Justin W. Wheeler

In October 2022, I joined Red Hat as the fourth Fedora Community Architect (FCA). The Fedora Community Architect (FCA) is employed full-time by Red Hat to lead initiatives that grow the Fedora user and developer communities. They also help make Red Hat and Fedora interactions more transparent and open.

Although I continue several of my capacities as a long-time Fedora Project contributor, my role at Red Hat directs my focus in a few specific areas:

• Architectural support: Guidance, coaching, and mentoring on how to participate and contribute in the Fedora community. This includes mentoring to community volunteers as well as my Red Hat colleagues working on downstream products who also contribute upstream.
• Community leadership: Participate in community leadership bodies (e.g. Fedora Council, Mindshare Committee) to represent the interests of Red Hat and the motivations of our contributor community. I also participate in discussion and execution around strategic direction for the Fedora Project.
• Events: Global in-person and virtual events are a primary focus of my role. This includes organization of the Flock contributor conference and other regional events, such as FOSDEM, DevConf CZ, SCaLE, and others. It is also inclusive of the various virtual events that we run throughout the year, such as Fedora release parties, Fedora Week of Diversity, Fedora Appreciation Week, and others.
• Financial forecasting and budgeting: Planning, forecasting, recording, and coordinating payments from the Fedora Project fiscal budget, provided by Red Hat. I work with various stakeholders to account for how Fedora spends its financial resources, mostly around SaaS services, event planning and execution, and marketing resources (i.e. swag).
• Swag: I maintain the global inventory of Fedora swag and I am responsible for ordering new items into our inventory. I work with contributors around the world to distribute items for regional and community events.

There are many other aspects of the Fedora community that I support through my role, but these are the major highlights.

I am a contributor to Fedora Linux since August 2015. Fedora Linux is a Digital Public Good created by the Fedora Project community (see recognition).

Current volunteering in Fedora

Here is a list of the things I am currently doing in Fedora (see Fedora Linux release history):

• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Team: Founding member & core contributor (Fedora Linux releases 24 to present)
• Community Blog: Editor-in-chief (Fedora Linux releases 22 to 29, 39 to present)
• Community Operations (CommOps): Founding member and team co-lead (Fedora Linux releases 22 to 30, 33 to 36, 40 to present)
• Fedora Council:
  • Elected member (Fedora Linux release 26)
  • DEI Advisor (Fedora Linux releases 33, 34)
  • Community Architect (Fedora Linux releases 37 to present)
• Marketing:
  • Team lead (Fedora Linux releases 25 to 28)
  • Core contributor (Fedora Linux releases 23 to 28, 39 to present)
• Packager: mpris-scrobbler, playerctl, zork, protonvpn-cli (Fedora Linux releases 26 to present)

Past volunteering in Fedora

I have done more in the Fedora Project over the years. I served in the following positions previously (see Fedora Linux release history):

• Ambassadors: North America representative (Fedora Linux releases 25 to 29)
• Badges: Sponsored system administrator (Fedora Linux releases 24 to 32)
• Documentation Team: Core team contributor & writer (Fedora Linux releases 27 to 32)
• Fedora Happiness Packets: Outreachy 2019 mentor, project manager (Fedora Linux releases 29 to 31)
• Fedora Magazine: Editor-in-chief (Fedora Linux releases 24 to 26)
• Games SIG: Moderator (Fedora Linux releases 24 to 28)
• Google Summer of Code 2016: Student intern (Fedora Linux releases 23, 24)
• i3wm SIG: Core contributor (Fedora Linux releases 33, 34)
• Join SIG: Mentor (Fedora Linux releases 23 to 28)
• Mindshare Committee: Founding member (Fedora Linux releases 27, 28)

Open Source Technical Advisor, Office of Innovation

From June 2020 to September 2022, I was the first Open Source Technical Advisor at the UNICEF Office of Innovation.

There, I supported UNICEF Venture Fund startup companies in launching Open Source products, one of the requirements to receive funding from UNICEF. In all, I mentored 23 companies from 19 countries on community strategies for their Open Source products. Of those, fourteen achieved global recognition as Digital Public Goods and three were acquired in multi-million dollar acquisitions. Additionally, I also designed a fixed-term Open Source community mentoring program for startup companies and developer communities that later expanded to Technical Assistance programs for software development and data science & AI.

UNICEF MagicBox, Office of Innovation

From January to May 2018, I was the first, full-time co-op placement to work exclusively on Open Source community for UNICEF Office of Innovation. I was mentored by Mel Chua and Stephen Jacobs as part of the Project in FOSS Development (IGME-585) course at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

I supported MagicBox, a geospatial data project connecting unrelated datasets into actionable feedback for local governments and municipalities. I improved Open Source best practices to enable continuous integration, agile development practices, and created a 12-month Open Source community roadmap. There, I worked together with UNICEF personnel and Red Hat Open Innovations Lab on MagicBox. This was an engagement highlighted by Jim Whitehurst, former President of IBM and Red Hat CEO, during his Red Hat Summit 2018 keynote.

In September 2020, I joined the Open@RIT Advisory Board. Open@RIT is a Key Research Center of the Rochester Institute of Technology and serves as the Open Source Programs Office for RIT. Its goals are to discover and grow RIT’s impact on all things Open including, but not limited to, Open Source Software, Open Data, Open Hardware, Open Educational Resources and Creative Commons-licensed efforts. Otherwise what we like to refer to in aggregate as Open Work.

The Advisory Board provides me an opportunity to contribute back to many programs and initiatives I participated with during my undergraduate degree:

• RIT’s Minor in Free and Open Source Software and Free Culture
• Experiential education programs of FOSS@MAGIC (formerly FOSS@RIT)
• LibreCorps co-op program

From August 2018 to April 2020, I was a leading member of the LibreCorps program of the FOSS@MAGIC initiative at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

From 2018-2020, RIT LibreCorps collaborated with the UNICEF Innovation Fund, a pooled funding vehicle to quickly assess, fund and grow open-source solutions that have been developed in new and emerging markets. I provided expertise and mentorship for developing sustainable communities around open source projects for RIT LibreCorps partners like the Innovation Fund. In 2019, I led multiple half-day workshops together with Prof. Stephen Jacobs for UNICEF’s Innovation Fund to introduce over 20 international start-up teams to the Open Source way. You can read more about this work on Opensource.com: LibreCorps mentors humanitarian startups on how to run the open source way.

From 2016 to May 2020, I was a core committer and stand-in project manager for the TeleIRC project. TeleIRC is a Telegram <=> IRC bridge written in Go to bridge chat rooms between any IRC channel and Telegram group. Read through past community updates on my blog.

From April 2014 to October 2016, I was a community moderator and staff member of the open source SpigotMC project.

There, I handled user reports for a community forum with over 400,000 registered members. I also replied to support emails and directly worked with users to solve problems. I was a co-conspirator for Spigot’s event planning for the annual Minecraft convention, MINECON, in London 2015 and Anaheim 2016. This is one of the most unique communities I have worked in, as the Spigot Community is a population of hundreds of thousands with an age demographic concentrated between ages 13-25.