The F44 election interviews are now live. With seats open across all leadership groups, this is one of our most popular election cycles yet! Use this post to navigate to candidates interview posts easily.
Voting will be open on Monday, June 1st and will close at 23:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th. Best of luck to all our candidates!
Continue readingThis is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 EPEL Steering Committee Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
Jonathan Wright, jonathanspw
I’ve been a consumer of EPEL for…a long time. 20 years? I’ve been a contributor to EPEL for about the past 5, and on the EPEL steering committee for the past year.
EPEL is very near and dear to my heart and is actually how I got involved with Fedora. I’m on the AlmaLinux team and like everyone else, the first thing I do when installing AlmaLinux (previously CentOS) is dnf install epel-release. I’ve successfully graduated packages from EPEL that ultimately got picked up by RHEL (see Valkey) and work to make EL distros more usable by having an array of package availability that’s not otherwise available without EPEL.
I have a unique perspective to bring to the table with my history in web hosting and long time usage of RHEL and its clones (CentOS and now AlmaLinux). The past year serving on the EPEL steering committee has been a great honor and I hope to continue in that role for another year.
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 EPEL Steering Committee Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
My relationship with open source started back in 2006, and I’ve been an
advocate since, both by contributing to various projects and by publishing
my own. My deep dive into EPEL began in 2013 while working in a company doing
R&D work for local industries, where I gained my first practical
experience with RPM packaging. This early work gave me a solid understanding
of what it means to build and manage software within the Enterprise Linux context.
More recently, I joined Red Hat in 2021 to work as part of the
CLE Team, where I deepened my understanding of how to become a proper Fedora packager
and contributor. I have been working together with Carl George, focusing on the
needs of EPEL by participating in steering meetings and doing work
regarding the project’s infrastructure. Through this position, I was able to
participate in activities such as packaging, writing documentation and SOPs,
collaborating on maintenance work required for the infrastructure, and improving
infrastructure automation. Furthermore, during steering meetings, I have been able to
add my viewpoints and insights when they were needed, and I was also able to
take on some of the steering team’s workload,
such as the Forgejo migration.
Over the last few years, while spending time on the infrastructure side of the project,
I’ve seen first-hand the ups and downs of the project, which has enabled me to
collaborate closely with members of the community.
The EPEL steering committee is already a place where I have been able to
use my experience and knowledge to support and contribute to the project.
However, this time I want a vote on these topics. This will allow me to
collaborate further, helping to turn those discussions into a better
path for the project. I want to continue helping the community so
that the project can continue to grow into a great
platform by ensuring our governance is as solid and reliable as our processes.
For the sake of transparency, even if I wrote the text myself, I also used a local LLM (Gemma4:e4b) to iteratively fix the text’s grammar and flow.
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 EPEL Steering Committee Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
I got my start in Fedora and EPEL in 2014. I was working for Rackspace and joined a team whose primary purpose was to maintain IUS, a third-party package repository for RHEL. Part of my work there involved contributing to and maintaining EPEL packages. I left Rackspace in 2019 to join the CentOS team at Red Hat. In 2021, I started a new team at Red Hat to specifically focus on EPEL activities.
During my time on the EPEL team, I’ve lead the design and implementation of EPEL 9 and EPEL 10. These releases each brought significant improvements to packager workflows and user experience, especially the introduction of minor versions in EPEL 10. We’re currently in the early days of planning EPEL 11, with a focus on continued refinement and quality.
Aside from the hands-on technical work of EPEL release engineering and packaging, I routinely attend conferences to deliver presentations about EPEL and staff Fedora/CentOS booths to engage with the EPEL community. I enjoy mentoring new packagers and helping existing Fedora packagers get started with EPEL.
I have been on the EPEL Steering Committee since 2020. I have enjoyed my six years serving on the committee, and hope to have the opportunity to continue this important work. I am passionate about EPEL and I am committed to continue finding ways to improve the EPEL experience for both packagers and users.
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 EPEL Steering Committee Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
Troy Dawson (tdawson)
I started contributing to EPEL 11 years ago with some nodejs packages for OpenShift. I later added rubygems and golang packages as OpenShift changed languages. Later, RHEL 8 did not have KDE, so I added KDE to epel8, and have been maintaining KDE in epel ever since. I have picked up many other packages during the years, but I think my KDE contributions are what I am most known for.
I’ve been the EPEL Steering Committee chair since 2020, taking over from Stephen Smoogen. A lot of changes have happened since then, most of them for the better. I’m not responsible for all the changes, but it’s been wonderful being part of the committee as these changes have come through.
EPEL has grown to be part of my professional and personal life. I not only want to contribute to it, but help steer it’s growth and progression. I think as a EPEL Steering Committee member, I can help keep EPEL healthy and thriving.
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 Mindshare Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 Mindshare Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 Mindshare Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 Mindshare Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
jnsamyak, and most people in the community know me by jnsamyak as well 😀#releng:fedoraproject.org #admin:fedoraproject.org #release-day:fedora.im #devel:fedoraproject.org #mindshare:fedoraproject.org #social:fedoraproject.org #design:fedoraproject.orgSince this is mindshare, Samyak wanted to do something innovative and creative for keeping mindshare spirit alive.
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 Mindshare Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
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