Justin Wheeler is a Free Software activist and Open Source maintainer with a passion for the human health and well-being of the communities around the code. Justin currently works at Red Hat as the Community Architect for the Fedora Project. In this role, Justin participates as a member of the Fedora Council, stewarding the Fedora community budget from Red Hat, and organizing the annual Flock to Fedora conference. Among many other things too.
With over a decade of experience in Open Source, Justin often works in fast-moving, innovative organizations and communities. For nearly a decade, he participates in the CHAOSS project and community. He was part of a Ford Foundation research cohort in 2021–2022 and contributed to the DEI Working Group. Presently, he is a co-chair of the CHAOSS AI Alignment Working Group.
Justin also has a connection and appreciation for collaboration and innovation in the public sector. This was honed during his years working with the UNICEF Office of Innovation, supporting the UNICEF Venture Fund. While at UNICEF, Justin designed and executed a guided twelve-month Open Source mentorship program for diverse start-up companies from around the world. Together with a team of mentors, Justin mentored twenty-three start-up companies from nineteen countries and five continents. Of these companies, fourteen achieved global recognition as Digital Public Goods and three were acquired in multi-million dollar acquisitions.
As a Fedora community member since 2015, Justin has played an influential role in shaping its direction. He is an advocate for DEI and co-founded the Fedora DEI Team in 2016. He also co-founded the Fedora Community Ops team to help drive greater collaboration among remote, asynchronous teams. In 2022, he was a driving force for helping Fedora earn its own global recognition as a Digital Public Good. Additionally, Justin often travels either as a speaker or representative of the community at various events.
You may find Justin on the speaker track at various conferences. He has appeared earliest at All Things Open (Raleigh, NC, USA) and DevConf CZ (Brno, Czechia) when he shared his experience as a student studying and contributing to Free Software. Later, Justin would go on to speak about measuring healthy communities at CHAOSScon EU and ethical AI systems in Open Source communities together with Mike Nolan at the FOSDEM conference (Brussels, Belgium). However, his favorite events are ones like Open Source Conference Albania (Tirana, Albania) and the double OS Community Africa Festival and CHAOSScon Africa conferences (Lagos, Nigeria). Experiencing the emergent enthusiasm for Free Software in new contexts and getting to participate in the evolution of the culture is what renews the fight for Software Freedom.
Additionally, Justin also is a current or past contributor of other Open Source projects, such as SpigotMC, Opensource.com, MusicBrainz, and Wikipedia. He is also an avid traveler and sets a personal goal to learn something new from the places he visits and the people he meets.