The hands of a person is visible on top of a pad of paper. One hand is pointing to a diagram on the top pad of paper. The other hand holds a thick black marker and is adding a new section to the diagram on the piece of paper. A subtitle appears on the side: "Write yourself into obsolescence."

Write yourself into obsolescence.

A brief meditation on why you should write yourself into obsolescence and also what kind of writing matters most when documenting yourself and your responsibilities.

Continue reading
Three boys are smiling and gathered around together looking at a phone screen held in the hands of the boy in the middle of the group.

XPOST: Spurring new Digital Public Goods

On 27 September 2022, I authored an article on unicef.org highlighting my work with the UNICEF Venture Fund in providing mentoring to startup companies pursuing compliance with the Digital Public Goods Standard. Discover the UNICEF Technical Assistance programs and the Venture Fund mentoring strategy in the last year.

Continue reading
Introducing the UNICEF Open Source Mentorship programme

2020/2021 in Open Source at UNICEF Innovation Fund

Open Source is a means to collaborate and solve common problems; during the COVID-19 pandemic, open data and tools proved useful in quickly tailoring and deploying life-saving services. How has the UNICEF Innovation Fund kept up with latest Open Source innovations? The UNICEF Innovation Fund invests exclusively in Open Source

Continue reading
Introducing the UNICEF Open Source Mentorship programme

Introducing UNICEF Open Source Mentorship

This post was co-published on the UNICEF Innovation Fund blog. 2020 saw the launch of a formalized Open Source Mentorship programme for the UNICEF Innovation Fund, built up on two years of work from RIT LibreCorps expertise and consulting. The Open Source Mentorship programme includes five modules about Open Source

Continue reading

How Mozilla Open Source Archetypes influence UNICEF Open Source Mentorship

In May 2018, Mozilla and Open Tech Strategies released a 40-page report titled, “Open Source Archetypes“. This blog post is a recap of how this report influences the Open Source Mentorship programme I lead at the UNICEF Innovation Fund. I joined the UNICEF Innovation team in June 2020, although this

Continue reading
Black and white picture of an American protest with a banner of a Muslim woman wearing a hijab styled in the American flag, with a caption below "We The People." Author added a caption overlay, "Why FOSS is still not on activist agendas"

Why FOSS is still not on activist agendas

On December 13th, 2006, author Bruce Byfield reflected on why he thought Free and Open Source Software (F.O.S.S.) was not on activist agendas. My interpretation of his views are that a knowledge barrier about technology makes FOSS less accessible, the insular nature of activism makes collaboration difficult, and FOSS activists

Continue reading

Keep your open source project organized with GitHub project boards

This article was originally published on Opensource.com. Managing an open source project is challenging work. The challenge grows as a project grows. Eventually, a project may need to meet different requirements and span across multiple repositories. These problems aren’t technical, but are important to solve to scale a technical project.

Continue reading
The UNICEF Office of Innovation releases software under free and open source licenses

Humanitarian open source work: My internship at UNICEF

In December, I received the happy news of an offer for a internship position at UNICEF in the Office of Innovation. The Office of Innovation drives rapid technological innovation by rapid prototyping of new ideas and building full-stack products to make a positive impact in the lives of children. This

Continue reading
2017 - Justin W. Flory's Year in Review

2017 – My Year in Review

I can’t remember how writing an annual reflection became a tradition, but after writing them for the last two years, it is now a habit. Every time I look back on all that the last year brought into my life, it is surreal. Many things that happened, I could never

Continue reading