Welcome to our new Fedora Community Action and Impact Coordinator

Great news, Fedora Friends! I am excited to announce that we have completed our search for a new Fedora Community Action and Impact Coordinator (FCAIC). He joins the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) team at Red Hat to work with the Fedora Community today. Please give a warm welcome to Justin W. Flory (he/him).

If you’re a contributor to Fedora, you may have already worked with Justin on a variety of teams and projects. Although I couldn’t possibly list them all in one post, Justin’s Fedora contribution highlights include co-founding CommOps, the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (D.E.I.) Team, and Mindshare Committee. More contribution highlights include former editor-in-chief of the Fedora Magazine and Community Blog, former Council Member, leading the Marketing team, contributing as a packager, and traveling to events and conferences worldwide as a Fedora Ambassador. He has attended many Flocks: organizing workshops, presenting sessions, and coordinating informal socials like the international candy swap. Most recently Justin presented “5 Lessons Learned from 5 years of Fedora’s D.E.I. Events” at Nest with Fedora 2022.

Justin is new to Red Hat, joining us after seven years of involvement with the Fedora Community. He was first introduced to Fedora as a high school student and later through Open@RIT at the Rochester Institute of Technology (formerly the FOSSBox and FOSS@MAGIC). Justin’s most recent role was at UNICEF’s Office of Innovation supporting and mentoring startup companies across the world in open sourcing their innovations. He mentored 23 companies from 19 countries on community strategies for their Open Source products. Of those, fourteen achieved global recognition as Digital Public Goods (like Fedora Linux). Additionally, he also designed a fixed-term Open Source mentoring program for startup companies and developer communities to follow best practices and industry standards on launching Open Source communities.

Justin’s extensive experience with supporting Open Source community building, program management, and involvement with the Fedora Project makes him an excellent fit for this position. I am excited to work with him as both a colleague on the OSPO team at Red Hat and as a Fedora contributor. Feel free to reach out to Justin with your congratulations, but give him a bit to get up to speed with his new FCAIC duties. 

Congratulations, Justin!