we endured a mini blizzard. We walked through a city without a specific destination in mind, but to go wherever the moment took us.

We visited a quiet dirt road that led to a meditation house and cavern maintained by monks, where we meditated and drank in the experience. I wouldn’t classify the trip has a high-energy or engaging trip, but for me, it was one of the most enjoyable trips I’ve embarked on yet. There are many things that I still hold on to from that weekend for remembering or reflecting back on.

A big shout-out to Matt for always supporting me with everything I do and always being there when we need each other.

Finally seeing NYC with Nolski 🔗

In no short time after the Vermont trip, I purchased tickets for my favorite band, El Ten Eleven, in New York City on November 12th. What turned into a one-day trip to see the band turned into an all-weekend trip to see the band, see New York City, and spend some time catching up with two of my favorite people, Mike Nolan (nolski) and Remy DeCausemaker (decause). During the weekend, I saw the World Trade Center memorial site for the first time, tried some amazing bagels, explored virtual reality in Samsung’s HQ, and got an exclusive inside look at the Giphy office.

This was my third time in New York City, but my first time to explore the city. Another shout-out goes to Mike for letting me crash on his couch and stealing his Sunday to walk through his metaphorical backyard. Hopefully it isn’t my last time to visit the city either!

Finalizing study abroad 🔗

At the end of 2016, I finalized a plan that was more than a year in the making. I applied and was accepted to study abroad at the Rochester Institute of Technology campus in Dubrovnik, Croatia. RIT has a few satellite campuses across the world: two in Croatia (Zagreb and Dubrovnik) and one in Dubai, UAE. In addition to being accepted, the university provided me a grant to further my education abroad. I am fortunate to have received this opportunity and can’t wait to spend the next few months of my life in Croatia. I am currently studying in Dubrovnik since January until the end of May.

During my time here, I will be taking 12 credit hours of courses. I am taking ISTE-230 (Introduction to Database and Data Modeling), ENGL-361 (Technical Writing), ENVS-150 (Ecology of the Dalmatian Coast), and lastly, FOOD-161 (Wines of the World). The last one was a fun one that I took for myself to try broadening my experiences while abroad.

Additionally, one of my personal goals for 2017 is to practice my photography skills. During my time abroad, I have created a gallery on 500px where I upload my top photos from every week. I welcome feedback and opinions about my pictures, and if you have criticism for how I can improve, I’d love to hear about it!

Accepting my first co-op 🔗

The last big break that I had in 2016 was accepting my first co-op position. Starting in June, I will be a Production Engineering Intern at Jump Trading, LLC. I started interviewing with Jump Trading in October and even had an on-site interview that brought me to their headquarters in Chicago at the beginning of December. After meeting the people and understanding the culture of the company, I am happy to accept a place at the team. I look forward to learning from some of the best in the industry and hope to contribute to some of the fascinating projects going on there.

From June until late August, I will be starting full-time at their Chicago office. If you are in the area or ever want to say hello, let me know and I’d be happy to grab coffee, once I figure out where all the best coffee shops in Chicago are!

In summary 🔗

2015 felt like a difficult year to follow, but 2016 exceeded my expectations. I acknowledge and I’m grateful for the opportunities this year presented to me. Most importantly, I am thankful for the people who have touched my life in a unique way. I met many new people and strengthened my friendships and bonds with many old faces too. All of the great things from the past year would not be possible without the influence, mentorship, guidance, friendship, and comradery these people have given me. My mission is to always pay it forward to others in any way that I can, so that others are able to experience the same opportunities (or better).

2017 is starting off hot and moving quickly, so I hope I can keep up! I can’t wait to see what this year brings and hope that I have the chance to meet more amazing people, and also meet many of my old friends again, wherever that may be.

Keep the FOSS flag high.

When people first think of “open source”, their mind probably first goes to code. Something technical that requires an intermediate understanding of computers or programming languages. But open source is a broad concept that goes beyond only binary bits and bytes. Open source projects hold great regard for community participation. The community is a fundamental piece of a successful open source project. For my experience getting involved with open source, I began in the community and worked my way around from there. At the age of fifteen, I was beginning my open source journey and I didn’t even know it.

Gaming introduces open source 🔗

One of my strongest memories of a “gaming addiction” was when I was fifteen and a younger cousin introduced me to the game Minecraft. The game was in beta then, but I remember the sandbox-style of the game entertaining the two of us for hours. But what I discovered was that playing the game alone became boring. Playing and mining with others made the experience more fun and meaningful. In order to do this, I learned I would have to host a server for my friends to connect to play with me.

I originally used the “vanilla” Minecraft server software at first, but it was limited to what it could do, and didn’t compare to other multiplayer servers in existence. They all seemed to be using something that offered more, so players could play games, cast spells, or do other unique things that would normally not be possible in the game. After digging, I discovered Bukkit, an open source Minecraft server software with an extensible API to let developers change the multiplayer experience. I soon became wrapped up with Bukkit like a child with a new toy. Except this toy had me digging through my computer to set up “port forwarding”, “setting NAT records”, and “creating static IP addresses”. I was teaching myself the basics of computer networking in the guise of creating a game server for my friends.

Over time, my Minecraft server hobby began to take up more and more time. More people began playing on my server and I began searching for ways to improve the performance of my server. After doing some digging, I discovered the SpigotMC project, shortened to just Spigot. Spigot was a fork of the Bukkit project that made specific enhancements to performance. After trialing it on my server, I discovered the performance gains were measurable and I would commit to using Spigot from then on.

Participating in SpigotMC 🔗

Before long, I began running into new challenges with managing my Minecraft server community, whether it was finding ways to scale or finding the best ways to build a community up. In October 2013, I registered an account on the Spigot forums to talk with other server owners and seek advice on ways I could improve. I found the community welcoming and accepting to helping me learn and improve. Several people in the community were owners of larger servers or developers of unique plugins to Spigot. In response to my detailed inquisitions, they responded with genuine and helpful feedback and support. Within a week, I was already in love with the people and helpfulness of the Spigot community.

I became an active participant in the forum community in Spigot. Through the project, I was introduced to IRC and how to use it for communicating with other server owners and developers. What I didn’t realize was a trend in my behavior. Over time, I began shifting away from asking all the questions. Almost as if in a role reversal, I became the one answering questions and helping support other new server owners or developers. I became the one in an advisory role instead of the one always asking.

In April 2014, the project lead of Spigot reached out to me asking if I would consider a role as a community staff member. Part of my responsibilities would be responding to reports, encouraging a helpful and friendly community, and maintaining the atmosphere of the community. With as much prestige and honor as my sixteen-year-old self could muster, I accepted and began serving as a community moderator. I remember feeling privileged to serve the position – I would finally get to help the community that had done so much to help me.

Expanding the open source horizon 🔗

Through 2014 and 2015, I actively served as a moderator of the community, both in the forums and the IRC network for Spigot. I remained in the Spigot community as the project steadily grew. It was incredible to see how the project was attracting more and more users.

However, my open source journey did not end there. After receiving my high school diploma in May 2015, I had set my sights on the Rochester Institute of Technology, a school I noted as having the country’s only Free and Open Source Software minor. By coincidence, I also noticed that my preferred Linux distribution, Fedora, was holding its annual contributor conference in Rochester, a week before I would move in for classes. I decided I would make the move up early to see what it was all about.

Flock 2015 introduces Fedora 🔗

The summer passed, and before I knew I was ready, I was packing up from my home outside of Atlanta, Georgia to leave for Rochester, New York. After fourteen hours of driving, I finally arrived and began moving into my new home. A day after I arrived, Flock was slated to begin, marking my first journey in Rochester.

At Flock, I entered as an outsider. I was in an unfamiliar city with unfamiliar people and an open source project I was only mildly familiar with. It was all new to me. But during that week, I discovered a community of people who were united around four common ideals. Freedom, Friends, Features, First: the Four Foundations of the Fedora Project were made clear to me. The community members at Flock worked passionately towards advancing their project during the talks and workshops. And after the talks finished, they gathered together for hallway discussions, sharing drinks, and enjoying the presence of their (usually) internationally dispersed team. Without having ever attended a Fedora event before, I knew that the Four Foundations and the community behind Fedora were the real deal. Leaving Flock that year, I vowed to pursue becoming a part of this incredible community.

Pen to paper, keyboard to post 🔗

The first major step I took towards contributing to the Fedora Project was in September 2015, during Software Freedom Day. Then Fedora Community Action and Impact Coordinator Remy DeCausemaker was in attendance representing Fedora. During the event, I reached out to the Fedora Magazine editorial team asking to become involved as a writer. By the end of September, I penned my first article for the Fedora Magazine, tying in my experience in the Spigot community to Fedora: run a Minecraft server using Spigot.

My first step getting involved with the Fedora community was an exciting one. I remember feeling proud and excited to see my first article published on the front page, not only helping Fedora, but also helping Spigot. I realized then that it was relatively straightforward to contribute this kind of content, and I would keep writing about software I was familiar with for the Magazine.

As I continued writing posts for the Fedora Magazine, I became aware of another team forming up in Fedora: the Community Operations, or CommOps, team. I subscribed to their mailing list, joined the IRC channel, and attended the first meetings. Over time, I became wrapped up and involved with the community efforts within Fedora. I slowly found one thing leading to another.

Today in Fedora, I am the leading member of the Community Operations (CommOps) team, the editor-in-chief of the Fedora Magazine, a Marketing team member, an Ambassador of North America, a leading member of the Diversity Team, and a few other things.

Advice for other students 🔗

When you’re first getting started, it can sometimes be tough and a little confusing. As students getting involved with FOSS, there are a few challenges that we might have to face. A lot of this can be with making the first steps into a new project. There are countless open source projects of various sizes and they all do things a bit differently from others, so the process changes from project to project.

One of the most obvious challenges with getting involved is your personal experience level. Especially when getting started, it can be easy to look at a large project or well-known project and see all the work devoted there. There are smart and active people working on these projects, and many times their contributions are quite impressive! One of the many concerns I’ve seen other students here face (including myself at first) is wondering how someone with beginning to moderate experience or knowledge can get involved, in comparison to some of these contributions from active contributors. If it’s a large project, like Fedora, it can be intimidating to think where to start when there’s so many things to do and areas to get involved with. But if you think of it all as one big project, it is intimidating and difficult for you to make that first step.

Break a bigger project into smaller pieces. Start small and look for something you can help with. A healthy open source project usually will have things like easyfix bugs that are good ones to start with if it’s your first time contributing. Keep an eye out for those if you’re getting started.

Another challenge you might face as a student or beginner to open source is something called imposter syndrome. For me, this was something I had identified with before I knew what it was. For a definition, I’ll pull straight from Wikipedia first: " Term referring to high-achieving individuals marked by an inability to internalize their accomplishments and a persistent fear of being exposed as a “fraud”.

Imposter syndrome can be a common feeling as you get involved with open source, especially if comparing yourself to some of those active and smart contributors that you meet as you become involved. But you should also remember you are a student – comparing yourself or your contributions to a professional or someone with years of experience isn’t fair to yourself! It’s not apple-to-apples. Your contributions as you get involved with open source are worthy and valuable to an open source project regardless of how deep, how many, or how much time you spend on the project. Even if it’s a couple of hours in the week, that’s saving others those couple of hours and it’s adding something into the project. A contribution is a contribution – it’s a bad idea to rate the worth of contributions to other contributions.

Those are some of the challenges that are useful to know and understand as you become more involved with FOSS. If you know the challenges you are up against, it makes it easier to handle them as they come.

There are also benefits to contributing to open source as a student as well. Contributing to open source is a great way for you to take knowledge and info you have learned from classes and begin applying it to real-world projects and gain experience. It’s one thing to take you to the next level as a student. If you are contributing to a project in the real world, that is unique experience that is helpful for you for future career outlooks as well.

It’s also a great networking opportunity. In open source, you meet many incredible and smart people. In my time in Fedora, I’ve met many contributors and had various mentors help me get involved. I’ve made new friends and met people who I normally would never have had the opportunity to meet.

There are also opportunities for leadership in open source projects. Whether it’s just one task, one bug, or even a role, you might find that sometimes all it takes is someone willing to say, “I’ll do this!” to have leadership on something. It might be challenging or difficult at first, but it’s a great way for you to understand working in team environments, how to work effectively even if you’re remote, and how to break down a task and work on finding solutions for complex problems.

Lastly, it’s important for younger people to become more involved with open source communities. As students and younger community members, we add unique perspective and ideas to open source projects. It’s important to a healthy community for an open source project and any open source project worth contributing to should be welcoming and accepting to students who are willing to spend time working on the project and helping solve those problems, whether they’re bugs, tasks, or other things. In short, there is absolutely a role for students getting involved with open source!

https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/hackmit-meets-fedora/

HackMIT is the annual hackathon event organized by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. HackMIT 2016 took place on September 17th and 18th, 2016. This year, the Fedora Project partnered with Red Hat as sponsors for the hackathon. Fedora Ambassadors Charles Profitt and Justin Wheeler attended to represent the project and help mentor top students from around the country in a weekend of learning and competitive hacking. Fedora engaged with a new audience of students from various universities across America and even the globe.

Arriving at HackMIT 🔗

The Fedora team arrived in Massachusetts a day early on Friday to ensure prompt arrival at the event the following morning. Fedora was one of the first sponsors to arrive on MIT’s campus Saturday morning, and scouted one of the best positions on the floor. Fedora was given a choice of anywhere in the bleachers surrounding the floor. As a result, the team set up Fedora’s banners close to many of the tables where hackers would spend the weekend.

On the morning of the first day, over a thousand students arrived on the MIT campus. Around 10:00am, the kickoff ceremony began in the main auditorium. The event staff introduced themselves and the structure of the event. After covering the basics, every sponsor was given a 30 second “elevator pitch” to explain their company or project, and share anything important with the hackers. Justin represented Fedora and Red Hat on stage to introduce Fedora and what Fedora wanted to help students with. He introduced Fedora as a distribution targeted towards developers, briefly introduced the three editions of Fedora, and offered help for anyone wanting to open source their hack or seek support with open source tooling.

May the hacking begin! 🔗

After the sponsor introductions, hackers relocated to the main floor to start seeking teams and begin working on projects. While HackMIT was getting into full swing, many people visited the Fedora area before jumping into a project. Many of the students who talked with Charles and Justin were either surprised to see Fedora at an event like HackMIT or were curious to know what was going on in Fedora. For the most part, many students were familiar with Linux through classes or lectures. The ones familiar with Linux knew about it from hands-on experience or from guided instruction in classes. A smaller number of people were running Linux environments or using them in servers or other ways.

Overall, the demographic of people attending the hackathon were generally familiar with Linux, but not at an advanced level. This group was ideal for promoting Fedora as a developer environment. The ease of setting up a development workspace or installing dependencies for projects intrigued many students. HackMIT was an ideal opportunity to present Fedora to a new group of budding technological enthusiasts. HackMIT participants had an organic interest in Fedora and wanted to know how Fedora made development easier or what made it different from other distributions.

Personal engagement 🔗

During the event, Charles walked around the various tables to talk with students while Justin manned the Fedora area. Charles introduced himself to the hackers and asked to know what they were working on or what their plans were. For many teams, he provided advice on how to get over hurdles with first planning and project direction. He checked back in with these groups across the weekend to see how they progressed.

At the Fedora space, Justin fielded questions from students about Linux, what Fedora offers, and about open source software. Some people were familiar with Fedora, and a small handful of students were running Fedora as a primary operating system. However, most students were only familiar with Linux and were curious to know more. As a student, Justin offered specific advice about contributing to open source software and how helpful it is to gain real-world experience. Some students expressed interest in contributing but were unsure about where to start. Justin coached students through key steps to start with on beginning their open source adventure. He identified the process of choosing a project to contribute to, matching something genuinely interesting with technical skills, and getting involved with the community.

Additionally, there were two students organizing other hackathons in the country with a specific focus towards open source software development. The Ambassadors engaged with these students and joined in a dialogue about making open source a critical part of hackathons. More information about these events will become available in the coming future.

Evaluating impact 🔗

To help gauge our impact with the event, there was a limited edition HackMIT 2016 Attendee badge that attendees could claim during the event. The team leveraged Fedora Badges as a tool to help tell the story of our impact at the event. Through Badges, you can see a list of FAS accounts that claimed the badge from the event and their account activity in the long run. Bee Padalkar’s FOSDEM event evaluation demonstrates how this data can be used. Ten people claimed the badge during the weekend. One of the benefits of using badges as a tool for measuring impact and engagement is the follow-up it allows us to make with what badge claimers do in the Fedora community.

However, there were more ways to measure engagement with the students and hackers than only with badges. Many of the most valuable insight into our impact was follow-up on the second morning. Charles went around to most of the tables he visited on the first day leading up to the final deadline. With one team, he helped do some live testing in the last 30 minutes before the deadline since her team was asleep from the previous night. Engagements like these left a positive impression of Fedora, and by extension, the community.

What was our engagement? 🔗

The type of interactions and conversations Fedora held with students and other attendees was productive and motivating, not only to the students but also to the Ambassador team. People were genuinely interested in Fedora and it was easier to shape their interest into an insightful discussion about what Fedora enables students to create and develop. A powerful message about open source software development was also delivered during the event. This stands in contrast to some other hackathons in the United States which are sometimes set up more like unofficial career fairs. HackMIT clearly held a strong focus on community. Events with that kind of management and direction are where Fedora succeeds and has a more valuable impact.

Leaving the event, the Fedora team was confident that we had a powerful impact on students during the event. For many, Fedora was not only introduced as an operating system, but as a tool for accomplishing and doing. Fedora provides the tools and utilities students need to build their projects and drive them forward. Open source as a development practice was also introduced to many for the first time, or deeper explained for those with a mild interest. These messages and the team’s other engagements were warmly received.

Looking ahead 🔗

The Fedora Ambassadors of North America would like to make a special thanks to Red Hat and Tom Callaway for partnering to sponsor this event. Without Red Hat’s help, attending this event would not have been possible. Our engagement and impact after HackMIT excites the Ambassador team. We hope many students from the event turn to Fedora not only as an operating system, but as a tool for their expanding technological toolbox. A congratulations also goes to the organizers of HackMIT for putting together a thoroughly planned and carefully executed event that placed a strong focus on community, which fits within one of Fedora’s four key foundations, Friends.

We hope to return to Cambridge again next year!

You can read Charles Profitt’s event report on his blog.

Although my report comes a little late, it comes with a lot of thought and reflection over the week at Flock. I participated as a speaker for my talk with Jona Azizaj titled, “University Outreach: New task or new mindset?” I also worked with Bee Padalkar on running the Community Operations (CommOps) team workshop for planning our own future tasks in coming months and knowing what issues or topics the community had in mind. And lastly, due to last-minute scheduling issues, I helped plan and organize the Diversity Panel with Amita Sharma and many other incredible contributors.

Without further ado, this is my analysis and report on the events at Flock 2016. And for anyone wondering what “żegnajcie” in the title means, Google Translate tells me that means “farewell!” in Polish.

General experiences around Flock 🔗

As a second-time visitor to Flock, I was a little familiar with the conference structure. Joe Brockmeier made a call for volunteers to help transcribe talks over IRC. I signed myself up to help transcribe all the talks and workshops I was attending to help cover them in the “CommOps-style” way that I run meetings. This proved effective and I hope that my transcriptions were useful both to those who wanted to keep up with Flock from home and attendees who wanted to remember specific parts of talks after the conference ended. You can find an index of all talks and their transcriptions on the wiki.

The event organizers did an effective and incredible job of planning the fine details for the conference. When I arrived on August 1 at the airport, Rafał Lużyński greeted me and provided a ride from the airport to the hotel. Along with us at the airport was Bee Padalkar, Amita Sharma, Stephen Gallagher (thanks for sharing a plane ride with me!), and Ryan Lerch. Throughout the entire conference, I was always amazed at the hospitality and constant willingness to help by all the local organizers. For traveling in a country where the language was completely foreign, I never felt too confused or had a difficult time. I remember when Rafał helped translate the menu options for me at the restaurants we ate at on the first day, which was a major help for finding vegetarian choices. My impression on Kraków and then Poland is high and I hope to return again someday in the future.

Overall, the “i’s were dotted and the t’s were crossed”, as the saying goes. I am impressed by and thankful for the hard work that went into organizing this conference. The work of the organizers is one of the most important roles of the entire conference as it enables us to come together as a community. Events like Flock are powerful in many ways, and it would be easy for a conference to fall towards the “lousy” side of the scale. But the organizers, volunteers, and staff behind Flock help make the conference an amazing experience for all attendees. It’s difficult to explain my appreciation for this work that enables so many incredible experiences and magic to come together every year.

My participation at Flock 🔗

Unlike last year’s Flock, I also participated as a speaker. In all, I helped organize and plan three different talks and workshops, which are detailed individually as follows.

University Outreach: New task or new mindset? 🔗

My first talk was on Tuesday. Together with Jona Azizaj, we presented on the topic of outreach to students and university staff and faculty for the Ambassadors program. The talk structure was past, present, and future. We begin by looking at past efforts and trying to see what we could learn by things that have happened before now. Then, we looked at how Fedora is doing in working towards the University Involvement Initiative and what tactics are effective now. We also focused on areas of student outreach with the events we are attending now. Everything up to this point was more of presenting information.

After running through the past and present, we presented the direction for moving forward with improving our outreach to universities, high schools, and their students and faculty members. We broke up the main points into four big topics: on-boarding, mentorship, focusing on not just students, and improving visibility. We presented some of our own thoughts on these topics and then opened the floor for community ideas and brainstorming.

My original plan for this talk was to present more hard information on how to begin moving forward sooner than later (e.g. “less talking, more acting!”). However, I had made plans and expectations for an EDU FAD to happen in late July, which at the time, would be the place where resources and guides were created focusing on this specific topic. But due to sudden complications, the FAD never happened. The resources I hoped to have were not available. So the end of this talk was a valuable time for attendees to leave their own thoughts and ideas on generating these resources and what kind of areas we should focus on first. The room was packed, and many people with diverse ideas had something to offer. The feedback was at times harsh, but I appreciated the directness towards coming up with solutions and the interest in the topic (after all, a full room says a lot more than an empty room).

A super big and special thanks goes to both Ardian Haxha and Jona Azizaj. Ardian was originally the other co-speaker for this talk, but was unable to attend Flock due to visa issues in Kosovo. Jona willingly stepped up as an interested member of the community to help deliver the talk and her help was greatly appreciated and helpful.

Once the videos of Flock are uploaded, I hope to review the comments and feedback from the talk once more and begin converting the ideas into action.

Diversity Panel 🔗

The first-ever Diversity Panel was originally headed by Fedora’s Diversity Adviser, María ’tatica’ Leandro. But due to medical concerns, María was unable to make it to Flock. Amita Sharma stepped up to help lead and organize the panel this year. Amita reached out to me for help as a fellow member of the Diversity Team, along with several others at the conference.

I was invited to take part, but I didn’t get to spend as much time answering questions or offering ideas as I would have liked to. I helped organize and establish a remote call with María to participate from her home and also helped document the panel with some picture-taking. I feel I have to say this because the picture I’ve seen shared the most from the panel has me looking down at my phone while the other panelists look deep in thought! At that exact moment, I was replying to messages with María to help troubleshoot some audio problems and help her identify who was speaking.

Overall, I feel the panel was a great success and I hope to see it become a regular part of Flock every year. We were able to target and name issues that the community feels needed focus in terms of diversity. Awareness was also raised for the incredibly large and diverse community we have. I hope together we can work towards breaking some of the stereotypes of Linux and open source communities, starting with our own. Big thanks (and hugs!) to Amita for helping organize the panel at the last minute, and a round of applause for all the panelists (Matthew Miller, Marina Zhurakhinskaya, Sylvia Sánchez, Bee Padalkar, Jona Azizaj, and Marie Nordin).

CommOps workshop 🔗

The Community Operations (CommOps) workshop was originally headed by Fedora’s Community Lead, Remy DeCausemaker, but due to an opportunity of a lifetime, he left his position at Red Hat and was unable to make it to Flock. Together with Bee Padalkar, we took over responsibility for this workshop.

Together, we helped plan out the key areas of focus we wanted to have for the workshop. We decided to focus on on-boarding discussions with community members and planning ahead for tasks we wanted to work on in the coming year. We created and developed some slides to help structure the workshop. Most of our preliminary planning work was done in an Etherpad, but some of the general structure and outlining exists in our wiki planning pad.

In the literal last minute before the talk began, Remy reached out to me and we patched him in for a brief audio introduction over Google Hangouts. He added some background and context to the work happening in CommOps over the past few months. Even with the suddenness of the arrangement, I was glad to have Remy with us for a time as we launched into the workshop. Unfortunately, it was only after his words we realized that our recording hadn’t started. So his words will live on in our minds and memories forever instead.

The on-boarding discussion was shaped by those who were in attendance, but as I anticipated, even a few people would be enough to begin discussion to know areas that need extra focus and attention. Two areas we spent a good amount of time covering and reviewing were the Python SIG (thanks to Miro Hrončok) and the Ambassadors (thanks to Christoph Wickert). We collected a lot of feedback and notes on these two specific teams. Until the workshop, the Python SIG wasn’t on the CommOps radar, and knowing that they could use some help and assistance with on-boarding new team members is the exact type of feedback that was perfect to hear. I knew the Ambassadors would be a large one to tackle, but we were able to get some added context and feedback from a FAmSCo member and veteran Ambassadors to help steer the direction for how that discussion and subsequent actions will be shaped and directed.

We also spent some time collecting feedback on “wishes” for community metrics that would be helpful to understand both our impact and areas that we could spend more time focusing on. Most of this part of the discussion was lead by CommOps metrics genius Bee. You can see some of her past work on her blog (like her FOSDEM analysis). One area that would be better to understand is the Globalization and translation parts of the project. It would also be powerful to measure contributions by location for translations. The example used was if a small number of translations begin appearing in a new language, we can spend time providing resources and help to new contributors, with the goal of helping spur organic growth and interest in translating Fedora to that local language.

Of course, there are hundreds of different ways we could spin this story on metrics, but hopefully with the information we gained, we can begin directing focus at specific areas and teams. Bee has already started reaching out to Fedora’s G11N team!

Again, I’d like to reserve a very special thanks to Bee for helping organize, plan, and execute this workshop. I didn’t originally anticipate being tasked with this and I had never organized something like this before. Having her help was a lifesaver and I think together we turned it into a productive and informative session. I’m looking forward to another year and beyond on working with her throughout the Fedora Project.

What Flock was for me 🔗

The context differences between my first and second Flock are immense. At the first Flock, it was a stroke of luck that it happened to be hosted in the same city as where I was already planning to move for attending my university. At Flock 2015, I was a newcomer and even an outsider. I didn’t know anyone in the conference, I didn’t know the city, and I had only ever wished to contribute up to that point. But I hadn’t done much leading up to Flock 2015 other than observe. But even at the conference last year, there was one thing that was evident to me even as an outsider. The community is strong. The community is together. It was clear that the relationships within Fedora also extended outside of Fedora. I remember seeing people have a heated discussion about Fedora, or spend an entire workshop focusing on a particular issue… and after all the work was done for the day, they would walk out, have dinner together, buy each other a drink, and celebrate. There were smiles, there were hugs, there was a true air of friendliness across the entire conference. I didn’t have to be much of a contributor to see that, even then.

Changing roles 🔗

Now, at Flock this year, the roles were reversed. Since becoming involved in Fedora around September and October of 2015, I slowly became immersed and absorbed into the community that I had watched and observed from the sidelines at Flock 2015 (and a year or so before then). But instead of watching this time, I became a participant. IRC names become names, and names become faces. In place of giving karma cookies, we shared real cookies, high-fives, hugs, and our thanks for each other. We had intense discussions on real issues or dilemmas in our project and our community. We built solutions and addressed tricky topics, we challenged each others’ ideas, we focused on how to improve the thing we spend so much time working on, either paid or volunteering.

And then we would walk around the city, jump on a river boat, visit a brewery, or hit the dance floor together. We smiled, we laughed, and we enjoyed the rare opportunity to eliminate the factor of distance and spend time with our community members. There’s an air of incredibleness to this that makes it difficult to describe. But when you’ve experienced it, you know exactly what it feels like.

Difference in saying goodbye 🔗

The one major difference between Flock 2015 and 2016 for me, outside of changing roles from an observer to a participant, was something I wasn’t expecting. Unlike the previous year where saying goodbye was driving a couple of miles to my apartment and thinking about all the things I saw and experienced, this time it was saying goodbye to new friends, shared memories, and an empowering sense of community. The names in IRC weren’t just usernames, but they were faces… people. They were conversations, they were walking around together in a foreign city, they were sharing the view of a beautiful sunset on a river. It was remembering that we’re all humans with unique ideas, perspectives, and personalities, even if the tools we use to communicate make it easy to forget that.

Saying goodbye at the end of the week was far harder than I anticipated, and it made me crave the opportunity to close the factor of distance again at the soonest possible opportunity.

On a more personal note 🔗

To this end, Flock came at the right time for me this year. Over the past few months, I’ve spent a lot of time working across all different areas. My weekdays focused on Fedora and Google Summer of Code, my weekends woke me up at 4:00am for my weekend job at a local coffee shop in my hometown, and any extra time I could sneak goes into managing my now four-year-old Minecraft server community, CrystalCraftMC. Before that, I finished my first year of my undergraduate degree at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and I’m preparing to move back up to Rochester this week.

As much as I may have tried convincing others and myself that I wasn’t at least a bit burnt out, it was definitely beginning to wear on me. Anyone who has experienced burnout knows what the feeling is like. It’s different in how it affects all of us. But I was reaching that point through this summer. But Flock helped remind me of all the different people who are involved in this incredible project and why we’re doing the work we are doing. Anyone who isn’t familiar with open source will always question why we spend so much time working on something without being paid for it. But it’s more than just that. It’s more than a financial thing. The reason anyone volunteers willingly to open source is rarely ever to meet a financial or monetary goal. This is also a difficult thing to describe, and I hate to write something off as “you have to experience it to know what I mean”, but maybe this applies in this situation.

On that note, Flock served as a vital reminder for me about why I choose to involve myself with the Fedora Project. And it helped show me that the answer I need to take away isn’t to contribute more, but it’s to contribute enough for me. The several times someone in the community came up to me personally and said, “Hey, thanks for all the work you’re doing” or something along those lines was incredibly powerful and moving to me. And that helped provide value for all the contributions and time I spend in Fedora. I want to make sure that I am at my best where I am able to contribute without burning myself out and away from Fedora. The unique opportunity of being in the same physical place with so many other Fedora contributors added that context for me. And who knows, maybe this realization from Flock saved me from hitting a wall at some point in the future. But now, I am confident and ready to continue with another year, and beyond, of Fedora contributions.

Thanks for having me 🔗

I am incredibly thankful and grateful to be a part of the Fedora community. The opportunity to attend a conference like Flock with sponsorship in a country I’ve never been to before was an incredible experience. Without a doubt, it’s something that will stay with me for a long time. There are so many people I have to thank for helping open a door or offer pointers and tips for getting involved. There’s the Fedora Magazine team, the CommOps team and its original founder, the Marketing team, the Ambassadors (both globally and locally), the Diversity Team… to list names would both be incredibly time-consuming and unfair (because I’m beyond sure I would forget some name of someone who did have an impact on me getting involved).

I would like to give special thanks and appreciation for the companionship and friendliness of Amita, Bee, Jona, and Giannis during Flock. We probably spent a large part of our time at the conference together and I have a deep appreciation for the opportunity to get to you know you all personally, not just as fellow contributors but as true friends. I anticipate the next time we can all be together in the same space again!

Looking ahead 🔗

2016 is past halfway complete and we’re on track towards a speedy arrival of 2017. But there is a lot to do before we get there. Flock has helped give the opportunity for the community and all of its teams to find their direction and aim for the next few months and to work towards that. I am refreshed, reinvigorated, and ready for another year of noting all the #info, answering the calls for #help, and taking on #action items to build and grow the Fedora Project forward.

See you in channel, on the mailing lists, or wherever our paths will collide next… as I’m sure they will.

Flock, now in its fourth year, is a conference for Fedora contributors to come together, discuss new ideas, work to make those ideas a reality, and continue to promote the core values of the Fedora community: Freedom, Friends, Features, and First.

This year, I am attending as a contributor to the project, giving a talk, and leading a workshop!

Poland: New experience 🔗

Last year, I attended Flock 2015 without having much of an idea of what to expect. Flock 2015 was less than ten minutes away from my then future university, the Rochester Institute of Technology. I was a user of Fedora since 2013, but I had never figured out how to start contributing to the project. To take advantage of this experience, I made plans to move into school early so I could see what Flock was all about.

Fast forward a full year, and a lot has changed. Now, I spend many hours a week working on the Fedora Project in many places. I help lead the CommOps and Marketing teams. I organize and attend events on the US East Coast as an Ambassador. I’m a Google Summer of Code 2016 student for Fedora. When I walked into the conference center last year as a shy student, I never imagined that many of the people I met would become familiar faces in short time.

This year, Flock 2016 in Poland will be a different experience, and I am looking forward to seeing what it will bring. Do you have plans to attend? If so, allow me to share some details for sessions you will want to add to your schedule!

Evaluating our impact in education 🔗

At 17:30 UTC+2 on August 2nd, 2016, together with Jona Azizaj, we will lead a talk titled, “University Outreach – New task or new mindset?”

In early 2015, the Fedora Council proposed a new objective: the University Involvement Initiative. The purpose? Try to increase exposure of Fedora in university settings to gain new users, but also to hopefully gain new contributors. In order to carry this out, is it a new task, or does it need a new mindset? In this talk, we begin looking at the current mindset and marketing thoughts around attracting university students to Fedora. What is working? What isn’t?

We will look at personal experiences among the presenters with getting involved with Fedora as a student for an example. We will focus on how changing the ways we approach reaching out to students might be the best way to begin making an impact on students with Fedora.

If you are someone interested in reaching new audiences of students with Fedora, make sure you work this talk into your agenda.

CommOps Workshop 🔗

As of recently, I will also be leading the CommOps workshop on August 4th, 2016 at 13:30 UTC+2.

This year, for the first time, CommOps will be hosting its own workshop to tackle existing tasks and project items, offer a place for the community to add their own ideas and wishes for what they would like to see, and planning for the future growth of our sub-project. Flock offers a unique venue to do this as it brings together multiple people from different areas of Fedora in the same rooms. This is a great place for us to take advantage of the combined people power to accomplish tasks that would be hard otherwise.

The workshop will be designed to also try to keep remote contributors in mind, where possible, over IRC and possibly other means.

To help organize thoughts and ideas on the workshop in a public and open way, the workshop planned in the open on the wiki. We’re working with other CommOps contributors on shaping how the workshop will run. We hope to have you join us and see what we’re up to in CommOps land!

Thank you Red Hat 🔗

Finally, I want to offer my sincere gratitude and appreciation to Red Hat and the Flock sponsors for sponsoring my travel costs to Flock 2016. As a student, there would not be a way for me to afford making this trip on my own expenses. Thanks to the great folks behind Flock, I will be attending and hope to contribute my worth with the above talk and workshop, as well as throughout the entire conference.

Thank you for granting me this opportunity, and I look forward to seeing many other Fedora contributors next month in Poland!

Image courtesy Alexey Topolyanskiy – originally posted to Unsplash as Untitled.

Communicating between Ambassadors and Design 🔗

From our conversation, I learned that there was a disconnect between the Ambassadors and the Design team. As a sponsored Ambassador myself, I had never seen anywhere documenting the steps or process I should take to ask for art assets when needed for an event. There were also things I had not considered about what goes into the printing and production process for items too. Every region of the world seems to do things a little differently!

With the information I learned from our conversation in a CommOps meeting, I penned up a first draft of what the communication process should look like between Ambassadors and the Design team. The page is not official yet, and I posted a bit ago to the Design Team mailing list requesting feedback on the page. Hopefully, if the information passes approval from the Design Team, we can work on socializing this information with all Ambassadors across the four regions of the world. The end goal of this is to make it easier on both the Ambassadors and the Design Team by doing the following…

• Making it clear what to do as an Ambassador for requesting art assets / printed items
• Reducing strain / load on Design Team from repetitive situations / “common questions”
• Creating a faster and more efficient workflow for Ambassadors organizing events and Designers creating art and deliverables

Long-term, though… 🔗

In this discussion, we acknowledged a wiki page is not a long-term solution to this problem. There are now initiatives in the project to help bring greater unity and cohesion between different sub-projects. CommOps is definitely one of the biggest players to this. The future formation of FOSCo will help specifically towards communication between groups like Ambassadors, Design, and Marketing. Fedora Hubs will also contribute to making this process easier by having improved methods of communicating key information like this.

Communication by Lorenzo Stella from the Noun Project.

Bitcamp is a place for exploration. You will have 36 hours to delve into your curiosities, learn something new, and make something awesome. With world-class mentors and hundreds of fellow campers, you’re in for an amazing time. If you’re ready for an adventure, see you by the fire!

The Fedora Project attended as an event sponsor this year. At the event, we held a table in the hacker arena. The Ambassadors offered mentorship and help to Bitcamp 2016 programmers, gave away some free Fedora swag, and offered an introduction to Linux, open source, and our community. This report recollects some highlights from the event.

Getting to Bitcamp 2016 🔗

I left Rochester, New York around 4:00pm after my classes for the day had finished. Bitcamp check-in started at 7:00pm on Friday, April 8th. It was about a six hour drive for me to get there, and I got to Maryland right around 9:30pm.

Once I arrived, walking in was a crazy experience. Tables upon tables of hackers were lined up bu the hundreds. Most were already working on brainstorming. I meandered my way through the crowds to the Fedora table where Corey Sheldon, Mike DePaulo, and Chaoyi Zha were set up.

Meeting the hackers 🔗

Many other students came up to the table before the hackathon officially began. We interacted with several students and helped establish ourselves as mentors as well. Additionally, we also had a badge that attendees could scan to get added to their FAS account!

Once the event officially began, teams of people began working on their projects. Many people had grand ideas of projects to cram into the one weekend. For a brief time, the Ambassadors had a chance to rest from answering questions and helping people with their own hardware.

The hackers began settling into a groove for the evening.

Spending the night 🔗

As the day turned into night, the home stretch of the hackathon was beginning. Those with firm ideas were deeply focused on their projects. Others were taking their plans back to the drawing board to overcome unexpected difficulties. Things began settling down for the night. The same cycle repeated itself for both Friday and Saturday nights.

Around this time, we had waves of interested hackers in Fedora, open source software, and Linux approach the table. This time was great for personalized, one-on-one conversations with visitors. Many excellent connections happened during this time!

Mentoring 🔗

During Bitcamp, there were several opportunities and connections made between Fedora Ambassadors and university students.

For most of one night, Corey worked with one student who was aiming to do a full dual-boot installation on his laptop with Windows 10 UEFI. For a mixed variety of issues, he was unable to get Fedora working properly on his system. With the help of Corey, he was able to install and use Fedora on his laptop. He was very excited to finally get it working and was hoping to use it for development work in both classwork and personal projects. He was also a repeat visitor from BrickHack and remembered some of the booth members from the last hackathon.

Chaoyi traveled around the hacker space and worked with students looking to get help on web development projects. Chaoyi was able to give advice and help for students working with HTML, JavaScript / NodeJS, and Python. He traveled around the room for most of both nights teaching and showing students how to work on their projects and promoting the benefits of doing their work open source.

Mike also helped several students at Bitcamp, and like at BrickHack, his triple-booted MacBook with OS X, Windows, and Fedora was a popular item. Students with Macs often came and asked him about his setup and how he got it working. Mike was also able to help answer questions about developing in Fedora and share his experience working with tools available in Fedora for working on his projects for work and for fun.

Many students were looking for help with how to better get experience working on software for their future careers. As a student familiar with open source, I enjoyed talking to these students about how open source was a great resource for them. I explained how open source is a great way to get real world experience without working an “official” job, showed how they could make an impact on the world and start doing things, and why we do open source. It was gratifying the see these students get something out of our discussions and build something awesome in the open by the end of hackathon.

Overall, I feel like the Fedora Project’s impact was notable and concentrated at the event. I am extremely thankful and fortunate to have been sponsored to attend Bitcamp as an Ambassador for the Fedora Project.

BrickHack 2016 and Fedora 🔗

This year, I attended with the Fedora Project team, which included people like Remy DeCausemaker, Mike DePaulo, Charles Profitt, Ralph Bean, and Ryan Scott Brown. In addition to the Fedora crew, many of my friends and fellow students were there, like Mike Nolan and Brendan Whitfield. There were countless others that made the weekend awesome and incredible.

For pictures and more details, read my full report on the Fedora Community Blog.

https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/brickhack-2016-event-report/

Today, I received the Pizzelle badge in Fedora Badges. I was awarded with Pizzelle after a short “karma storm” in the EMEA Ambassadors meeting. After finding out I was awarded the badge, I had a light bulb sort of moment. As of this month, it has been a year since I first found myself wanting to get involved with the Fedora Project. I remember seeing the announcement for Flock 2015 and how that was right next to my soon-to-be university, the Rochester Institute of Technology. I remember lazily dismissing the idea of taking any further steps into Fedora until after Flock 2015. And now, a year later, I’m reflecting back on crazy of a past few months it has been.

What is a pizzelle? 🔗

If you’re not aware already, Fedora has a unique system of rewarding positive contributions in the community through karma.

Karma is a unique way of rewarding positive interactions and actions in Fedora with a friendly, quantifiable number. In any official Fedora IRC channel, Fedora contributors can give any other contributor Karma by adding ‘++’ after their nick (i.e. jflory7++).

This “positive” karma is distributed by zodbot in the form of “cookies”. A contributor can give another contributor a “karma cookie” once a release cycle before they are able to give another one. For reaching certain milestones of karma cookies, contributors are awarded badges via Fedora Badges. Fedora uses this as a method to promote positive behavior in the community as well as help support and build community in Fedora. This reflects upon the “Friends” part of the Four Foundations of Fedora.

The Pizzelle badge is awarded to a user after received 50 cookies from other users in Fedora.

Thank you! 🔗

A special thanks goes out to all of those who have helped mentor and guide me towards contributing to Fedora. There’s really too many names to list, and everyone has impacted me in their own unique way. I hope that through my contributions, I can return the kindness and support that so many others have shown me.

I think karma is cool because it’s a simple way users can show their appreciation for others. The more karma you receive, the more you realize that it really is like karma – the more you give, the more you get back out of it. If you put forth the effort and willingness to help others, those same others will return the favor to you in one form or another.

Special shout-out to the CommOps team for working on some awesome tasks in Fedora! I don’t know if I’d be as deep in Fedora if it weren’t for the folks behind CommOps.

My Year in Review 🔗

With an hour left until the New Year, there never seemed a better time to begin writing my Year in Review article. While it is a stereotypical kind of thing to do, I also think it’s a great opportunity to reflect on the gifts, changes, and special occasions that this past year has presented to me. 2015 is special to me in many ways because it marks a significant milestone in my life of moving away from home and beginning my journey into full adulthood.

There are many important and special people in my life that have made this year incredible, and I want to reflect and make note of this.

</high school> <college> 🔗

This past May, I graduated from high school. Looking back, it’s interesting to see how much has changed in my personal life and even in my own interests. Some friends have come and gone, but there are an important core of people who have always been present in my life, and I am privileged to have been one to know them deeply over the past four years.

Interestingly enough, it wasn’t until my junior year when I realized that I wanted to spend my life working in computer science. I remember when I walked into the classroom of my AP Computer Science teacher asking how I could get going with only one year left. Now, here I am immersing myself in digital technology in countless different ways. I feel like I am where I am meant to be.

These four years haven’t been easy either. I worked hard to get to the place I wanted to go. Despite quite a few personal challenges, I was fortunate enough to afford an education here at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Just in the semester and a half that I have been enrolled here, I’ve met countless people who have affected my life and helped shape the direction of where I’m going in the world. Special shout-out to the FOSSbox and RITlug, and everyone involved with both.

Coffee and Doughnuts 🔗

For most of 2015, I worked a not-so-typical job at Dutch Monkey Doughnuts in my hometown. Dutch Monkey is an important part of my town and they have helped create a name for people visiting the region. They’re well-known for their homemade doughnuts and Counter Culture Coffee, both of which are legendary within their own right.

During my time at Dutch Monkey, I was able to attend workshops and classes at the Counter Culture Coffee Training Center in Atlanta. Throughout the eight or nine classes I took, I was able to further my understanding and appreciation for an extremely complex and fascinating beverage. My appreciation and love for coffee has become a part of my being. The coffee industry is a wild and exciting place, and it is very much an ethical hotbed of all kinds of issues. I joke to myself that if sysadmin doesn’t work out, the coffee industry could always make a good fallback…

I was also fortunate to have some awesome co-workers who helped make the 4am shifts a little more enjoyable. Special shout-out to Jordan Hughes for the long talks about music, the music industry, and so many other things. I learned a lot from you and you’ve had a big impact on my own music tastes.

MINECON and SpigotMC 🔗

This was single-handedly one of the most profound events of the year for me. If you weren’t aware, I am a community moderator for the SpigotMC project. I have been a moderator since April 2014. Spigot is my true first open-source project, even though I wasn’t a contributor of code, but a community builder (or so I like to think).

MINECON announced 🔗

In February of 2015, Mojang announced that MINECON 2015 would be happening in London, England. Instantly, I thought there would be no way I would ever be able to afford a trip overseas for a two-day convention. However, I found the application for a MINECON Agent, which is the small group of “interns” that volunteer to help set up and prepare MINECON for over 10,000 people with the Mojang team. The only benefit to being an Agent was a waived ticket cost (around $120 last year). I applied for the program, unsure of what would come of it, doubtful I would be able to go even if I were accepted.

April rolls around, and I finally hear back from Mojang! “Congratulations, you are now a MINECON Agent!” It was difficult to believe at first, but I wasn’t sure I would be able to go regardless.

Getting in gear for MINECON 🔗

I began talking with the rest of the team at SpigotMC. We were also getting in gear for MINECON 2015 and were planning to attend as an organization with our own booth. We had arranged to have a booth and most of the team knew who was going to be there. Michael, our project lead, would be in attendance, along with Matthew, the other lead developer; Jordan, another community moderator like myself; Cindy, our local wiki staff, IRC staff, and contributing developer, or also the official “Spigot Mom”; and Miguel, our witty Spigot volunteer who has an ambiguous position with Spigot. Cindy’s son Alex was also going to be in attendance.

I didn’t think I would be able to attend. However, a very unique set of events happened one after another, and suddenly, the possibility of me attending MINECON this year began to materialize. Thanks to awesome people behind Spigot, I was fortunate enough to make it out to this year’s convention. When I figured out that I would be going to London, I was beyond stoked.

Going to London and MINECON 🔗

I would be there from Saturday, July 4 to Wednesday, July 8, 2016. Saturday and Sunday were the days of MINECON. Together with the team, we helped represent the SpigotMC project among thousands of convention-goers. We had brochures, bracelets, and a video running in the booth for visitors to take and see. I met some incredible people from our community, and I am privileged and honored to have met some incredible people there.

Thanks to Michael being the incredible individual he is, we went to a few dinners and meet-ups with others in the Minecraft community. I met two of the major Minecraft developers, Nathan (Dinnerbone) and Erik (Grum) and countless others in the YouTube and development community. It was almost unbelievable. The entire time I was in London, the experience felt surreal. Six months before this, I would never have believed any of this would ever have happened.

The Monday and Tuesday we were there, Cindy, Jordan, Alex, and I went around London doing our proper duty as tourists. We went to see Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, rode a double-decker bus, went to the Queen’s castle, and indulged in what Jordan called a “proper British meal”. On Monday night, Jordan treated me to a short trip around London hopping between bars (although everything closed so early)! We ended up crashing in some late-night diner, had a meal, and headed back for the next round of sightseeing on Tuesday.

Thanks to the team 🔗

This was truly a life-changing experience that was bestowed upon me. I was honored and privileged to have met the other members of the Spigot team that I’ve been working with for the past two years. I wouldn’t trade my time in London for anything else, and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to help host the crew this upcoming MINECON if it ends up in the northeast US.

Open Source and Fedora 🔗

I have used the Fedora operating system on my laptop since December 2013. I began using it on my desktop I built in November 2014. I have used this operating system for almost two years and I never had thought too much about the community behind the Fedora Project. I knew that it was a large and complex community, but I was never sure where to take the first step. I had always wanted to be an Ambassador, but questioned my usefulness or whether I was a right fit for the program.

Flock to Fedora! 🔗

I learned that Flock, Fedora’s annual contributor’s conference, was to be hosted in Rochester, NY in 2015 from August 5th to the 9th. I would be moving right next door to Flock just a week after the conference! After contacting a pair of people who seemed knowledgeable about the details back in February 2015, little did I know I was setting in motion an entirely new track of events in my life. The two gents I emailed, Remy DeCausemaker and Prof. Stephen Jacobs (SJ), helped give me advice on travel details and how I would get myself into Rochester in time for Flock.

Come August, I am back from MINECON, packing my bags for Rochester, and ending my last few days at Dutch Monkey. When I arrived in Rochester with my mother, it was an exciting and new experience, something I had looked forward to for a long time. Once Flock rolled around, I was almost instantaneously immersed in the Fedora community, and over the course of the week, I would begin to feel a part of a Project that I had questioned how to enter for almost a year.

The talks were fantastic, the speakers were passionate, and the community was welcoming. I was jump started into Fedora at Flock 2015, despite walking in a stranger. At first, I questioned whether coming was such a grand idea. It was obvious everyone knew someone already and I was only an excited Fedora user and fan. These were the people who did all the heavy-lifting to make this operating system and its community run. What was I doing here?

I distinctly remember Pete Travis (randomuser in IRC) coming up to me, introducing himself and asking me a few questions. In retrospect, I probably looked like I was feeling a bit out-of-place. He and I began talking a bit about his role in Fedora and some of my little experience in open source. After he spoke to me, I began to feel a little more attached to the conference. After a while, I began speaking up at some of the talks I attended, or trying to share some of my perspective or thoughts as an outsider. These were the stepping-stones that got me involved with the project.

One thing about all else stands out to me about the conference. I remember Remy saying to me towards the end (with minor paraphrasing), “You should check out this Community Operations thing that’s coming up soon. It’s going to be awesome.”

Fedora Magazine 🔗

Over the course of the next few months at RIT, I started working with Paul Frields, Ryan Lerch, and a few others on the Fedora Magazine. I began contributing as a writer, with my first article about using Spigot on Fedora. As time went on, I began helping as an editor, revising and reviewing other people’s articles to help get them published for the Magazine. By the end of 2015, I believe I would come to establish myself as a permanent member of the editorial team behind the Magazine.

CommOps 🔗

Additionally, during the months after Flock, I would follow up on what Remy told me, and I checked out this whole Community Operations (shortened to CommOps) thing. It was in the early formation stages, but the core idea behind CommOps was that they were the supporting team to offer support to all the other sub-projects in Fedora. Or in my eyes, a team focused on building and supporting the community with resources and assistance. This was something I thought I could contribute to. My programming skills were not at a level where I’d feel comfortable hacking on to Fedora either on the Infrastructure or as a Packager. But CommOps was that kind of thing that hooked me from the start. I wanted to help build Fedora up, and I could see what exactly CommOps was trying to target and how it was wanting to fix the long-term issues.

Now, months later, my involvement with CommOps has resulted with many tickets filed and many tickets closed. It has been a productive time while I have been with CommOps, and I never feel like there is too little to do. Our horizon is vast and there is much work to be done… 2016 offers great promise to the success of our sub-project, which in turn offers great promise to the Fedora Project. I am looking forward to seeing where this year takes us. I am also happy to work with such an awesome and dedicated group of people as those behind the CommOps team. There are too many to name, but I’m thankful for the leadership of Remy to keep us all together, focused, and driven.

2016 🔗

2016 will have a lot of ground to cover over 2015, but there is a large potential for this to be done. My own personal story with open source continues to grow, and I am beyond excited for what the future may bring. I am exposed to a unique group of people and minds here at RIT, and I am actively pursuing the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) minor.

This self-reflection has turned into a much longer post than I anticipated, but I think this reflection is necessary and useful for my own purposes. Taking a moment to reflect on the events of the past year helps remind me what it’s all about and why I’m doing what I’m doing, especially at the times where everything seems confusing and I begin to question what I’m doing. But the path is illuminated and I am driven to succeed. There are a lot of things at stake for me and my family, and I hope to be able to meet many personal goals and better support the people closest to me in my life.

I would also like to give a special thanks to all the people who have made this year so incredible for me, and for those who have ridden the ride with me. There are so many names to list, and it’s hard to come up with this list in the dark hours of the morning when I know I should be sleeping. But to all of those who play a special and important role in my life, I want you all to know that none of what has happened to me would be possible without your support. Your continued guidance, counsel, and companionship teaches me much and inspires me greatly. My only wish is that I will someday be able to repay all the good deeds that others have bestowed upon me. If not to the original giver, I hope to someday inspire others and help others in the same way you all have shown and taught me. Maybe this is less of a 2016 thing and more of a “crystal ball into the future” moment… but I think it’s worth mentioning regardless.

Thanks for a fantastic 2015. I’m looking forward to seeing where 2016 takes us next.

Today, the Fedora Elections for December 2015 officially began at 00:00 UTC. The voting period will be open from now until December 14th, 2015, at 23:59 UTC. Fedora is a community-driven project, and voting is one of the greatest ways you can have an impact in how Fedora runs, either as a user or a contributor. Your vote is powerful, and you should be informed before casting your vote!

Fedora Elections for FAmSCo 🔗

This Election is especially interesting because of the open seats for the Fedora Ambassador Steering Committee (FAmSCo). The plan is to phase out FAmSCo in order of the Fedora Outreach Steering Committee (FOSCo). However, this plan is still one that is in progress and there are many details being hammered out. Because of the plans to transition, the current board sitting in the Fedora Ambassador Steering Committee have been elected for the past year, something that normally has new elections every six months. In the interim period while FOSCo is expanded, FAmSCo is running an Election to bring new, fresh blood into the board.

Inform yourself 🔗

There are a lot of things happening across Fedora right now, so it is important that you inform yourself for the Fedora Elections. I have had the unique perspective of reading, reviewing, and proofreading many of the candidate interviews. As a result, I have had the advantage of reading every candidate’s platform and what their vision for the Project is. It’s important that you vote with an informed opinion about whose platforms you agree with most. There are a lot of important topics on the table for this Election cycle, and an informed vote is the best way to make a vote. Please take the time to read the candidate interviews!

Fedora Elections, December 2015 Interviews 🔗

• Fedora Ambassador Steering Committee interviews
• Fedora Engineering Steering Committee interviews
• Fedora Council interviews