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!
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