There are people who dream of making it happen, people who think of making it happen, people who say they will make it happen, and then there are people who make it happen. At the start of this year I wrote down the words: "Apply for Outreachy by mid-January" on my list of goals for the quarter.
What started as a dream turned into a thought, became words and is now a reality. I applied and here I am two months later making my first steps into the world of open source and I am so glad I get to share it with you!
In this article I will document my experience with the Fedora Project highlighting what projects I've been working on {so far ;-) } and what I look forward to working on as this journey progresses. A very warm welcome to my portfolio! I'm happy to have you here today!
Starting Out: How the Fedora Project Helped Me Kickstart My Personal Brand
The Fedora Project which I chose fell under the Marketing Section of Open Source Projects. For this reason, building a personal brand was of key interest. This was to ensure that when I sent out posts or was communicating with my community they would know the person behind the profile to enable better relationship. As a result I began slowly building a personal brand in order to have authentic conversations with my community and share insights from my journey. This is how I did it:
Step 1: Launch a Personal Blog on Hashnode and Introduce Myself to the Community/ My Journey Into Tech
Step 2: Repeat Step 1 for LinkedIn
Step 3: Find other ways to provide value to my audience
Step 4: Post consistently and monitor results
Step 5: Marketing myself offline by letting people know what I want to do
Step 6: Dedicate an hour to planning and scheduling content each week.
Step 7: Repeat Steps 3-6, adjust as necessary and grow from there.
With my personal brand kickstarted, it was easier to talk with my audience rather than talk at them. And so it was time for me to jump into my other tasks.
First Projects: Pre-requisite Tasks
Description: Applicants were onboarded and given five(5) pre-requisite tasks to complete in order to qualify for the Fedora Internship. These are links to the Objective and Outcome for each tasks:
*Please note: All images are hyperlinked leading to the necessary file/page
Issue 140: Outreachy onboarding
Description: Applicants met on Google meets for an Onboarding Meeting. The Recording to the meeting was then placed on the Fedora Discussion board. In order to ensure applicants could access it easier however, I requested the link and added it under the specific ticket for onboarding. These are my comments:
Issue 153 [Step 1] Set up your Fedora Account System (FAS) account
Description: In order to begin contributing to Fedora, the first step one must take is to set up a FAS account and sign the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement. My account is visualized below with an image of a logo a friend created for me in 2020 and my pen name "ravenstarline". This is my comment.
Issue 154: [Step 2] Set up a personal blog
Issue 155: [Step 3] Write a blog post that introduces the Fedora community to your audience
Issue 156: [Step 4] Promote your intro blog post on social media
Issue 157:[Step 5] Write an onboarding guide for Outreachy 2025 applicants
Stretch Projects: Building Momentum
Issue 139: Promoting Fedora presence at SCaLE
Summary: Applicants were tasked with creating post ideas to boost Fedora's presence at SCaLE 2024. The image below is one of two graphics I created for the event and is hyperlinked with my copy (captions) suggestions. These are my comments:
Issue 144: Prepare social media posts
Summary: Applicants were allowed to create and come up with general post ideas for the different Fedora Accounts. Fedora primarily uses Mastodon, Facebook, X/Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Matrix/Element. This is my contribution to this ticket.
Issue 147: Make a list of DEI-related holidays
Description: Fedora is all about community. Highlighting DEI related holidays is a testament of this. Interns were tasked to come up with post ideas regarding this. These are a few of my contributions for upcoming dates:
This is a comment I made assisting a fellow applicant.
Issue 148: Write an article:Fedora 40 Beta
Description: Topics for this issue were taken so I decided to write on theFedora 40 Beta Release.
Description: Applicants were asked to evaluate the impact of their promotion campaign. This is my report. This is my comment.
Applicants were tasked with creating an high level timeline of what they wanted to do during their internship period. This is my detailed contribution. Here is my comment.
Beyond Myself: Flock to Fedora CFP
While reading my project description I recognized that Flock to Fedora was an important upcoming event for the Fedora team so I looked into ways to make contributions to it. The team is requesting proposals. These are a few ideas I contributed so far:
