This is a part of the Mindshare Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.

Interview with Greg Sutcliffe

• FAS ID: Gwmngilfen
• Matrix Rooms: I’m in many rooms as a lurker, but Infra (#admin:fedoraproject.org) and CommOps (#commops:fedoraproject.org) are two good places to find me.

Questions

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

I’ve been on the fringes (brim?) of Fedora for a long time – I’ve been at Red Hat for over a decade, and I’ve worked on projects like Foreman and Ansible, and I’ve got lots of friends in Fedora.

In the last year or so I’ve come closer by joining the CommOps data work that Justin and Robert were leading, helping to do survey writing & analysis, and generally just lending an opinion where I can. I’ve also tried to learn from / contribute to Fedora in use of Matrix & Discourse, both of which I brought to Ansible.

This year, I formally joined Fedora for the day-job too, as a member of the Community Linux Engineering team. That means I’m back to being a sysadmin alongside people like Kevin and Michal and helping to run our infrastructure.

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

I might have returned to my sysadmin roots for my job, but I still care a great deal about community architect work, especially from a data perspective. I’ve had some great chats with various existing Mindshare folks about how we can use the data we hold in ways that benefit the project and the community, and I thought it might be a good idea to be here in person to drive those efforts. I’d like to see us making strong use of that data to support the various Mindshare Teams in their work, as well as using it to support the wider Fedora strategy.

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

Data visualisation can be incredibly effective if done well – the popularity of sites like dataisbeautoful and so forth are ample proof. So we don’t just need to get a grip on our data, we need to message it well. I’d like to see CommOps taking a lead on the data, but also rworking with Design, Marketing, and others to make the insights we find really land with users and contributors.

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

I’m really just restating the above here, but our data! I think the Mindshare Committee could be crucial for gathering expectations on what data would be useful to the various teams, and helping making sure that data gets delivered. Repeating work in disjointed ways isn’t going to get us as good a result, and the Committee can provide that oversight.