Search for a command to run...
Edidiong Asikpo is a Senior Developer Advocate based in Lagos, Nigeria. She is passionate about sharing her Kubernetes and web development knowledge through technical articles, videos, talks, and social media.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment.
We're excited to partner with the creators of the docu-series, Beyond the Classroom: Open Source Stories. This exciting partnership highlights our commitment to showcasing the diverse and impactful journeys of students in open source and celebrating ...
Join us for another community webinar on Friday, 27th September 2024, by 04:30 PM (GMT+1) with Maxime Corbani, where we get to talk all about commercial open source and cracking the code of open-source investment. Maxime Corbani is a Senior Associate...
Open Source Community Africa (OSCA) was created in 2018 because there was a need for an inclusive and diverse community for open-source, contributors, creators, and enthusiasts in Africa. We knew that open source was incredible and would have a posit...
Watch the recording of the entire session: https://www.youtube.com/live/bR1y7xuuwZk Join us for another community webinar with one of our own Prosper Opara, where we get to talk all about the MLH Fellowship, a 12-week open-source internship altern...
Once upon a time, barely a handful of people in Africa knew about open source or even tech in general. At the time, tech was still relatively new to the ecosystem. Yes, we had software engineers in different African countries, but the prevailing fields were still Medicine and surgery, Law, and banking.
In fact, if you told an African parent you wanted to become a software engineer during this time, most of them would talk you out of it in a lovely manner, while others would literally threaten to disown you if you did not study to become one of the big three - a medical doctor, a lawyer or a banker. However, a lot has changed since then. The African population has moved from not knowing about tech to becoming a continent where most people now know about tech and want to have a career in tech.
In this article, I’ll be taking you on a journey that explains the growth and impact of open source in Africa. It will cover how we moved from a few Africans knowing about open source to the incredible increase in Africans contributing to and building open source projects, what triggered this increase, and what we believe is the next phase of open source in Africa.
Remember I said I’ll be taking you on a journey? Let’s start with how it all began.
The educational system in Nigeria is designed to ensure that anybody in a university studying to get a science degree must go for industrial training in their third year to gain real-life experience before they graduate from the university. For context, an industrial training is like an internship, but in this case, you must spend these six months working at a company that aligns with the degree you want to graduate with. Since I studied computer science, I did my industrial training in a tech company called Start Innovation Hub and spent six months there learning how to develop Android applications.
One of the unique things about this company was that tech companies that wanted to establish their presence in Africa, like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, would reach out to the company's CEO (Hanson Johnson) to host community-focused events for them. My time at this company introduced me to developer communities and their importance in the ecosystem. Since I worked there, I’d automatically have access to these events. I would hear inspiring tech career journies from the speakers, learn more about tech, and begin to see that I had a chance at becoming a software engineer after graduating from university. During one of the talks at the event, a speaker who was giving a talk about Javascript highlighted how it was an open source language and talked a bit about what open source was. I found it fascinating but never looked into it after that because I wanted to focus solely on my industrial training goal - to learn how to develop Andriod applications.
Luckily for me, during a joint GDG event at the end of every year, one of the speakers, Samson Goddy, talked about open source in detail. He explained what it meant, how to contribute, its impact on your tech career, and so much more. His talk at the event convinced me to give open source contribution a shot. Samson and I would then connect on Facebook, and I would ask him to tell me more about open source and guide me through making my first contribution to a project. He recommended that I start with the Google Summer of Code program since I was still at university.
This led me to find the Open Data Kit, an open source organization that owned an Android application for collecting data worldwide. I selected a good first bug and started working on fixing that bug. I would eventually submit a pull request, which will be merged by the project's maintainers, leading to one of the best days of my life. To this day, I still remember when I found out the pull request was merged. I couldn't believe that the code I wrote would be utilized by thousands of people all over the world. It was one of the best days of my life.
Why am I telling you this? It's because, like myself, not many people in the tech ecosystem in Africa knew about open source or what it meant. We were at the peak of tech companies wanting to establish themselves in Africa, and the few people who were in tech were spreading the gospel about tech and encouraging people to join in. However, open source was barely mentioned in these conversations or quickly glanced over if mentioned. As time went by, something happened that moved Nigeria and eventually other African countries to become active in the open source ecosystem.
It was Open Source Community Africa (OSCA), created by Samson Goddy and Ada Nduka Oyom. OSCA was designed to increase awareness about open source in Africa and the number of African contributors and creators in the open source ecosystem. When OSCA started in 2018, an event was hosted in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, with about 20 to 50 people in attendance. In 2019, OSCA hosted open source-focused events in Lagos and Uyo, other states in Nigeria.
Each of these events would typically have about 20 to 80 people in attendance. This was a great first step, but we knew we needed to reach more people to achieve our goals. This inspired us to try something different and host an open source festival. A festival that would be sorely focused on open source, last for three days, and include workshops, talks, panel sessions, etc.
At the time we were planning to do this, something like that had never been done in any country in Africa. The only big tech events in Africa then were created by Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. Don’t get me wrong, these events were fantastic and impactful to the African tech ecosystem, but we wanted something focused only on open source. So we made the necessary arrangements and birthed the biggest open source conference in Africa - OSCAFEST.
The Open Source Festival (OSCAFEST) triggered THE BIG SHIFT from people not knowing about or being interested in open source to more people being interested in open source in Africa.
The first OSCAFEST in 2020 had more than 800+ attendees, lasted for 3 days, and had over 29 talks and 12 workshops, all focused on open source. We had speakers like Eriol Fox from Ushahidi, Aniedi from Google, Prosper from Eden, Stephen Walli from Microsoft, Henry Zhu from Babel, and sponsors like GitHub, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, AWS, and Cloud Native Computing Foundation were present. Here are a few highlights:
The first day was sorely focused on workshops because we didn’t just want to tell people about open source; we wanted to show them how to contribute, so these workshops served as hands-on sessions.
The second and third days were focused on panel sessions and talks. One of the panel sessions focused on increasing the number of Africans that got into open source programs like Outreachy, Google Summer of Code, and Google Season of Docs. Since we had about 6 Africans who had successfully participated in these programs in attendance, they shared tips that will help the attendees get into the program, how being part of the open source program impacted their careers, and much more.
The festival left attendees informed about open source and inspired to make their first contribution. It also trended on Twitter and other social media platforms, thereby creating more awareness about Open source in Africa.
Even though we had attendees from other African countries, we noticed that most people who knew OSCA and what we were doing were Nigerians. Our organization's name was Open Source Community Africa, not Open Source Community Nigeria, so we knew we had to take a different approach.
We recognized that we couldn’t reach everyone in all the African countries or the local tech communities in each country, so we decided to launch the Chapter Leads program. In this program, selected community builders will create, grow, and support vibrant local OSCA communities in Africa.
Before the launch of this program, OSCA communities and events only happened in 3 states in Nigeria (Lagos, Uyo, and Port Harcourt). However, thanks to the OSCA chapter leads program, we now have 34 OSCA chapters in different African countries. These chapters have hosted various events within their local communities, helping us reach thousands of people and drive our mission to increase the number of Africans contributing to and creating open source projects.
The Open Source festival and the chapter leads program created a ripple effect that moved Africa from a continent with a handful of people aware of and actively participating in Open Source to a more active and vibrant open source ecosystem. Here are some success stories and use cases:
When you look at the use cases I’ve shared, you’ll see that we achieved our goal to a certain degree. Unlike five years ago, African participation in the open source community has greatly improved. People are now aware of open source, and we’ve hosted events solely focused on open source, increased the number of our community members, chapter leads, and countries, hosted Sustain OSS events, and so much more.
We’ve successfully created awareness and increased the amount of creation and contribution. But the work isn’t done. We believe it is time to move into the next phase of open source in Africa, and this has led us to work on an acceleration program called the IDB program—ideate, design, and build — that we will launch soon.
Our goal for this program is to enable participants to accelerate their tech knowledge and become better professionals and collaborative team players by providing them with real-world work experience where they can engage in the ideation, designing, and development of open source projects. Stay tuned for it! 🎉
So far, I’ve talked about the work that OSCA has done, but I’d be lying if I ended this article without highlighting the other Africans who helped to raise awareness of open source in Africa outside of OSCA. Here are some Africans whose work has increased awareness about open source in Africa:
Marlene Mhangami, who led the first PyCon Africa event, became the first African to be a vice chair of the Python Software Foundation and actively advocated for Open Source in Africa.
Prosper Otemuyiwa, who created a Laravel starter pack that trended more than Google and Facebook, has created several open source projects and continues to be a strong advocate for open source and tech in Africa.
Adewale Abati, also known as AceKyd, created the Made in Nigeria repo to showcase open source projects created by Nigerians. This repo will inspire people from other countries in Africa to create “Made in repos” that showcase projects from their country.
Peace Ojemeh brought a new light to contributing to open source as a designer when everyone kept thinking only software engineers could contribute to Open Source.
Without these people and many others I haven’t mentioned in this article, the open source ecosystem in Africa wouldn't be as active as it is today.
It is possible to do great things from a small place. Open Source Community Africa started as a small community in Lagos, Nigeria. But in five years, it went on to have an incredible impact on the African tech community.
We are still actively working on growing the open source ecosystem in Africa. There are still more countries to be reached and so many lives that can be changed. If you’d like to be a part of it, you can email me at edidiong@oscafrica.org. Thank you!
