Justin Wheeler

Picture of Justin Wheeler

Justin Wheeler is a Free Software activist and open source advocate focused on community leadership and digital infrastructure. As the Fedora Community Architect at Red Hat, he designs and maintains the core support structures that enable a global community of contributors to thrive. His work is driven by a deep commitment to fostering global inclusion within technology. This philosophy shaped his impactful tenure at UNICEF, where he mentored startups worldwide to become successful Digital Public Goods. It continues to define his leadership within the Fedora Project, where he has been a key contributor for over a decade.

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):

UNICEF

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.