Sandro Mathys

Like fellow Fedora contributors Jeroen in 2008 and John in 2009 I’ve been selected one of the five RHCE of the Year 2010 – the one for Europe to be more specific. Looks like someone at Red Hat really recognizes that (Fedora) community work is very useful for a RHCE’s daily business. My entry for the self-nomination really mostly consisted of my work I did and still do for Fedora including organizing FUDCon Zurich 2010. Beside that I also mentioned organizing FrOSCamp 2010 Zurich and that my $DAYJOB involves lots of Spacewalk/RHN Satellite administration and some RHEL/Fedora related tasks. As far as I remember my entry that’s really been iall to it.

So after I sent in a small text (500 chars tops IIRC) with the above facts I got a call last Friday asking me whether I’m still free June 22-25 as the winner is needed to go to the Red Hat Summit 2010. They told me I was one of the last 3 or so before the winner is chosenand they needed to make sure they’re all available during the summit before the final decision is made. Today then I got another call informing me that I’ve been selected and to clear the administrative stuff (as Red Hat pays the winner the flight, hotel and fee for the whole summit).

I feel I own the community a lot in receiving this award as a single person couldn’t achieve that much particularly since I’m no experienced open source developer. Also it just wouldn’t be that much fun to do all this on my own. Thank you to everyone involved in Fedora and Spacewalk (including all those upstream folks), to all the folks involved in FUDCon Zurich and FrOSCamp organization and whoever else I forgot to mention. Of course my thanks also go to Red Hat for rewarding me with this great honour and for the invitation to the summit – and again to recognize the work the community does (and to support that work)!

I hope to see as many of you at this year’s Red Hat Summit in Boston and FUDCon/FrOSCamp in Zurich as possible!

Last but not least my congratulations to the other four RHCE of the year 2010. As of this writing that page says the winners will be announced May 17 but this has not happened yet.