F44 FESCo Election Interview

What is your preferred name?

Timothée Ravier (often shortened to travier and siosm as common nickname).

What is your FAS Username and Matrix ID?

FAS: siosm
Matrix ID: @siosm:matrix.org

What Matrix rooms do you tend to use?

Fedora Atomic Desktops, Fedora CoreOS, Fedora bootc, Fedora KDE, Fedora Kinoite, Fedora Silverblue

Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?

I want to be a member of FESCo to represent the interests of users, developers and maintainers of what we call Atomic, Bootable Container, Image Based or Immutable variants of Fedora (CoreOS, Atomic Desktops, IoT, bootc, etc.).

I think that what we can build around those variants of Fedora is the best path forward for broader adoption of Fedora and Linux in the general public and not just in developer circles.

I thus want to push for better consideration of the challenges specific to Atomic systems in all parts of Fedora: change process, infrastructure, release engineering, etc.

I also want to act as a bridge with other important communities built around this ecosystem such as Flathub, downstream projects such as Universal Blue, Bazzite, Bluefin, Aurora, and other distributions such as Flatcar Linux, GNOME OS, KDE Linux, openSUSE MicroOS, Aeon or ParticleOS.

How do you currently contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?

I primarily contribute to Fedora as a maintainer for the Fedora Atomic Desktops and Fedora CoreOS. I am also part of the KDE SIG and involved in the Bootable Containers (bootc) initiative.

My contributions are focused on making sure that those systems become the most reliable platform for users, developers and contributors. This includes both day to day maintenance work, development such as enabling safe bootloader updates or automatic system updates and coordination of changes across Fedora (switching to zstd compressed initrds as an example).

While my focus is on the Atomic variants of Fedora, I also make sure that the improvements I work on benefit the entire Fedora project as much as possible.

I've listed the Fedora Changes I contributed to on my Wiki profile: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Siosm.

How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team?

Disagreements are a normal part of the course of a discussion. It's important to give the time to everyone involved to express their positions and share their context. Limiting the scope of a change or splitting it into multiple phases may also help.

Reaching a consensus should always be the preferred route but sometimes this does not happen organically. Thus we have to be careful to not let disagreements linger on unresolved and a vote is often needed to reach a final decision. Not everyone may agree with the outcome of the vote but it's OK, we respect it and move on.

Most decisions are not set in stone indefinitely and it's possible to revisit one if the circumstances changed. A change being denied at one point may be accepted later when improved or clarified.

This is mostly how the current Fedora Change process works and I think it's one of the strength of the Fedora community.

What else should community members know about you or your positions?

I've been a long time Fedora user. I started contributing more around 2018 and joined Red Hat in 2020 where I've been working on systems such as Fedora CoreOS and RHEL CoreOS as part of OpenShift. I am also part of other open source communities such as Flathub and KDE and I am committed to the upstream first, open source and community decided principles.