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The OSAS team is excited to have another new community lead on board, welcoming Mikey Ariel, the new Community Lead for the oVirt Project.
Mikey's journey to oVirt started over two years ago, in the earliest weeks of 2014, when a busload of Red Hat and Fedora team members made the 13-hour January trek from Brno, Czech Republic to the biggest free-software conference in the world: FOSDEM, in Brussels, Belgium. Among the passengers was Mikey, a new Red Hat employee on her way to her first tech conference, at the start of her professional journey into the world of free and open source software.
Mikey was relatively new to Red Hat and open source at the time, but soon after her exposure to the community at FOSDEM, she became hooked by the strong sense of culture and creativity that is so readily apparent within FLOSS. It would be only two months later that she would speak at another tech conference (Write The Docs 2014 in Budapest, Hungary). Since that first speaking engagement, Mikey went on to help organize a Write The Docs unconference + conference and two Django Girls workshops, one at DevConf 2015 and another at EuroPython 2015.
"As I was able to expand my role at Red Hat into customer and community interactions," Mikey said, "I found myself really interested in the community aspects of the work. I felt like there was something there to explore."
Mikey brings a strong set of skills to her new job with the oVirt community. Her most recent position at Red Hat, senior technical writer for the OpenStack platform, means that she will bring oVirt a much-needed focus on documentation and content.
"It's important that we assist in on-boarding new users and contributors to oVirt," Mikey explained. Improving the project's documentation and web site will be a big step in that direction.
Mikey also plans to capitalize on her event experience by speaking at the upcoming LinuxCon EU, co-organizing PyCon CZ, and--a sure sign that life is about circles--advocating oVirt as much as possible at FOSDEM in early 2016.
The OSAS team is pleased to welcome Mikey aboard! We're excited to continue supporting the oVirt community, so please reach out to Mikey if you have interest in being involved with oVirt!
About the author
Brian Proffitt is Senior Manager, Community Outreach within Red Hat's Open Source Program Office, focusing on enablement, community metrics and foundation and trade organization relationships. Brian's experience with community management includes knowledge of community onboarding, community health and business alignment. Prior to joining Red Hat in 2013, he was a technology journalist with a focus on Linux and open source, and the author of 22 consumer technology books.
