This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Monday, 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, 30th May 2024.

Interview with Sumantro Mukherjee

• FAS ID: sumantrom
• Matrix Rooms: fedora,#fedora-kde,#fedora-mindshare,#fedora-social,#fedora-social-hour, #fedora-arm,#fedora-devel,#fedora-qa,#fedora-workstation,#fedora-test-days, #fedora-i3,#fedora-badges,#fedora-docs,#fedora-l18n,#fedora-ambassadors)

Questions

What is your background in Fedora? What have you worked on and what are you doing now?

I’ve been in Fedora Project for more than 10yrs now. I have been a part of the Fedora QA team for the whole time. As a part of Fedora QA, I have signed off on multiple releases.
Apart from those, I have been an avid advocate of Fedora Project to the community at large, it has driven me to take up onboarding , ambassadorship and mentoring as part of Fedora Project. Recently, I am taking part in a11y initiative and few places of Mentorship init.

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

Fedora in recent years has been in the talks, be it conferences or tech news. I run my own YT channel, promote a lot of QA test day events over socials and totally believe in the power of Digital and Social Media. In this day and age, where Recognition is a very sought after and retention of efforts directly linked to rewards ; it’s important for a project like Fedora to become more efficient with resource allocation. My “why” is to figure out and open up more way how Fedora project can reward it’s contributors.

How would you improve Mindshare Committee visibility and awareness in the Fedora community?

Mindshare is a very visible committee to begin with, however we can actually benefit from efforts like CommOps 2.0. I believe the more stats we have about out community and contributors the more we can get visibility in the obscure corners. I would like to be someone who helps bring more clarity for my team (Fedora QA) to start with and then expand to other parts of the project.

What part of Fedora do you think needs the most attention from the Mindshare Committee during your term?

Recognition and Community health are the two key areas Mindshare can put some attention. Recognition brings in fresh blood in the community, adding more ideas and diverse way of doing things. Community’s health helps us with retention and avoiding possible burnouts. Outreach teams of all kinds will benefit from both of them and Fedora contributors will have a long lasting impact on the Open Source space for years to come.