Open Source Festival 2020

Talk Description

Open Source Design has huge challenges before it can become fully adopted by the global design community. Exploitative ‘work for free attitudes’, workflows and how design functions/roles connect up through a product life cycle, how our software doesn’t yet allow for robust and collaborative versioning across different designers and how the open source community as a whole, is over-represented by those with privilege, access, and ability.

The first part of 'Open Design' was a collaborative project between Adobe, Designit and Ushahidi. A creative proprietary software, global design agency and a humanitarian, technology non-profit creating open source tools for some of the most marginalized people across the globe.

To tackle these systemic problems with how to ‘open source’ a design effort and bring the community along with the ‘on-staff’ Ushahidi designers, we’ve been piloting a series of design workshops on Ushahidi's crisis communication tool TenFour with our partners Designit and Adobe. Together, we’re looking to solve the problems with how open source design can work by engaging through meaningful technology that makes a difference in the world.

We’re here to take you through that journey, but also some practical tips on structuring issues, labelling and maintaining design (and extended functions like research, UX and product management), working with the methodology and workshop framework, running remote design sprints and writing design documentation. You’ll leave with a set of tools and methods you can apply to your OSS to engage with designers.

A 60-minute workshop for OSS maintainers to start building issues for designers in their repos and for designers to learn and practice how to engage with OSS projects.

The #IamRemarkable initiative strives to empower women and underrepresented groups to speak openly about their accomplishments in the workplace and beyond, thereby breaking modesty norms and glass ceilings. At the heart of the #IamRemarkable initiative is a 90-minute workshop.


Talk DescriptionThe #IamRemarkable initiative strives to empower women and underrepresented groups to speak openly about their accomplishments in the workplace and beyond, thereby breaking modesty norms and glass ceilings. At the heart of the #IamRemarkable initiative is a 90-minute workshop.

Recently, serverless computing has become a topic that has continued to garner increasing public interest. Beyond the hype around serverless computing, this talk would focus on demystifying this interesting technology, and the immense benefits it offers.

In this talk, we would go over a high-level overview of serverless computing to give everyone a good foundation of what the technology is all about and the problem it solves. Then we would go into more details on how to implement this to build a simple API, the money savings, and the benefits in scaling real-world applications for the next billion users.

Google Crowdsource application makes available with a variety of simple tasks like Image Label Verification, Sentiment Evaluation, Handwriting Recognition, Translation, Translation Validation, Image Capture and many more. By Contributing to these tasks, the user provides valuable data to Google through which they can improve services such as Google Maps, Google Translate, Google Photos, Google Lens and many more.

The Information Technology Age is belatedly embracing the African continent in an unprecedented fashion. Hundreds of technical and innovation hubs are springing up in this digital transformation. Major multinational corporations are taking a new look at sub-Saharan Africa. So why is the IMF and the World Bank cutting their 2019 economic growth projections for the region? Nothing will counterbalance this perceived sluggishness swifter than the advent of a Tech Generation pioneering an “expert skills revolution,” and the vast potential of the continent with the World’s youngest populace.
 
This discussion focuses on the perceptions to overcome in this Post-Colonial and Post Jim Crow Millennium. The barriers haven’t dissipated only morphed. There is so much to glean from the experience of those whose coming before paved the path. Let’s explore it. There is great value in the synergy of a shared cultural identity and the empowerment of collaboration across the great Atlantic. So, let’s consider how to embrace it like an ‘Africentric’ version of the Chinese guanxi. Experience matters and enthusiasm matters, let’s bring the convergence into reality together.

The speaker will describe the start of the Linux journey as it began with Linus and delve into the background status of how the technology developed over the years with open source as the backbone. 


The focus of the talk would not be technical but rather align on Open Source and Linux, along with the disruptions in the technical space that have come about from collaborations of people across licenses denoted for such purposes. 

This talk is to discourage folks who get into opensource for self-beneficial purposes.
People fail to understand (especially new folks) that opensource is a selfless service: you do it for the community and the love for the project, not the self-glorifications and travel funds.

This is a reason why most individuals pop-up the questions at the end of most opensource events “what are the benefits of contributing?”
The talk aims to impact the granular understanding of opensource being 100% Beneficial with 0 Benefits; not as a reward for participation, collaboration or contributions, but gratitude for selfless service.
Opensource has zero (0) spelled out Benefits for you (the collaborator), You (the collaborator) make your contributions count which in return becomes Beneficial to you (the collaborator).

There has been an accelerated growth in the number of software engineers in Africa with varying degrees of experience. My talk will highlight some of the ways software engineers can open source their experience through various channels like writing or virtual mentorship to help young developers grow.
Open source has opened so many doors and lowered the entry barrier to becoming a successful programmer but becoming a world class software engineer requires a lot more than knowing how to write code. This is where experience comes in. Sadly, the majority of the growing community of software engineers have limited access to opportunities that can accelerate their growth to becoming world class. There are fewer internship opportunities, startups are not patient enough, agile teams are fast paced and experienced developers are too busy. This talk seeks to highlight various ways software engineers and tech enthusiasts can leverage on available digital channels to share their hard earned experiences by way of peer-to-peer mentorship, virtual mentorship, delivering lightning talks, supporting tech-based user groups, sharing of post or articles to grow the tech ecosystem by educating more developers on none technical topics like Time Management, Work Ethic, Finances, and other soft skills

Africa is home to a very young population now actively pursuing careers in tech.

While online content and developer communities abound, there’s been little success around catalysing the growth of our mostly junior engineer population, and enabling robust self, peer, and corporate evaluation for engineers as they acquire new skills and build proficiency.

This talk focuses on lessons, best practices, tools, and a methodology on how to harness ecosystem levers, all of which aims to ultimately drive high speed growth for African engineers across competence levels.