Hi all – my name is John Kizer, and my interest in contributing to the Fedora Project really just stems from a personal appreciation for the product that it creates, and a belief in perhaps “old school Internet” ideals that having a bunch of people working together across continents to solve problems in new ways is one of the greatest imaginable human achievements.
Before September of this year, the closest I had gotten to anything FOSS-related was getting a Linux book as a youth that included an install CD for, IIRC, Slackware. I was too nervous about wrecking the family computer to get past the warnings about how disk partitioning would wipe out our data, so I never ended up installing, and went on blindly enjoying my childhood.
I changed majors more often than I changed my toothbrush in college, but my flirtation with Computer Science ended when I dropped the Intro to Operating Systems course before I could officially flunk it. In my work life (which, thanks to my B.A. in History, began as an answering service operator), I gravitated toward chances to expand the little snippets of CS exposure that I had in college, and after a couple of programming-lite job assignments (homegrown case management for emails using Outlook/Access/VBA), started to build experience in business analytics. The exposure in that role led to my first management opportunity, and I spent the majority of the next decade in various levels of business process and data/analytics team management, typically doing quite a bit of hands-to-keys work myself.
All that is to say, I think my most useful skills would be: • Developing business process performance metrics • Building dashboards / reporting packages for the contributors, owners and stakeholders of those processes (end-to-end, from data integration approaches to dashboard visual design) • Executing and providing well-structured user feedback on technical test scenarios • Laying out problem-solving decision trees and developing content to assist in diagnosing causes
This reads a lot like a job application or something – sorry, some of the habits of the corporate world don’t break easily, I guess, and hopefully/maybe some of them can be used for a positive purpose?
As far as communication platforms go...honestly the last time I can specifically remember interacting via a mailing list, my mental image is of the Eudora email client, so...I’m a bit rusty!
Time wise...it’s tough to say when exactly the time would come, so honestly the most I can give a firm commitment to right now would be about 3-4 hours/week, until existing work (part-time assistant for my wife’s accounting/bookkeeping business) and life (full-time spouse and dad to two kids, ages 8 and 5) settles into a bit more of a routine.
If you read all the way to the end of this...sheesh, please let me know something long and purely personal of yours that I can read to return the favor!
Hi John!
Welcome to the community (again :)).
Thanks for that---it's always great to get to know all our friends in the community better.
There's so much in the community that I think would interest you. There's general community development and enablement---the mindshare, commops, outreach, and marketing teams for example. Almost all teams could use help with end-to-end processes---we're all volunteers so our teams are not as well structured as they could perhaps be, so having folks that can help to "tame the chaos" is always good.
On the more technical side, there's testing of updates (see the QA team) which requires some diagnostic skills. These are also particularly needed on the help forums like Ask Fedora.
All of this info should be covered in the links in your welcome to Fedora ticket, so you should run into it all as you go through those bits. The community is quite large with lots going on, so it does take a little bit of time to sort of get to grips with what is happening where.
For my intro, I'm going to take a short cut and refer you all to my user page on the Fedora wiki ;) : https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Ankursinha
(To prevent spam on the wiki, one needs to be part of at least one group in the Fedora Accounts System. So as soon as you've joined one there, you will also be able to set up a user page for yourself on the wiki if you wish)
Thank you so much Ankur! I'll check out the wiki, and also see what I can start diving into on Ask Fedora and any of the groups.
fedora-join@lists.fedoraproject.org
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Ankur Sinha -
John Kizer