Justin W. Flory is a creative maker. He is best known as an Open Source contributor and Free Culture advocate originally from the United States. Justin has participated in numerous Open Source communities and led different initiatives to build sustainable software and communities for over ten years.
In October 2022, Justin joined Red Hat as the fourth Fedora Community Architect (FCA). He works closely between the Fedora Project community and Red Hat to lead initiatives that grow the Fedora user and developer communities. He also helps make Red Hat and Fedora interactions more transparent and open.
Previous to Red Hat, from June 2020 to September 2022, Justin supported the UNICEF Office of Innovation as the first Open Source Technical Advisor. At UNICEF, he supported the UNICEF Venture Fund and other Open Source activities within the Office of Innovation. Together with a team of mentors, Justin mentored twenty-three start-up companies of diverse 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. Additionally, Justin designed a fixed-term Open Source community mentoring program for start-up companies and developer communities that later expanded to Technical Assistance programs run by other mentors for software development and data science & AI.
From August 2018 to April 2020, Justin was a leading member of the LibreCorps program of the FOSS@MAGIC initiative at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He was the first, full-time co-op placement to work exclusively on community issues for UNICEF Office of Innovation from January to May 2018. This was work he did in concert with UNICEF personnel and Red Hat Open Innovations Lab on UNICEF’s MagicBox effort. This was an engagement highlighted by Jim Whitehurst, former Red Hat CEO and President of IBM, during one of his Red Hat Summit keynote showcases at Red Hat Summit in 2018. Since then, Justin led half-day workshops for UNICEF’s Venture Fund to introduce numerous international start-up teams to the Open Source way.
Additionally, he is a proud alum of the Rochester Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Science in Networking & Systems Administration and a double minor in Free and Open Source Software and Free Culture, and Women’s and Gender Studies. Go Tigers!
Justin is also a contributor to the Fedora Project since 2015. In Fedora, he volunteered as the team leader of the Community Operations team for four years and was a founding member of the Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Team. He represented Fedora internationally at events and conferences, including FOSDEM, DevConf CZ, All Things Open, OSCAL, and others.
Authored Comments
One thing I wonder about is how to navigate differing cultures between a team and external stakeholders. If your team accepts failure as a key way to gather feedback, how do you work across other stakeholders and clients who might read failure as incompetency?
My first experience with Linux was as a 15 year old trying to set up a Minecraft server on a CentOS 6 server to save money after using a shared hosting provider. I remember the feeling of logging into the server for the first time over SSH without really knowing how to work in the command line. A lot has changed since then. :-)