This is a part of the Mindshare Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Thursday, 6 June and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, 20 June 2019.

Interview with Sumantro Mukherjee

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 Outreach in accordance with the four pillars of Fedora, I believe it can be achieved with an increase in Fedora’s Calendar Events. Events, in general, will require contributors to be able to request for resources in a jiffy. As a part of the current mindshare, I have tried/helped, created and implemented processes which allow event organizers and speakers easily request for resources like budget and swags.

However, we have the process is in place and the number of event requests has increased, we still need to work on finalizing a standard template for reporting back to mindshare with an event report and some corner cases like that.

Another important aspect which I have worked on was to help Fedora participate in a program which targeted high school students. Last year, Fedora participated in Google Code-In and we got great participation from high school students one of our winners was interviewed and you can read his experience on the Community Blog.

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 Mindahre and 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 newcomers 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. One of the very specific will be to participate in Google Season Of Docs which we failed to make the cut this year but I am hopeful with all the learning that we will be in the next time.

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 an individual, I will help shape some events and outreach around IoT, Modularity, Silverblue and Fedora Core OS. Being a Fedora QA, team member, I usually lay my hands on everything that comes as a new changeset and host test days around it. I would love to bring that experience to outreach activities and help write boilerplates and run pilot activities to increase the contributors and users to increase Fedora’s footprint in IoT landscape. Since Mediawrite offers out of the box support for ARM and Silverblue it will nice to put most of the already ready pieces to use.

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