As you may already know, this year we launched the Contributor Recognition Program as part of the Fedora Mentor Summit, with the goal of recognizing and celebrating outstanding contributions across the Fedora community - whether through mentorship, packaging, infrastructure, docs, events, or other impactful work.
Big congratulations to our amazing contributors who’ve gone above and beyond in supporting and growing Fedora! Thank you for your dedication, impact, and Fedora spirit.
Matthew Miller (@mattdm) – Fedora Council & more
Matthew has kept the Fedora Project running for over a decade! He’s also been a driving force behind discussion.fedoraproject.org, helping shape our community spaces.
Kevin Fenzi (@kevin) – Packaging / Development / Infrastructure / Mentorship
Kevin is always there when something breaks in Fedora Infra (even while on PTO!). His deep involvement and mentorship make Fedora stronger every day.
Timothée Ravier (@siosm) – Fedora Atomic Desktop
Timothée’s work on sysext and overall contributions to Fedora Atomic Desktop are pushing our desktop innovations forward in a big way.
Let’s give them a huge round of applause and show some love in the thread!
These recognitions are just a small way to say thank you for the big impact they’ve made - and we hope to keep highlighting more amazing Fedora contributors in future rounds!
I think the result reflects our current situation perfectly. I wholeheartedly agree with it.
But perhaps a pinch of salt here. We don’t differentiate between contributors who work for Red Hat or another big user of RH technologies in their day job and “others.” We do this for good reason, and it’s the right thing to do. But perhaps this means we are underscoring the huge efforts made by those many “others”? Perhaps this could be compensated for somewhat by a weighting factor? But maybe we shouldn’t overdo it either.
Yeah, I struggled with this when voting. Ultimately I decided to evaluate RH employees and non-RH employees exactly the same, but it did feel a bit ‘unfair’.
Finding a factor that “fits all cases” might be hard without causing advantages/disadvantages for some. E.g., even at RH employees it would have to be differentiated between what contributions they make in their working hours and what in their free time. So an alternative would be maybe to keep the easy and transparent process we have for 2 or 3 winners (which treats RH employees the same way as others), and make a 3rd or 4th “non-RH winner”, who has to be someone who is not with RH? Not a perfect solution either of course. On the other hand, I also do not like myself to start differentiating between contributors.
Having the FPL win a contributor award is like a CEO winning employee of the month.
Yes, FPL is an awesome contributor and we love him, but these awards should be about those we don’t yet applaud.
I wouldn’t read too much into this, and definitely not with this much cynicism. Matthew is leaving his post as FPL, so I think it’s likely that at least some people voted as if this were more of a farewell / lifetime achievement award kind of thing for him (I definitely did).
Thank you all for the thoughtful feedback and for taking the time to share your perspectives. We truly appreciate it, and we’ll go through everything as we plan the next edition of the Fedora Mentor Summit.
I also want to clarify that the three recognized contributors were selected from nominations submitted by the community. This program is meant to be a way for us to show appreciation for the impact and effort people bring to Fedora - not a competition or ranking, but a celebration of contributions that have resonated with others. While it’s natural to have different opinions on the recognition program, let’s focus on using this thread to celebrate and appreciate the contributors’ efforts rather than debating the results.
Let’s continue finding ways to highlight the amazing work happening across the project in a thoughtful way.
In future iterations of this award, I wonder if we could come up with more specific categories of recognition? Instead of generally recognizing a few contributors project-wide,[1] I wonder what creative categories that the community could help us come up with.
Maintainer(s) of the ugliest Fedora package spec files? Contributors who most resemble a human encyclopedia of Fedora? A technical writer helping out multiple different docs projects across Fedora? A localization leader and Weblate champion?
I know we can use this as an opportunity to improve the Contributor Recognition Program and continue making it an important part of how we recognize valued members of our community, whether they tend to be very visible or less visible.
These folks have contributed significantly to Fedora without a doubt! ↩︎
Thank you for your dedication, impact, and Fedora spirit. 
Big thanks to our Review Panel 
And the winners are…
Matthew Miller (@mattdm) – Fedora Council & more
Let’s give them a huge round of applause and show some love in the thread!