Changing of the Guard, the New Fedora Community Architect | Fedora Podcast 060

Fedora has a job whose entire purpose is the health of the community around the distribution, and this month a new person took it over. So I did the obvious thing and got both of them on the show at once: Justin Wheeler, who has held the Fedora Community Architect seat since 2022, and Shaun McCance, who is stepping into it.

This is episode 60, which I still cannot quite believe. Noah was off dealing with a customer emergency, so it was just me and two people I have known for the better part of a decade.

A few things worth carrying away from this one:

• The role is older than the name, and the name has changed twice. It started around February 2015, largely because Robyn Bergeron pushed for it when she was Fedora Project Leader. Back then the Project Leader was the only lead figure in the project, and this was a way to split off the work of sustaining the community itself. It was called the community outreach and impact lead at first, and became Fedora Community Architect in January 2023.
• What actually lands on the desk is governance, budget, and Flock. Justin walked through it: a formal seat on the Fedora Council, stewarding the Mindshare Committee, representing on the Code of Conduct Committee, and then the two big ones, budget management and Flock. The budget piece is where the community-facing part lives, since Mindshare is how an ambassador gets an event funded or a local organizer gets a box of stickers shipped out.
• Justin is moving to AI Alignment Community Architect, and he wrote the job description himself. His framing stuck with me: the verdict is not in on AI, plenty of people in the community have real doubts, and community consent on it is not a guarantee you get for free. It is something you earn. Near-term he is looking at This Week in Fedora, Aurelien Bompard’s contributor digest, which recently kicked off a real argument about a bot ingesting messages from a public but non-indexed Matrix room. Some people found it useful, others were caught off guard that nobody asked them first.
• Shaun is keeping the CentOS Community Architect job. He has been at Red Hat 11 or 12 years, always in the group that is now the Open Source and AI Program Office, and he was treasurer of the GNOME Foundation for years. His words on the hard part: he knows how to run events and budgets, but there is an almost daunting amount of wrapping his head around the breadth of Fedora.
• This is not a merger, and the thing being merged is the plumbing. Justin and Shaun already ran shared internal budget management this year, on one spreadsheet, while keeping the external processes separate. Social accounts stay separate, the management platform behind them does not have to be. Event teams can be shared. As I put it on the show, you are not knocking down walls, you are running one pipe where there used to be two.
• Dates, since Shaun snuck them in. CentOS Connect is January 28 and 29, 2027 in Brussels, the two days before FOSDEM. DevConf US is September 24 and 25 in Boston with a shared booth. Texas Linux Fest is in November, and both projects will be there. All Things Open is approved for a community table.

We also got into why there is no CentOS equivalent of the Fedora Project Leader, the half-day Fedora Hatch event at SCaLE that I managed to miss entirely and want them to run again, and Shaun’s ongoing attempt to become proficient at either the banjo or the mandolin, whichever one sticks.

One real ask before you go. The podcast needs a producer. Not on mic, not on camera, just someone to help with the administrative side: engaging the people on our list, coordinating with Noah and me, and scheduling episodes. Between being a single father and a career that is a little bit in flux right now, I would genuinely appreciate the hand. If that sounds like you, find me on Matrix.

Next episode we are finally talking about Project Hummingbird with Scott McCarty and team, and Noah should be back.