This is a part of the Mindshare Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Thursday, 28 May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, 11 June.

Interview with Sumantro Mukherjee

  • Fedora account: sumantrom
  • IRC nick: sumantrom (found in fedora-qa #fedora-test-day #fedora-classroom #fedora-india #fedora-meeting #fedora-join #fedora-devel #fedora-kernel #fedora-mindshare)
  • Fedora user wiki page

Questions

Is there a specific task or issue you think that Mindshare should address this term?

As Mindshare is a core group of volunteers to expand and evolve the Fedora Outreachy in accordance to the four pillars of Fedora, I believe it can achieved with increase in Fedora’s Calendar Events.

For instance, we have Release Parties and Flock as calendar events. Organizing FADs or some “output-driven” will help to get a better outreach and also attract contributors to participate in Fedora project with their skill sets. Building and constantly evolving a recognition framework for attract more developers and users to ecosystem will be something which I believe will help Mindshare to achieve it’s goals. Mindshare is helping Fedora Advocates and Contributors to file budgets and swags which is great but going forward we would like to map the amount of contributors. A long term contributor recruitment plan which will heavily involve
Fedora Join and all other team’s unified effort.

Please elaborate on the personal “Why” which motivates you to be a candidate for Mindshare

I hail from APAC. It’s vast and diverse. I was a part of FAmSCo and I was thrilled to work with Fedora Ambassadors around APAC and around the world. The biggest motivator for me is to see more new comers feel welcome and participate in the project. Working with people across the world teaches me a lot and helps me understand community dynamics in a better way.As a part of Fedora QA team, we often have onboarding calls and I feel it’s crucial for the success of the project to evolve the outreach program and that’s the reason I would like to join Mindshare , join hands with the subproject team and expand the outreach activities. As a part of Mentored Projects to see the new contributors join Fedora from 13-17 yrs of age and sticking around Fedora is always an rewarding experience.

What are your thoughts on the impact (as an individual and then as a Mindshare group) that the group will have on the Fedora Mission?

As a individual, I will help shape some events and outreach around onboarding new contributors. My focus areas will be IoT, CoreOS and Silverblue. As a part of QA team, I have worked with Fedora IoT team and Kernel Teams to bringing up a lot of test day contributors. I would love to bring that experience to outreach activities with hosting virtual events (Fedora Classrooms) and retaining contributors. Since Mediawrite offers out of the box support for ARM it will nice to put most of the already ready pieces to use.

As a part of Google CodeIN and Google Summer of Code, I have fair bit of mentoring experience, which can be used to design the contribution retention plan – which is in the talks.

As a part of Mindshare, I would like to work with Fedora Ambassadors/Advocates, Contributors and Users to help shape a outreach experience which will help the forthcoming people to make the most of their skill sets and contribute to the project.