Introducing Paul Frields as Fedora Project Leader

Now that we’re a few months past the Fedora 8 release, and we’ve produced another successful FUDCon, this time in Raleigh, NC, the time has come for our current Fedora Project Leader, Max Spevack, to hand off his role to a new advocate. We welcome Paul Frields, who will assume this role in February.

Max first joined the Fedora team two years ago, about one month before Fedora Core 5 was released. Only a few people within the Fedora community knew him, but he had been a Fedora user and working for Red Hat already for a year and a half in the Red Hat Network group. Now, he’ll remain involved in Fedora and Red Hat’s community efforts.

Many of you in the Fedora community already know Paul. He has been part of our community since 2003, not long after the Red Hat Linux Project officially merged with the original Fedora.us. Paul has worked with Fedora’s documentation, packaging, marketing, news and artwork teams. He also served as one of the inaugural members of the Fedora Project Board. From an interesting background with the U.S. Government, Paul spent 17 years as an analyst, a forensic examiner and instructor and as a technical specialist.

Fedora has come a long way in the last few years. Red Hat has committed more resources to Fedora, enabling us to grow the Fedora team when the opportunity came up to hire some of the true stars of the Fedora community. This in turn allows the core group of Fedora folks within Red Hat to be more effective leaders within the community, because a focus on community building is the most important thing that we do. The people who are lucky enough to get paid to spend their workdays 100 percent on Fedora each have a responsibility to be community builders first, and individual contributors second. A community that does not grow and that does not develop new leadership will stagnate. Red Hat’s investments in the Fedora community help to prevent this.

We’ve also made tremendous changes to Fedora at a technical level in the past two years - merging Core and Extras into a single repository, working with Red Hat and community engineers to produce a new build system for Fedora and new tools that allow users to create fully customized versions of Fedora and deliver Fedora in new ways (Live USB, for example).

We thank Max for his dedication as Fedora Project Lead and welcome Paul to the team.