This is a part of the FAmSCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Tuesday, August 8th and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, August 14th. Please read the responses from candidates and make your choices carefully. Feel free to ask questions to the candidates here (preferred) or elsewhere!

Interview with Alex Oviedo (alexove)

Fedora Account : alexove IRC : alexove (found in #fedora-latam) Alexove’s Wiki Page



Questions

What is your background in Fedora? What have you worked on and what are you doing now?

I started as Linux user in 2002 and I began as fedora ambassador in 2013.

Some events that I organize was:

FUDCon Cusco 2013 as main event owner.

FUDCon Puno 2016 as a little helper in previous tasks before the event.

FAD LATAM 2017 as main event owner.

Currently I’m ambassador and packager and I’m working on some projects using fedora and related tools.

What are the most pressing issues facing the Fedora Ambassadors today? What should we do about them?

In FAD LATAM we talk a lot about the problems and we saw that the main problems are:

Language barriers.

Cultural differences.

Ignorance of the rules.

Lack of presence in universities.

Lack of communication

In my opinion the main opportunity is the help of the community and with this we are planning:

Promote spaces for strengthening communication to improve cultural and language relations.

Strengthen the presence of the Fedora community in the universities of Latin America and in the educational institutions of Basic Basic Education.

Improve the management processes of community events and disseminate them.

What are three personal qualities that you feel would benefit FAmSCo if you are elected?

I think my principal qualities are:

Perseverance.

Organization.

Involvement.

What is your strongest point as a candidate? What is your weakest point?

I think my strongest point is perseverance, because I getted approval for 2 big events (FUDCon Cusco and FAD LATAM) although at the beginning they were rejected for mistakes, I worked to improving the proposals and getting them approved, I saw some proposals that are reject by same reasons but the people become angry and abandon it.

I think my weakest point is the time, sometimes I have a lot of free time but in other situations I’m very busy.

What are your future plans? Is there anything you can consider a “Mission Statement” as a candidate?

I’m very interested in help to the ambassadors get successful in their main role, represent to the fedora community in the world and enroll new collaborators, mainly in the universities and schools.

Is there a specific task or issue you think that FAmSCo should address this term?

Help to ambassadors to get more contact with users and get better feedback to improve collaboration within the community between the all teams.

Are the Ambassadors disconnected to the rest of the project? If so, what is your solution to fix the issue?

I think many ambassadors are disconnected from the other teams, As I said in the previous question, the ambassadors need to be in contact with users finding better feedback that they can share with appropriate teams, for example if the users don’t find a packaged application for fedora, the visual style is not nice, etc these issues can be collected and shared with packagers team, design team, etc.

What kind of information should be exchanged between Ambassadors and other groups / sub-projects?

As I said in the previous question, the ambassadors need to be in contact with users finding better feedback that they can share with appropriate teams, for example if the users don’t find a packaged application for fedora, the visual style is not nice, etc these issues can be collected and shared with packagers team, design team, etc.

If a past member of FAmSCo, identify a negative factor you noticed while serving. How would you propose to improve on that for the next cycle?

It is a very delicate problem, but we must give he/she “positive feedback” so as not to hurt their feelings and maintain good relationships.

The past term, FAmSCo did not have any representatives from NA or APAC. If a region isn’t represented this term, how do you hope to help include and support a region without representation?

I think some representatives with extra free time from other zones (LATAM, EMEA) can talk with the ambassadors from these places and route their comments and requirements to FAmSCo or invite them to attend to meetings to explain their requirements.

Closing words

Enroll new collaborators is difficult task in our region (LATAM) but with the help of ambassadors and FAmSCo we can do great things and have a great presence and involve more people in this great experience named “Fedora Community”.

I have the best intentions to help the fedora ambassadors achieve their goals, to attract more users and more collaborators, and spread the 4F everywhere. I hope to have the opportunity to help more in the community from FAmSCo, but if I can’t get the site I know that the other candidates will also do it. Thanks and good luck to all.