I haven’t blogged seriously since about 2012, not since I was an active Fedora contributor, in fact. And now that I’m back and in the very privileged position of being the Fedora Project Leader, it's time for me to start blogging again.
Actually, it’s well past time. I should have restarted several months ago, but I’ve been reluctant to start doing it again. To understand my own reluctance requires some introspection into why I stopped in the first place. If you go back and look at the historical blog, it was pretty much about stuff going on in the broader open source ecosystem at the time… 20 years ago. I could have continued to do that; I could have been “that guy” continuing to have an opinion about something I cared about and shout it loudly into the void, but I decided that was not the best path for me. As I stepped back from participating in the Fedora Project culture, I made the decision that I wanted to focus my energy on the things I was well positioned to impact. Sure, I had a lot of opinions about a lot of things over the last decade and change, but I didn’t need to take the time to write them up. I could just have them quietly, and focus on what was in front of me, and let the open source ecosystem go on without me. I let go, not because I thought my voice was valueless, but because I trusted in the fact that I wasn’t indispensable in the conversation.
But now I find myself back in the project, inhabiting a role that is indispensable. And that creates a degree of cognitive dissonance for me. Now, because I’m FPL, I need to start doing some of my thinking out loud again; long-form, nuanced thinking. Maybe not coherent thinking. Maybe not self-consistent thinking. But nuanced and researched. I knew at the start of this gig, I was going to have to pick blogging back up again. I made an excuse to myself that I needed to wait a bit and ease back into the discussion culture, but that was a rationalization that allowed me to wait too long. I owe it to everyone in the Fedora Project to start publishing what I’m thinking about and how I’m examining a topic and how deeply I’ve interrogated my own values, biases, and assumptions.
So hey! I’m blogging again. But this time it’s going to be different. This time it’s going to be primarily a dialog with myself… between my inner skeptic, idealist, and pragmatist aspects of my persona. The glass will be half full, half empty, and completely full all at the same time. This is going to be an experiment to openly journal an introspective process in how I form and reform opinions on topics. Topics will be scoped for relevance to the open source ecosystem using the Fedora Project Leader role as a lens for how I organize my thoughts. You might see some discussion about fusion energy and curling here, because I’m me and I’m having a dialog primarily with myself, so I have to reach for experiences I can relate to in order to argue with myself… that can’t be helped. And I will double-space my sentences because I am old, and no matter how hard I try to change the muscle memory to accommodate the drift in cultural standards on that, it’s not gonna happen, and I’m not gonna use a copy editor in this space. This is my space, typos and all.
New blog who dis?
Why am I doing this?
