jwflory / heuristics

"Heuristics is the science of finding new ways to solve problems" (Abbott 2004, 81)

Hi there.

My name is Justin (pronouns: he/him) and I am a creative maker. I am best known as an Open Source contributor and Free Culture advocate originally from the United States. I have participated in numerous Open Source communities and led different initiatives to build sustainable software and communities for over ten years.

In October 2022, I joined Red Hat as the fourth Fedora Community Architect (F.C.A.). I work closely between the Fedora Project community and Red Hat to lead initiatives to grow the Fedora user and developer communities and to make Red Hat & Fedora interactions even more transparent and positive.

Previous to Red Hat, from June 2020 to September 2022, I supported the UNICEF Office of Innovation as the first Open Source Technical Advisor. At UNICEF, I supported the UNICEF Venture Fund and other Open Source activities within the Office of Innovation. Together with a team of mentors, I 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, I 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 & A.I.

Learn more by visiting my website.