[fedora-india] FOSS.IN 2009 retrospective

[Rahul Sundaram]

On 12/12/2009 04:34 PM, Aanjhan R wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 10:42 AM, Aanjhan R <aanjhan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> We must check where each of the current active Fedora contributors
>> started off? Just a short 2 sentence "What was the first thing you did
>> for Fedora? and why? "
>>
>> IMO, we should be able to observe some sort of pattern and try putting
>> forward similar entry points somewhere on the wiki or work on such
>> points during FADs.
> 
> As I was cleaning my room, this flash appeared and I pen it down here.
> May not make much sense but worth going on records :)
> 
> 1. Important tasks of being involved with a distribution (Packaging /
> Documentation / Testing / Artwork)
> 2. Out of the above tasks you show to a new comer, which one do you
> think would excite him/her the most? IMO nothing gives the adrenalin
> rush to immediately sit down and start hacking. 

That does vary between people. Within the free software world, I started
out doing L10N, then moved on to documentation, did some system
administration, perl and Qt programming, packaging and now doing a bit
of everything.  There are aspects of individual communities which are
incredibly appealing.

I don't think you can sit in a session with the Fedora design team and
not come away excited about the possibility of creating new user
interfaces or themes.

One of the reasons why I did try and provide a more holistic view in the
Potd rather than the traditional hacker only culture is not just because
Fedora Project itself believes in bringing together people with wide
variety of interests but also because I believe in it based on my own
personal experiences as well.

We have a fairly well rounded team in Fedora. Susmit does infrastructure
work. Hiemanshu does websites. A bunch of us do various upstream
projects, packaging, QA etc. That is not accidental and I believe it
leads to a healthier community. The challenge is breaking down chunks of
it enough to mentor and recruit new contributors.  Let me note that
within India, among distributions, we have by and far, the largest base
of contributors. So I don't believe we are slacking. Just that we can do
better and that's always going to be the case.

Rahul