Justin W. Flory

Open Source Initiative

2021 candidate for Board of Directors

I am currently in the running for a Individual Member seat on the Open Source Initiative Board of Directors. Read more about my platform and statement of intent on my blog.

UNICEF Innovation

Open Source Software Technical Advisor

Since June 2020, I work as a full-time independent contractor at the UNICEF Office of Innovation. There, I support the UNICEF Innovation Fund as their first-ever Open Source Software Technical Advisor. My responsibilities include the following, related to Free and Open Source Software:

• Technical assistance
• Open source support
• Cohort collaboration
• Assessment support
• Metrics assessment
• Sustainability assessment

UNICEF MagicBox

From January - May 2018, I was the first, full-time co-op placement to work exclusively on open source community for UNICEF Office of Innovation.

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, President of I.B.M. and former Red Hat C.E.O., during his Red Hat Summit 2018 keynote.

[email protected]

In September 2020, I joined the [email protected] Advisory Board. [email protected] 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 [email protected] (formerly [email protected])
• LibreCorps co-op program

Fedora Project

I am a contributor to the Fedora Project since August 2015. Currently, I focus my time on diversity and inclusion and documentation. Here is a list of the things I am currently doing in Fedora:

• Community Operations: Founding member and former team lead (August 2015 – May 2019, December 2020 – present)
• Diversity and Inclusion Team: Founding member (August 2016 - present)
• Documentation Team: Participant (March 2018 – present)
• i3 S.I.G.: Participant (June 2020 – present)
• Packager: brightlight, mpris-scrobbler, playerctl, zork, protonvpn-cli (August 2017 – present)

In the past, I served in these positions:

• Ambassadors: North America (December 2016 – December 2018)
• Badges: Volunteer sysadmin (August 2016 - May 2020)
• Community Blog: Editor-in-chief (October 2015 – May 2019)
• Fedora Council: Elected member (Fedora 26); Diversity & Inclusion Advisor (August 2020 – April 2021)
• Fedora Happiness Packets: Outreachy 2019 mentor, project manager (March 2019 – August 2019)
• Fedora Magazine: Editor-in-chief (Aug. 2016 - Oct. 2017)
• Games S.I.G.: Administrator (2016 – 2018)
• Google Summer of Code 2016: Participating student (May 2016 – August 2016)
• Join S.I.G.: Administrator (2016 – 2018)
• Marketing: Former team lead (2016 – 2018)
• Mindshare Committee: Founding member (Fedora 27 – Fedora 28)

Open Source Diversity

I am a part of the Open Source Diversity community since early 2017. I also facilitated a merge between a former D&I community led by Mozilla and the Open Source Diversity community.

The Mozilla group was formerly led by Emma Irwin and was handed off to the community in October 2019. Since then, I volunteered to manage some community channels, and later got involved with the core Open Source Diversity team in March 2020. I do not have an official title or role in this community, but it is a community that is important to me!

RIT LibreCorps

From August 2018 to April 2020, I was a leading member of the LibreCorps program of the [email protected] 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.

TeleIRC

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.

SpigotMC

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.