 Hello, it's Rachel Lawson here again, community liaison for the Drupal Association and we have yet another one of the candidate chats for the Drupal Association 2020 elections. And this time it's with Samson Goddy all the way over in Port Harkot. So, hi Samson, how are you doing? I'm good, I'm good. How are you doing? It's been, I don't know, like six, seven, almost seven months. It feels a long while, doesn't it? Yeah, since we last saw each other. In fact, we have kind of bumped into each other quite a few times over the last few years. I seem to remember, yeah, I seem to remember us meeting at a very important conference called Sustain RSS a few years ago. What brought you to that? So, you know, I would just, I think, so 2018 was the year we officially started the open source community in Africa. So that was when I was in some research around sustainability model for RSS and I was trying to look for a way that I could make the project more sustainable financially. So I stumbled upon Sustain RSS, which you just made more sense and given the fact that the project that I was interested in the open source collective were the hosts for the event. So it kind of made more sense for me to attend and that's when I met, you know, yourself and Pierre and some really interesting folks within the RSS community. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Okay, so you have stood for the election, which made me very happy. In fact, actually we've got some amazing candidates, we've got 10 fantastic candidates and I'm going to be really happy for any of them to be elected to be honest, I'm really happy. But I thought I'd give you an opportunity to tell us all about yourself and tell us kind of how you see Drupal in the future and so on and being part of that. So I think, first of all, you talked about open source community Africa there, you're a big community person and I follow you on Twitter and read things like your latest blog posts and so on. So can you tell me about building community, what does that mean to you? So, you know, the article I dropped actually, I think that was like two, three weeks ago called the Accidental Leadership in Open Source. I kind of highlighted the reason why, you know, I got into open source in the first place because I was a pretty young kid with access to, I believe most people should know there's the one after the child project. And I was very interested in coding and that made it much easier for me to like figure out because, you know, the, on the software side of the hardware, the Sugar Labs community is like really welcoming and that made it much easier for me to like, you know, feel welcomed and, you know, able to ask questions. So I kind of felt a little bit indebted in a way to kind of replicate that same scenario to like, you know, people that are interested in coming to open source. And ever since I've been stuck within strategizing, you know, and also like focusing on community communities. So I've been working with Sugar Labs for the past six, seven years right now on focusing on the community side, trying to make sure things like onboarding, welcoming folks from GCI group coding, and with some of code and, you know, outreach and then some few folks through like maybe some kind of like, October 1 equivalent. So it's been something really interesting that I've been doing over at the U.S. because it's a project, you know, based in the U.S. But for the past two, three years now, I've been sort of like serving as a strategist to understand what really works best for communities in Africa, because it's kind of a very interesting challenge for me because again, a lot of persons have been asking me, okay, we've been seeing less participation from the continent and some of the time there's a lot of stereotypes that come in play and there's like, Africa is a country, they speak Africans, you know, there's just a lot of there's a lot of stereotypes that always come in play, but it's really a diverse continent and they're like a really huge continent, right? So something that I actually spent a lot of time trying to understand the space and, you know, that was where the open source community Africa came out from because I was trying to make something that was, you know, part of the definition because, you know, when somebody goes into, go to, let's say Google or maybe some search engine and search open source, there's always some kind of a definition around software and not the community, right? And maybe in the western world, it's much easier, maybe due to the terminology of the language being used in defining open source, like from the SFS or the OSI, it kind of makes much easier sense. But given the fact that, you know, they are like much younger people in the continent and they are obviously new to technology, the terminology of how open source is defined for me personally for somebody I've been in open source for about eight years, it's kind of like fundamentally flawed to embrace the community side because at some stage you'll be struggling, like, because an average African as a person believe in community, right? The culture promotes community, the culture promotes multiple people who live in one area, it's almost 1.5 billion people. I live in a country where it's like 200 million people, so community is a huge part of it and it's something that I have seen and also have created a space where, you know, we use community to onboard people into open source. That is why I feel like community building is like really important and something that I've been, you know, quite focusing on for the past five years right now. Fantastic. Yeah, so you talk about having really spent a lot of time thinking about this type of stuff and also trying out those ideas and thinking about how it works in different ways in different parts of the world, which is really interesting. Yeah. You also talked about organizations you've already been involved in and organizations that I know that you have spent a lot of time making sure other people know about. Things like Sugar Labs and so on. And if there's one thing that we need to really step up our game in Drupal, the Drupal project, is how we advocate for Drupal and actually how we make sure people know about that. So what can you tell us about that and what does that mean to you to advocate for Drupal? Yeah, that's a very interesting question because it's, I kind of like self identify myself these days as an open source advocate. Right, so this makes more sense to have like an idea around that. So, you know, if you look at, even out of the open source community, right, if you look at the corporate world, there's a lot of advocacy role these days. And that's one of the one of the high rising roles, you know, particularly because companies understood that, you know, the part of being for somebody to use your tool, or for somebody to trust your tool or your platform, you need to build a safe haven for them. And the idea of creating some kind of a safe haven, the idea for you to create some kind of a trust without too coming hard to the person is to give them the tips and tricks or how great a community is or how great it so is in this case. Right. And it's something that I've, you know, particularly with Sugar Labs, something that I've been able to do for this past years, right, telling kids or, you know, schools and also parents that hey, there's a tool that you could download for free. It's completely open source. Maybe they might not necessarily understand the word open source, but it's more of like, hey, this tool is free, and you don't need to worry about security tracking on all those things. And this is something that you could easily download. There's no license, there's no subscriptions, you know, any kind of crazy, crazy fees that you need to do. But the one of the awesome thing about it is that your kid can also learn, but also give back to the community. So making sure that they could take their unique experience on that software in this case like Sugar Labs or Sugar Dex of Sugar Labs Maintain and also go back and give back to the community to make it much better for more people to come in, right. And one of the ways that I've seen that work is organizations, foundations, making that extra effort to create needs of volunteers or hire people as an advocate to go into a space that they know that they are not really sure about. And the reason why I feel like, you know, this is something that is quite unique to Drupal is the fact that, you know, Drupal as a community is really awesome. I started, you know, recently started, in fact, like I was actually at the last summit, which was really interesting and the onboarding process of getting to the events was just awesome. I was a mentor, you know, the whole experience was really, really awesome, right. But that was a bit, I would say that for me, it's really unique because I haven't really gone through that experience before, which I get thanks to the Drupal community, right. But also, you know, one of my goals, one of the things that I always scream about, like Twitter or anything, it's always about how I feel that true diversity is trying to make sure that you get great skill sets, like having diverse skill sets attract better diverse community, because one of the challenges that you've seen in contributing to open source is the fact that, you know, it's always around code, code, code, code. And there's like design, there's like research, there's like documentation, there's even people person, like one of the reasons I love the Drupal project is about the people, right. And which is a bit unique because I honestly did not know that most of the people that I've been talking to directly and indirectly are from the Drupal community like yourself, right. You know, which is awesome because the great part about having a successful project is about the people and then the people make the community. And in order for you to make sure that your community is much better is like making sure that you have great representation. And that's why I love the list from the board, even if I know like there's a few folks from the continent already, which I'm really happy about to see that there are Africans coming to run. This is something that normally gives you joy because of how diverse the old open source space is. Yeah. Yeah. All right, that's really good. Yeah. So, obviously, you told there about hearing a lot of from various people it's like, oh, this person's from Drupal this person's from Drupal. And I know when we were at the open source community Africa conference which you co-organized in Lagos. There was so many of the speakers got up and when they were talking about community they were talking about Drupal. For example, it was like, oh my God, which for me is one of my favorite Drupal memories weirdly. Yeah. Yeah, even though I was not in a Drupal space. But I don't know about yourself is something that's particularly that you've seen that kind of stands out. So for me, you know, one of the important part about an open source project is not necessarily about the project, right, because I feel like I could I could be part of a project without being in contact with the organization, right. And one of the key part about, you know, the reason for advocacy, as much as it's not about just the usage of the software but also the people behind the software like China on board moving into the software right. So that that was like, you know, you mentioned the festival, when we started playing above the festival, you know, one of the high one of the things that we wanted people to remember is about, you know, yes, it was from the open source community Africa, but we created it in a way that every project would have an opportunity to reach out to people, right. Like, you know, even one of the keynote speaker from Lagos spoke about how his first encounter to open source was organizing Drupal events in Lagos. Right. It's like, it's incredible. Yeah. I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, whoa, this is interesting, right. And even today, like I also made a mega from the OSS team at Google and she's been really interesting because, you know, the community spirit around her is just really amazing. And when I heard that, you know, you know, she was she was part of the Drupal leadership team from Drupal, I was like, okay, this makes more sense because, you know, every Drupal person that I miss is like really awesome. I was like, I'll be saying what I've been doing all this years. Well, you know, we've been built in the world. Right. So it's just, it's just really amazing to see that, you know, they're like really awesome people behind the project, which is really important. And that's something that I plan to even do much better. You know, when I get elected, you know, for for the community to make sure that I create a league of advocates, right. It's something I've been doing independently. You know, and I've seen some, some, some amount of success on the continent. There's been some huge range of contributions from 2017 when I started publicly, you know, in 2020 and then the results was the festival. You know, the festival was an act of celebration, celebrate what has been happening for the past three years, you know, on the continent, right. You know, so that's that's what I feel like, you know, the people in Drupal are really awesome. And that's, you know, that's what I what I want to do to make sure that there's there are much cooler people in the community because people do kind of like set up a big evangelism because when you love somebody or you like somebody's or you or you or you or you just really interested in that person's work, you just easily get drawn to the project institution with right. One of the ways that people get into sugarlamps is because they're like, Hey, I love what Samsung do. I think I need to jump on this project. Right. So that's that's something I feel like it's, it's part of my moment and also like having to make sure that, you know, you give a presentation at the festival really awesome to me. And then we had a conversation about community was also one of my highlights, because you shared about again, you know, one of the things we're talking about was that you were able to share, you know, how Drupal have a very unique community building experience, you know, as part of the conversation for sustain. Yeah, part of the group. Right. So that was that was really important to me. I also like one of my best. I think maybe that's one of the reasons I love London, right, because this is like really awesome. Yeah, it's a good place. Yeah, it's a bit busy for me. But hey, yeah. Yeah, Megan, Sanik, it was our executive director and so recently. And now we've got Heather who's doing an awesome job. So yeah, we've got some great advocates. It's true. It's absolutely true. Yeah, so you mentioned a few things that you mentioned sugar labs and you mentioned, obviously open source community Africa, both extremely important things. And these are giving you experience. So obviously we'd be looking for someone who ever wins this election to come along and work on a on a board. And my understanding is you already have even though you're not old and you already have quite a lot of experience on boards and making them successful. Do you want to tell us about that? Yeah. So, you know, one of the interesting fact about the accidental leadership was the fact that I was explaining to the readers, right, how I started. I don't want to say more like accidental how I was kind of like learning why doing. So when I joined sugar labs as a contributor, I moved from just being a user into becoming a contributor coach contributor. And then I moved to the election membership because I was like something that I felt like I was really happy about. And then onboarding and then becoming an admin. So I was really excited when they were like, Hey, do you want to run for the board? I was like, okay, great. And the fact front fact I was like, you know, the youngest on the on the left. So it was quite intimidating for me at first because these guys are being like, you know, 20 years experienced, you know, leadership and it was really, really awesome. Like, I was actually running with somebody that onboarded me on open source. I was running against. It was just quite interesting. Right. So, so I joined I joined the board of oversight board. So she was on the board of a set board for sugar labs. And one of my focus was marketing strategy when it comes to some primarily on marketing. So true marketing, there was advocacy, there was, you know, social media outreach. It was also like, you know, conferences, just basically marketing stuff. But also I was also focusing on making sure that there was like the roadmap on the vision of the sugar itself. It's a really huge platform. You know, it's one of the, you know, the office of credit was like really huge, you know, way back in 2008, like it was like in every, literally every country, but maybe not much in Europe, but it was huge in Africa, it was huge in Asia, huge in South America, some part of the not American part of it. So having to be in part of that decision, making sure that I'm part of that leadership team to make sure that the software becomes better. Right. I'm interested because in 2017 to to begin of 2021 I left the board. You know, they have been some huge amount of growth within the organization right here being the vision has been more welcoming. It's been very diverse because I've been able to create systems and also advise other board members to create systems that makes it much better for people, especially on underrepresented, you know, a region to come and come to open schools. And after leaving the board in, I think, or before leaving the board, beginning of this year, but for the festival, I got reached out that hey, do you want to be so the sugar loss project was part of the the software freedom because obviously right. So they want to create their own entity to run the project itself. So now I'm serving as a board of directors for the new entity. Right. So, so, so that that just makes more sense to like, you know, continue that vision. And also few few months after meeting your sustain and also bring it Oscar, you know, a huge project from the continent into the collective platform right. I got reached out by the co founder that hey, we love what you're doing. Do you want to bring that experience down to open source collective. Right. And so for the past about six, six, six months so far, I've been, you know, working on a project as a board that kind of like helps sustain a lot of open source project, which is really awesome. And, you know, to give it a fact that we have a system that helps sustain a maintainers which is one of the fundamental problem of OSS to make sure that you give financial contribution to to to maintainers, you know, Oscar has been successful because of that So it's easier for organizations like Google and the rest of people with huge, you know, finance to support that mission. So being part of that, that board, being part of that board to make sure that we grow not bigger to make sure that particularly in the content alpha idea just makes much awesome. So on the both side, I would say it's been it's been a very interesting journey for me, because I've been more placed on the strategy side of it, like how do we grow 10 times or how we grow two times or how do we grow in this region So that's something that I've been doing and also obviously running an organization like open source collect and Community Africa, this huge has been also part of, you know, my one of my leadership qualities, I guess. I think you've got a wide and varied experience now. I think you're now one of those people with that 20 years of experience compressed into a short time. Yeah, it's always funny when, you know, so when I talk to people like hey, how do you know, like, oh, I'm October 21 and like, okay, great, how long have you been open source eight years how long have you been in leadership role about five years like wait, how is that possible, right. You know, yeah, exactly, right. Exactly. That was like, I was like, well, what, why not like, why can't I be, you know, in that part, right. So it's something that I've seen, you know, also registering. You know, you know, one of the one of the, the important announcement on the festival went was when I worked with a team to move, you know, Oscar as a member of the member for the OSI as Drupal was really important for us to because we would now join forces with OSI to make sure that we spread you know, that, that, that outreach of open source software or people. Really interesting. That's really good. And that will give people a lot, a lot to think about. I don't know if there's if there's anything else you want to say that to go with your candidacy or be anything else you want to add. Yeah, I would say so for the Drupal community, people watching this video would obviously read my candidacy statements. I'm not very, I'm not very political. It's always very interesting when I use the word candidate, right. It's always very interesting for me. Right. One of the, one of the things that, you know, I've been doing particularly as we try to, you know, translate professionally actually to become some kind of an open source strategies, right. It's something that I'm doing to hopefully get a full time job to work on that, on that, on that road not to make sure that I focus on strategy, not just around maybe the global side of it but also that those little things that, you know, open source has been fundamentally flawed on, like, true diversity, true diversity in skill set, true diversity in people and also in terms of just having better experience, right. I would say, you know, these are things that I've been working on for the past years and I'm really excited, you know, to join as a candidate and also looking forward to see how it can help Drupal deal the next, in my own terminology, right, deal the next billion creators. That's what we use at the Officers Committee of the United States. We do, yeah. Yeah, so to make sure that I take Drupal to that next phase. So I would say, yes, I might be really new to the community, but there's one thing that I'm really good at is, you know, my onboarding process to the community is really, really nice because I've been able to create onboarding process for a lot of open source organizations. So, yes, I might be pretty new to the Drupal itself, which I'm going to be so transparent about, but I'm really positive that, you know, if I get in, I would take my diverse experience to make sure that I make the organization much better and bigger. It's a really great community. It's a great community. I don't think there's anything I might most likely do. I would just have to work on some specific things because I can't say I want to make the organization better. It's better. It's great. So, yeah, so that's, that's what I, that's my, my, my final words here. Oh, that's fantastic. Well, I wish you the very, very best of luck. As I do all the candidates, and we will see very soon because yeah, voting opens quite soon. So best of luck. And I will speak to you soon, Samson, once the everything comes down. Okay. Thank you. Bye bye.