Justin Wheeler

Picture of Justin Wheeler

Best known as an Open Source contributor and Free Culture advocate originally from Georgia, United States. Open Source areas of focus are digital infrastructure projects, humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS), industry communities of practice, and the Linux developer ecosystem.

Red Hat

Red Hat logo

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.

Fedora Project

Fedora Project logo

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):

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):

Open@RIT

Open@RIT logo

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: