I'm a professional sysadmin (though I do much more than that now). I've been using RHL/Fedora/RHEL for around 7 years at this point. I finally found myself in a position where I had some free time, and wanted to give back to the community that helped me get where I am today - I'm a big believer in the open source philosophy - if you use open source software, it is your responsibility to give back to the community. I looked for ways that a badmintons could give back, threw out some darts, and it landed on bug triage. This is not a particularly glamorous thing, however it needs to be done.
I was expecting to join a vibrant triage community when I decided that's what I wanted to do. I started by closing out a few old bugs, and got a pointed response from one of them. This caused me to question where exactly this "community" was. I very quickly found that there was no organized "triage community" within Fedora. It had been done before, however it fell apart when the leader went back to school. Drawing from this experience, it became clear that someone needed to create a sustainable community around this. That's not easy, and I knew going in that this was going to be no walk in the park, but much of what I do is not easy :). I was ready for a challenge. In the past, Fedora has made the mistake of expecting community to "just happen", which it doesn't, unless you have clear leadership, documentation, and the leaders have a strong will to succeed.
I recognized this as a golden opportunity to not only become involved in Fedora, but to become a leader. I took this and ran with it, and about 3 months later, after lots of hard work, we're almost ready to launch this program upon the world, complete with clear procedures, documentation, and a support structure for folks to go to for help. We're also going to seek new, more non-traditional contributors to Fedora in this area. I am personally willing to help contributors that may have a difficult time with the sign-up process (which in it's current incarnation can be rather tedious, unfortunately - work is ongoing to make this MUCH simpler). I will do anything that I can in order to lower the barriers of entry to the project.
It's a quite common misperception that one has to be a code ninja in order to contribute to an open source project in a meaningful way. This is simply not true, and I'm hoping that my efforts in bug triage can open the door of the "non-traditional" contributor to the world that is Fedora. Folks that contribute to triage can also contribute to numerous other parts of the project - there's a whole world out there for non-developers to contribute to - for instance art, documentation, and marketing, just to name a few.
I'd also like to thank John Poelstra, without whom none of this would have been possible. He is another wonderful example of what leadership should be, and he's mentoring me along finding my way through the maze of Fedora projects and committees whose work we touch that need to be cognizant of. Thanks for everything, John!
Back to working on one of my deliverables!
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