We thought about it, we envisioned it, we announced it, you bought the idea, you shared your excitement, we planned together, it happened, and the chronicles continue!!
Last year, we shared our dream of hosting the first-ever Open Source Festival in Africa with you, we then shared our further plans, and we made it happen with your tremendous support and excitement. 🎉🎉
The Open Source Festival is a high profile event that attracted student delegates, developers, designers, and corporate organizations on a large scale with a series of talks, workshops, and awareness of open-sourced developer tools. The maiden edition was a forum for networking, discussions, and ideas proration around the latest happenings in technology as well as the growth of open source in Africa.
Festival Day One - Thursday, February 20th
The event started on Thursday, February 20th, with the registration session, which was followed by a series of workshops, after which the SustainAfrica summit was held on the same day.
Workshops
We had ten power-packed workshops on the first day of the festival, with over 400 amazing developers in attendance. Four workshops held at a time concurrently at different venues named after some cities in Africa
🎙️The first workshop was anchored by Regina Nkemchor Adejo, who taught the attendees how to improve their Linux User Experience by exploring the various streams of open source desktop customization.
🎙️ Eriol Fox taught OSS maintainers how to start building issues for designers in their repositories and for designers to learn and practice how to engage with OSS projects.
🎙️ Emeka Boris ama also introduced his workshop attendees to Data Science, how to contribute to Datasist, Datawiz and other Nigeria made Open-source Data Science tools using Python.
🎙️ Egwuenu Gift held a Vue Vixens workshop where she taught her attendees how to contribute to open-source projects as a beginner.
🎙️ Gen Ashley held the #IamRemarkable workshop to empower women and underrepresented groups to speak openly about their accomplishments in the workplace and beyond, thereby breaking modesty norms and glass ceilings.
🎙️ Ricardo Sueiras anchored the Open Source 101 - Developer Remix workshop.
🎙️ Onyemenam Ndubuisi taught his attendees how projects could ensure code quality using Static Analysis Integration, Static Analysis tools, and check for and detect errors within a codebase without running the code.
There was a short lunch, which was then followed by the last three workshops.
🎙️ Ricardo Sueiras gave another workshop and showed his attendees how to build a simple robot using AWS RoboMaker and how to use high-level AI services such as vision than to integrate AI capabilities into the robot quickly.
🎙️ Amanda Casari also introduced her attendees to Feature Engineering For Machine Learning.
🎙️ Emmanuel Oaikhenan then showed his attendees how to implement OAuth with PassportJS-Facebook In an ExpressJS and MongoDB App.
Day one of the festival ended with several interviews, networking sessions and photoshoots.
All workshop images can be found here (Gallery Section)
Sustain Africa - Thursday, February 20th
Sustain Summit is a one-day conversation for Open Source Software Sustainers. During the summit, we talked about Sustainability - the sustainability of resources and the sustainability of its people.
At the Sustain Africa summit, there were no keynotes, talks, or sponsor demos, and our amazing facilitators took us through the journey of Open Source Sustainability.
We had conversations around the comprehensive overview of how FOSS is developed, maintained, utilized, and providing a roadmap for solving the cultural, financial, and institutional issues among open source project maintainers.
The program included a set of discussions and strategy sessions share-out designed to explore the latest practices and learnings around sustainability in OSS contexts with five interactive case studies:
- Approaches to raising funds for your open source project
- The role of documentation in sustainable FOSS projects (How to create and scale timely documentation)
- Design and Sustainability (Open Source Design)
- OSS Programs (GCI, GSOC, and GSOD as a means of gaining new contributors)
- Marketing (Practices for reaching people as a means of achieving sustainability)
Results from each session, inventory action items, next steps, and other bridges to post-event collaboration will be published soon by each facilitator, as discussed during the summit. Ensure to subscribe to our newsletter to get updated when this happens.
All Sustain Africa images can be found here (Gallery Section)
Festival Day Two - Friday, February 21st
The first day of the conference started with a series of talks, lunch, interviews, networking, Q/As and photoshoots on the festival Day two.
The event started with the opening keynote anchored by Ada Oyom (Co-founder OSCA), who welcomed everyone to the festival and introduced them to the OSCA community and the fantastic work they have been doing since inception.
We then proceeded to keynotes and talks from our amazing speakers ranging from Open Source in Diversity, Documentation, Design, Mixed Reality, Cryptocurrency, Machine Learning, Serverless, DevOps, JAMstack, Linux, IoT, Cyber Security, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence and much more.
See all talks and speakers here.
To wrap the day two of the festival was a Panel Session on "Open Source Intern Programs (Google Summer of Code, Google Code-in and Google Season of Docs)." The panel covered the benefits of these programs for students and those starting out with open source. The panel featured: Amanda Casari, Samson Goddy, Peace Ojemeh, Glory Agatevure, Edidiong Askiipo, Kaweesi Joseph, Cecilia Mbugua(cess) and Favour Kelvin who shared their experience with these open-source programs and how it has drastically helped their careers.
Festival Day Three - Saturday, February 22th
The second day of the conference started with the open collective bounty program, series of lightning talks, keynotes, interviews, networking, Q/As and photoshoots on the festival Day three.
The event started with an overview introduction to the Open Collective Bounty Program and how you can earn some $$$ by contributing to open source anchored by Josh Ike.
The event then continued with several lightning talks and keynotes.
See all talks and speakers here.
We then had a keynote by the OSCA Open Source Team anchored by the co-founders Samson Goddy and Ada Oyom. They introduced the audience to Open Source Community Africa and the amazing plans they have for continued sustainability after the festival towards making Africans the next billion creators. The keynote also featured the Community Manager (I) Bolaji Ayodeji, who further explained the plans they have for the community at large, their chapter programs and the new community structure. The Design Lead Peace Ojemeh then took the audience and explained the amazing work that went into the branding of the entire event from start to finish and the plans they have for designers.
We then had a The Web We Want session before the end of the event hosted by Adewale Abati and featuring: Egwuenu Gift, Ekwuno Obinna, and Ada Oyom as judges.
The Web We Want is a collective effort by browser makers to understand where the dev community would like us to invest our energy.
Some amazing developers pitched their ideas and wants, and the best ideas based on the community and judges pick rewarded with a prize.
Diversity
We ensured diversity at the festival in attendance, volunteering, and talk sessions. We also partnered with SheCodeAfrica to sponsor 300 ladies (interested in open source) with tickets to the festival alongside much more community and scholarship support.
Our speakers, talks, and workshops were diverse with different topics around engineering, documentation, design, and open source.
Special Thanks
🏆 Special thanks to our amazing sponsors for making this event a success
🏆 Special thanks to our distinguished speakers for sharing their knowledge with our enthusiastic audience.
Some speakers are missing from this group photograph :(
🏆 Special thanks to our amazing team of organizers and volunteers whose tremendous and selfless efforts made this festival smooth and running.
Volunteers are missing from this group photograph :(
🏆 Thank YOU for attending the Open Source Festival 2020 and sharing your excitement and joy. We wouldn't have done this without you; you are part of the reason for this success.
There is just so many highlights and tweets to cover in one article, please see the thread of tweets via this hashtag for more highlights.
What Next?
Please take out time to fill our feedback form. We want to hear your feedback so we can keep improving our logistics and content to give you a better experience next year.
We have a new Discord server to accommodate our global community, chapters, events, and programs. Ensure to join and invite others. Speaker slides, essential updates, and community support will be disseminated via this medium henceforth :).
Don't forget to Download Discord on your mobile and laptop devices for faster communication.
We have started publishing some videos from the festival on our YouTube channel. Please ensure to subscribe and turn on notifications to get updated when we upload new videos.
The Big Question
Which country would host the Open Source Festival 2021???
Share your guesses in the comment section. 🙂
Open-source technologies are driving the future as the most widely adopted tools for building disruptive and innovative solutions to current global issues. Learn how to effectively contribute towards building the next generation of world-class solutions in Africa by joining an Open Source Community Africa Chapter nearest to you.
Changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years. ― James Clear
THE FUTURE IS OPEN!
