 Hello, everyone, and welcome to my session. I am Adan Dukat-Oyum, and unfortunately, I am making this recording all the way from Lagos, Nigeria. I was really looking forward to making this presentation in person, with you all at Dublin. But thank you so much for joining my session. I am the founder of Shikod Africa, and I'm also the co-founder of Ubuntu's Community Africa. Ubuntu's Community Africa is one of the largest communities, Ubuntu's developer communities. For Ubuntu's enthusiasts, Ubuntu's contributors maintain us in Africa. I am also the founder of Shikod Africa, like I mentioned, Shikod Africa is a non-profit organization and also the largest women in tech community for African women with over 17,000 African women, which is why I'm going to be giving a talk on building a thriving and healthy Ubuntu's ecosystem in Africa because of my experience in this. I'm going to be sharing the lessons that we have learned while trying to not only build Ubuntu's Community Africa, but also make the African tech ecosystem much more intrigued about the Ubuntu's space and also active in the Ubuntu's space. So also meet me. Aside being the founder of Ubuntu's Community Africa and Shikod Africa, I am currently engaged as community manager for the Google Developer Programs and the Women Technica Programs in Sub-Saharan Africa at Google. And because of me having a lot of interest and expertise in developer relations, I decided to also branch out and start something small, tag DevRelLight. DevRelLight is a platform initiative that I created for anyone who's looking to get started in developer relations. Basically, Ubuntu will get started in developer relations. Now, aside all of this, I'm also a technical writer and a tech content creator. I make tech contents on TikTok. So first off, what is this talk going to focus about? How do we create communities? When the idea of Ubuntu's Community Africa kicked off? The thought around this was, how do we create communities that is active enough and engage with contributors to ensure Ubuntu's projects benefit from their innovative thinking? I started Ubuntu's Community Africa in 2018 with my co-founder, Samson Gotti. Samson Gotti is someone who has a lot of experience and expertise when it comes to Ubuntu's contribution. He has been contributing and active in the Ubuntu space since childhood with Trigalabs. And with my experience in building developer communities with sites come together infusing his knowledge of Ubuntu's contribution and Ubuntu's development and minority community building, developer community building into kicking off what we tagged as Ubuntu's Community Africa. But this was our major question. Okay, we want to start a movement. We want to make Africa not just users and people who utilize Ubuntu's technologies, but we also want to make them contributors. People who are actively contributing to this Ubuntu's and also actively maintaining Ubuntu's projects, Ubuntu's tools, Ubuntu's development projects and all of that. So this was a major question in our mind. If I want to do something like this, how do we want to go about it? It's one thing to want to start a community and it's another thing to want to make it a movement. A movement is like a lifetime thing. It could go on and on and on. A community can exist for a couple of months, it could exist for a couple of years, but we want it to make something sustainable. So this talk is going to focus on the lessons that we have learned while trying to transform Africa into not just being utilizers, but also being creators, open source creators and the maintainers. And it would share about the lessons that we have learned as well. So if you're someone who is interested in starting not just an open source community, but also trying to build the ecosystem, the open source ecosystem in your region, or you're really interested in, you're really interested in taking a deep dive or plugging into what the African open source ecosystem is doing, then this talk is definitely for you. So this focus area, the focus area is looking at, but this talk is in four different places. The first is on community, because it's a community, the second is going to be about programs and events. We're going to focus on programs and events that we carried out to make sure that we're creating sustainability in this open source ecosystem. The third is partnerships as well, and then the fourth is team. Before we get right into it, this is a report of 2018 by Github, the October's regional spotlight on Nigeria. Well, I'm going to use Nigeria in this instance because Nigeria is one of the top highest performing developer countries when it comes to the ecosystem here in Africa. We have Nigeria, we have Kenya, we have South Africa. And moving off the list at the moment, we also have countries like Rwanda, countries like Ghana as well. But we're going to focus on Nigeria just to give you an insight as to what this ecosystem looks like because it's a report by Github. And if you look at this part of the screen, it says that as of 2018, they noticed 1.6x more developers contributing on Github, just from Nigeria alone. That shows that there is a movement, there is interest of people who are really interested in contributing to open source, people who are really keen in understanding and learning more about the open source ecosystem. It says that Nigeria represents the fastest growing developer community on Github. This was as of 2018. And it also says that they also noticed 2.1x more organizations as Github organizations from Nigerians. Nigeria is higher on our list of fastest growing countries by organizations created with 2.1x more organizations created this year that last year as of 2018. And also says that they also noticed 1.8x increase in repositories and 1.7x in more open source repositories. All of this I'm trying to say is that when we decided to fund this community, it was only an idea. I would bring my idea of building developer communities, you bring your idea of contributing to open source and working with open source developer technologies. And as of 2018 when we decided to start it, it was just one country where we had the presenting and that was Nigeria because we were all Nigerians. Six founding members and zero chapters, zero community advocates, nobody knew who we were, what we were doing, nobody knew. And also as of then the emphasizing for open source contribution, the emphasizing, the evangelizing, the gospel, all of that about open source wasn't as active as it is right now. So what did we do? First of all, community. Why community? Because if we're trying to build an ecosystem where we wanted to ensure sustainability, where we wanted to make sure that people were benefiting from the positive impact of contributing to open source, of the open source developer ecosystem, we needed to make sure that we had a community platform. But the first two things we had in mind, we needed to set a goal for our community members. If we're going to be building a community, anyone who's a community manager already understands this. The first thing you need to make sure that you are setting down in place when trying to build a community, regardless of what your community's focused on, is also to set a goal. So for us, the first goal that we set was to make sure that our primary focus was to grow open source awareness. And while growing open source awareness also creates a culture within the ecosystem. Because it's one thing for people to be aware of what open source is all about and how to make contributions. And it's another thing to make it a culture to make them be consistent in contributing to open source and also creating open source tools and technologies. So this was our first major goal. Then the second goal was to create a platform, a community platform where all of these contributors, these maintainers, these advocates, these experts, these enthusiasts who were interested in open source can meet, converge together, feed off each other's energy and help themselves grow as one. So we decided to create this platform. And at the moment we currently use this code for that. But please note, if you notice, these two major goals were what we focus on when it comes to our community. Those were our two primary goals. We wanted to make sure that people were not just aware of open source but we're also actually contributing to it. Because like I mentioned earlier, we wanted to move Africa from just being consumers or open source technologies into being contributors and creators of open source technologies and tools as well. Now this was where it moved us into. As you can see from the picture, I'm sorry, I know that my screen is currently so bad with pictures so I'm gonna try to move it around. But if you look at the pictures, you'll notice some of these events were closed door events. We were still trying to grow more awareness, create more awareness. So we focused more on beginner events, beginner projects and all of that. And you can see that the movement was slowly growing. In some pictures, if you notice, you would see some empty seats and in some pictures you would see some full seats as well. It shows that it was rapidly growing. And the next thing was programs and events. Why programs and events? If we're trying to build a community, a sustainable community, keyword sustainability, if we're trying to build a sustainable community, it's beyond just providing a community platform for them. We also want them to practicalize things that they learned. So we needed to create avenues, not just projects, but avenues, initiatives, programs for them to practice, implement things that they learned during the events that we organized for them. So we decided to run initiatives like this. One is open source challenge or the first ever initiatives that we ran. And this initiative was focused on them making mostly beginners, making their first open source contributions and also returning contributors who were also interested in building their open source skills, make returning contributions. And sometimes they will mentor some of these individuals who were coming into the field. As the first one, we had over 200 people participate in this open source challenge, which is a huge thing for us because it was our first major activity and getting over 200 people from all across Africa. That was a huge thing for us. The next one was our outreach and GSOC webinar. Why did we focus on these two specific programs? As of then, I don't think GSOC was quite popular or it had come out at that time. But in focus of outreach and GSOC, because while we also wanted to make sure that we're providing a community platform, we also wanted, we're trying to build awareness within the continent. We wanted to also make sure that these people who were bringing together within our community had an opportunity to participate in global open source programs. And what did we do? We carried out webinars where we focused on helping these people, giving them key points, how to succeed and how to apply in programs like this, how to participate in programs like this, criteria, as requirements and things like that. More like briefing them ahead of time and getting them prepared, work towards getting them into these programs. And from these webinars that we carried out, we noticed that there were more people ensuring of congratulatory messages about getting into the program. That really helped a lot. Like I said, the primary goal for this particular one was that we also wanted to make sure that while we were trying to focus and build the ecosystem within this continent, we also wanted to make sure that we're not just limiting them to projects within Africa, but also an opportunity to participate in global projects. Because at the end of the day, the goal of what we will term as success is not just within the African space, but also out there, seeing more Africans contribute in global open source projects or even build global open source projects for people across the world to use. So we focused on the outreach and GSOC webinar and we had a huge number of participants and also good amount of congratulatory messages and positive feedback from people who participate in this webinar. Another thing was starting up sustained Africa. Like I mentioned, when the idea of building this ecosystem, remember the topic is building a thriving and healthy ecosystem. So do something like this. We need to think about sustainability. Sustainability is a huge thing. And sustainability goes beyond just thinking about it. It involves having conversations with the people, the stakeholders within the ecosystem and actually creating this engaging conversation, creating a space for these conversations to happen, to get feedback and to share our own thoughts and ideas. So reached out to the main sustained team and said, oh, you know what? Nothing like this happens in Africa. So we want to bring this down to Africa. How do we go about it? And in 2020, we had the first sustained Africa event. It was a huge success. And in 2022, we couldn't have an in 2021 because of COVID. So in 2022, we had the second sustained Africa event and it was a huge success as well. What did this result in? It resulted in people becoming more aware that, oh, you know what? This open source gospel is here to stay and it's not just a gospel, it's a movement. It's something that I am aware of. I'm actively involved in it. I know what the key terms are. If I'm trying to make maybe my open source project more sustainable, if I'm trying to make my open source car more sustainable and overall as a goal, I know that I am actively contributing to making the open source ecosystem in Africa more sustainable. So it's there for any I'm sustained Africa. Then the other thing that we did was run Oscar Fest. If you haven't heard about it, I'm going to give you a brief overview. So what is Oscar Fest? Oscar Fest is the largest developer festival for open source enthusiasts, advocates, everyone who's basically every stakeholder in open source in Africa. Why did we start Oscar Fest? We wanted Oscar Fest, we started Oscar Fest rather because we wanted a headline event after you know, running community, providing the community platform, running multiple open source programs and initiatives to get people interested in open source. We also wanted an avenue or like an opportunity for this community stakeholders, community members, everyone within this ecosystem that we're trying to build give them an opportunity to meet physically in an open space for them to interact, learn from each other more like a community event but a headline and big events. So we have people, the first one had so many attendees, we've run two different editions right now. The first was in 2020 and the second was in 2022. We couldn't have one in 2021 as well because of COVID. And this past two events have seen over 2,000 attendees with speakers across over 40 sessions and track for these two different events. And because of the things that we're doing, we're able to get sponsors including Google, Meta, GitHub, AWS, Ubuntu and so many others. You can learn more about this Oscar Fest by visitingfestival.osafrica.org or you can go on Twitter and look up this hashtag, hashtag Oscar Fest 2020 or hashtag Oscar Fest 2022. But overall, our goal was, while we are trying to build this ecosystem, we're trying to make it sustainable, we have created a community platform. We have created programs and events. We have created an opportunity to create engaging conversations and sustainability. We made sure that because it's an open-source ecosystem, everyone is actively involved. And then we've also gone a step for that to make sure that we are providing them a platform for them to continuously meet and learn from each other. I'm gonna share a clip. First of all, this is pictures of pictures from 2020 versus 2022. The picture from 2022 was taken an hour after the event was over and I'm specifying or I'm harming on the one hour after the events to show you the impacts. If one hour after the events, this as a number of people were able to still gather together for a group picture then imagine how many people actually participated at the events. This is how much the interest, this is how much the enthusiasm, this is how much the contributions have grown in a space of two years when it comes to like Oscar Fest as an event of its own. I'm gonna share a clip from that of 2022. Very briefly. Thank you. So this event, two years ago, she is the trajectory of my career. One, two, three. Thank you. Thank you. We're coming from within Africa, we're from Sydney, we're from Sydney, we're from Lagos, we are from Sydney. So this event was, it was a very good experience. It was because we just, mind-blowing. It's just an energetic vibe. It's like, people are exchanging contacts left and right, learning a lot. It has been so inspired by the community here. Like I'm leaving way more inspired than when I came. On point API reference and it needs to be up to date. How do we achieve this? I have been able to preach or evangelize the world of open source over the past years. It's been amazing because this festival has been held twice and we should attend them. So people now accept that word open source. People want to know more about it. So this is my first time attending a second event. And of course I was very, very vulnerable but I grew up on my show and I talked to people and they're all very, very nice. Like the whole tech community here is very, very nice. With this culture, I see it would enable a lot of people to be creators. That means more maintainers and that means more contributors. It's actually... So I'm going to pause there because of time and move into the next aspect of focus area of this talk. Now, after building out a sustainable community, we had a community that was growing and was running and we're registered and running different initiatives, different programs and with a headline events that was already put in crowds into the space. We decided to go a bit further. If we're trying to build a sustainable community, we wanted something that would transcend even us as founding members or as co-founders, something that would help more people draw them into the space and convince them and also while we're trying to build a pipeline, we're trying to build a pipeline within this ecosystem. We wanted to make sure that the people who were already existing in that pipeline were moving upstream. So we had to think of partnerships that were sustainable for this ecosystem. And for us to be able to do that, we had to consider the primary needs of the members of this ecosystem. That's the members of the African developer community. This primary need could differ across different regions. But here in Africa, the first thing that we wanted to look out for was hiring opportunities. Why hiring opportunities? When people get hiring opportunities in open source space, it gives them, in any space, it gives them that moral, that conviction that, okay, you know what, there's really an opportunity here for me. If I'm being paid to do something like this or if I'm being employed to do something like, you know, actively enjoying, I would definitely go out there and evangelize. So while we were focusing on partnerships, the major goal was to get these people to be the ones to advocate for us. Because we had gone, you know, if you're trying to build a community, if you're trying to build an ecosystem, you want people who are advocating and doing the work of mouth for you. So you don't spend so much time trying to amplify on what you're doing, but you spend, you get to have more time to focus on creating impact for the members So the first thing was, you know, provide hiring opportunities for them, give them opportunity for them to grow in their career and also try to push that pipeline upstream. So what did we do for the hiring opportunity partner with a company called Propel to get this company would provide opportunities from organizations that they have their partnering and they're working with to provide our own community members hiring opportunities, new job opportunities, not just within Africa, but all across the globe. Then the other thing that we needed to look out for was gender diversity, because in Africa, we have just one race and everyone is black. We didn't really need to focus on racial diversity. So we focus more on gender diversity. If we're trying to build an ecosystem, there is absolutely no way where we wouldn't want to make sure that it's diverse in terms of gender as possible because while building an ecosystem and you're only focusing on skills and things like that, you would definitely at some point notice a gap when it comes to gender diversity. So we wanted to make sure that there was a forefront knowledge and it was something that we're actively working on. So for gender diversity and with what I do at Chicodafrica, I mentioned earlier that I'm the founder of Chicodafrica and Chicodafrica is currently the largest women in tech organization and community in Africa. I spoke with routine and we decided to bring in what I do at Chicodafrica into open source community Africa, basically through a partnership. What did that result in? It resulted in us forming what we called at the moment women of open source community in Africa or in short, OSCAR. Now what did this mean for us? It meant that we were infusing women from our Chicodafrica community, women developers, designers, community builders and across all fields, open source fields are interested in open source into, we're infusing them into the programs that we're running within OSCAR and what did that result in? We saw 40% growth in female participation across general programs. That was a huge achievement and remember, our main goal was to create more diversity and at the moment we saw 40% growth in female participation across programs. That also means that we also saw 90% of ladies make their first contributions, their first open source contributions to organizations like Jenkins, Django and Itabog, Microsoft Azure, Chaos, Layer 5 and so many others that I kind of put the list on here. What does that mean for people like this, especially for these women? We hope to give them opportunities to not just make their first open source contributions but to make it to renowned organizations like this give them an opportunity to boost their careers, to boost their CVs, to make proud claims on social media and talk about how I made my first open source contribution and not just to any organization, but I made my first open source contribution to an organization like Jenkins. I'm sure it's something that an employer will be interested in. What this also resulted in in them going ahead to speak on our behalf that's advocate for us to other people in other communities and the world was spreading like that. The other thing we also noticed that we noticed a 75% conversion rate from community members and community members to project maintainers and community builders. That was a huge thing for us because not only do we want these people to start contributing to open source, we also want to remember key words sustainability. We also wanted to create sustainability in a way that the pipeline keeps going but people are still active in different stages of their careers. Seeing these people move from just being community members or contributors to now being project maintainers and growing up that career ladder or that growth path was a huge thing for us. The next thing now having scaled partnership what we now focused on as a team was trying to form an actual courting. If we've been able to click partnership click programs and events click community, have a community platform all of those things we needed to have an actual courting and so we set up a courting like I mentioned earlier of the six founding members we set up a courting. We have a larger team but this courting consists of team leads from the different teams that we have. We have six founding members who are the courting members. One person is Yoma. She specifies on partnerships and works with our partnership different partners that we have to create sustainability in our partnerships. We have myself and Samsegodi the co-founders what we basically do is oversee every of the operation. We have Bolaji, Ayodeji Bolaji is the community manager so everything when it comes to community we have somebody who is fully focused on it and who has experienced skills in community building. Princess is the engineering manager when it comes to engineering projects, open source projects that we work but within the team and the one focused on community as well and we have a design lead. One beautiful thing that we have also tried to do and we are continuously doing with the open source ecosystem is make sure that we are amplifying on other ways to contribute to open source and for us to do that we need to have, we introduced design contributions and for us to achieve success in that role we had Peri lead the design team Peri is a very experienced Peri Pisojime is a very experienced designer and she currently leads the design team and design section for the organization. So where are we now in 2012? Right from 2018 with Slada showed earlier into 2012 that's a couple of years that have gone by. Where are we currently and what have we been able to achieve with every that I have talked about. So far at the moment we have over 47 or 47 chapters in 8 African countries. This is a huge goal for us because like we said we are trying to make sure that we are evangelizing the open source and what does that mean for us? At least a chapter in every African country. So far it's 7 chapters in 8 African countries and these 8 African countries are some of the most active developer countries in the African ecosystem. I'm talking about Nigeria, Kenya Nigeria, Kenya and we're also looking at countries like Ghana, Rwanda and so others. We also have 58 community advocates or leads. This is a community advocates or leads. Who are they? These are people who are helping build and run these different chapters in these different communities that we've talked about. Because we're trying to grow, we're trying to expand the reach and mission. Like I said earlier at least in the African country. What these community leads are also doing is they're advocating for us spreading the world of mountain from us to them, from them to the community members and then from those community members to like other people as well. That's how it's literally moving. It's like a ripple effect. And we've been able to grow to over 3,000 members just by everything that we have been doing so far. That's a huge goal for us starting an ecosystem from a community into a larger movement with over 3,000 members and so many social media impressions from the different activities that we have been doing. So what does this mean for you who is listening into this session? How can you take the lessons that I have shared from my talk today into what you're trying to do in your own region? Or how can you key into what we're currently doing in the African open source ecosystem? One is collaboration. And by collaboration what do I mean? Build, connect, partner with existing communities who have grassroots reach in these different regions or in the region that you're trying to get into. These communities have already done the grassroots. They have set the foundation for you. All you just need to do is partner with them, connect to them or build on what it is that they and build on what it is that they already have done. You don't need to go in there and try to like do the grassroots. You don't want to find communities except there are communities in your region that are already doing things like this if there are. Don't undermine their existence. Reach out to them, partner with them and build on what it is that they already do. It goes a very, very long way. And it also shows that you appreciate the effort that they have made into setting up that ecosystem within that region. The second thing is diversity. And by diversity I'm not talking about transatlanticism. This is a part of uh, transatlanticism that will eventually come in this region. So I'm pretty curious to see who are participating in your project. We constantly get feedback from my participants about how some projects specific about things like we don't take contributors from this region or we don't take contributors from than country not willing to take me in then. I don't think this is for me. So try to tone down on your country restriction and be more inclusive to candidates from the African country. Reach out, you know, amplify more on your programs in these different regions. Sometimes you would be surprised as to how little the level of awareness of your program is or your community is when it comes to the African ecosystem, which is why I started with, you know, collaboration and building a partnering with those grassroots communities like Open Source Community Africa and, you know, building on what it is that they have already done. And the next one is inclusion. How do you get to be so inclusive by creating beginner-friendly projects? Because a large percent of contributors in Africa identify as beginners. Because it's still a movement, it's still something that it's in, it's very early stages. Well, I won't say very early stages. Maybe it's like in its early stages, a lot of people are still beginners when it comes to Open Source contributions. So try to create beginner-friendly projects. If you want to be inclusive in, you know, getting more Africans contribute to your projects, try to create more beginner-friendly projects that would help them, you know, contribute, more better contribute to the Open Source projects. From there, you could create a leeway, getting them into becoming returning contributors. Because it's something that we've noticed. It's a pattern that we've noticed for first-time contributors most especially. There's always that first-time love and wanting to return back to the main first project that you contributed to because one, it was welcoming to you when you had absolutely no idea what it is that you wanted to do and they guided you and helped you make your first contribution. So it gives your project a leeway into having returning Open Source contributors into your project. I do know that, unfortunately, you may not have questions. Sorry, you may have questions for me, but unfortunately, I'm not able to take it at the moment in person with you. So what you can do is connect with me on Twitter, you know, share the questions I have, share the insights, the feedback that you have with me on Twitter at Colocodas, but you can reach out to me at that on the chat room. I'm more than happy to have conversations around this and also, you know, create more partnerships, sustainable partnerships with you or with organizations that are looking to, you know, key into the African Open Source ecosystem. And you can learn more about Open Source community Africa by visiting oscafrica.com. Thank you so much. And I look forward to seeing your feedback, but please do enjoy the rest of your conference. Bye.