Intros and such - why are you here?

[Robyn Bergeron]

Hi everyone,

Since this is a new SIG and all that, I thought it would be lovely to
perhaps introduce ourselves, and say a bit about why you're here and
interested. Whether you're already doing things in this area, you'd
like to learn about it, you want to do things, or you're just here to
observe, or any other reason - any reason is a great reason :)

And I guess that means: I get to go first. Hah.

So, a bit about me and my interests here:

I'm Robyn, I'm the Fedora Project Leader, and I like to make new
things happen. :)

Why big data? A few reasons:

#1: I've always had a fascination with data and how it can be used as
part of a decision-making process. I believe that agility is one of
the most important differentiating factors for organizations. The
ability to do things quickly, identify key trends and data points, and
make decisions and act upon knowledge, enables organizations to move
more intelligently.  And by intelligently I mean this: (a) Predicting
the right thing to do based upon patterns, (b) being able to detect
signs that you're doing the wrong thing - so that you can fix that
faster.

The cloud brings us the ability to utilize, deploy, orchestrate
infrastructure more rapidly; having lots of data points, and the
ability to analyze that information, comes through big data. Putting
those two things together gets you to the point where you can analyze
faster, or on a more ad-hoc basis, or deliver the capability to
analyze random things more rapidly to the person who wants to act upon
information.

#2: SCIENCE! I think it's interconnected hugely here. I like to think
that what we do in Fedora can help to change the world.  There is more
information than ever about every little bit of the universe we live
in, and helping people to sort through that leads to making the world
a better place. I'll be passing out banjos and marshmallows for the
campfire at the end of our meeting. Kumbaya :)

#3: I think that people like to tinker with and learn about new stuff,
and that Fedora is a great place to do that - "features" and "first"
are two of our awesome foundations.  But I think that people are more
interested in "the new stuff" than they are interested in "what it
runs on" - so I hope that in bringing some interesting tools to
Fedora, and making them work well, we can inspire some new people to
use Fedora.  And hopefully inspire them to also become contributors,
broaden the set of tools that we offer, give feedback about what we're
doing, and encourage them to share *what* and *how* they did things.

And that was long-winded. So I'll stop there. :D

Anyone else?