COMMUNITY COMPUTING

Erstwhile scourge of the community Jonni Bidwell meets  community hacker Jona Azizaj at the Open Source  Summit to talk hacking and happiness (packets).

- Jonni Bidwell

Jona Azizaj is a FLOSS evangelist and community advocate for Kiwi.com, the virtual online travel agent. She’s a Fedora ambassador, mentor and diversity advisor. And she’s also co-founder of Open Source Diversity, which promotes inclusion in free software communities, and a contributor to Nextcloud (having been introduced through a Rails Girls Summer of Code internship) and LibreOffice.

Jona lives in the Czech city of Brno (where the Kiwi.com HQ is), but hails originally from Albania. Working with the Document Foundation, Jona was involved with migrating the Municipality of Tirana (Albania’s largest) to open source software and in particular LibreOffice (read more about this at https://bit.ly/lxf264-tiranalibreoffice). Jona was kind enough to chat with Jonni at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit in Lyon in October 2019. And then she had to scurry off to address a room full of people.

Linux Format: You seem quite calm for someone who has to give a talk in about an hour. The numerous display panels tell me your talk is entitled ‘Why we care about open source at Kiwi.com’. What are you going to cover?

Jona Azizaj: I’m going to talk about how we contribute to open source at my company, and specifically Sourcelift, which is a project of ours that supports open source communities and developers. It helps them get together and so on. Kiwi.com is an online travel agency and people don’t usually relate that with open source. So I thought that it would be good to talk about what we do with it and why we care about it.

LXF: How long have you worked at Kiwi.com?