Originally published at: F44 EPEL Elections: Interview with Jonathan Wright (jonathanspw) – Fedora Community Blog
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.
Interview with Jonathan Wright (jonathanspw)
What is your name and what is your FAS ID?
Jonathan Wright, jonathanspw
What is your background in EPEL? What have you worked on and what are you doing now?
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.
Why are you running for EPEL Steering Committee member?
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.