As part of my internship journey at Outreachy, I attended the Open Source Festival 2020 + Sustain Africa summit in Lagos, Nigeria. Outreachy interns have access to a $500 travel stipend to spend on attending conference(s) with a strong Open Source message.
Open Source Community Africa organises The Open Source Festival, which is an annual gathering of developers, students, designers and corporate organizations on a large scale with series of talks, workshops, and awareness of open-sourced developer tools. Open Source Festival 2020 is the maiden edition of the Festival. A recap of the conference can be read here.
The event took place in Lagos, Nigeria and I got to the city on Wednesday, 19th February for the event.
DAY 1: WORKSHOPS AND SUSTAIN AFRICA SUMMIT
The festival started on Thursday 20th February and I attended workshops on topics like Data Science OS, I am remarkable workshop which was mainly attended by ladies in Tech, OAuth with Facebook.
The #IamRemarkable workshop focused on women empowerment by encouraging women to openly share their accomplishments. We were given post-it notes to write reasons why we thought we were remarkable and each person read out their notes to the other participant, it was empowering to share my accomplishments and to listen to other ladies talk about their accomplishments too.
Sustain Africa Summit
Sustain Summit is a one-day conversation for Open Source Software Sustainers.
The Sustain Summit took place later on Friday at the beautiful Google Dev. Space. The summit involved participants sharing ideas and experiences on how to achieve Open Source Sustainability. We had discussion on issues about OS Funding, marketing, sustainable documentation, Design and Sustainability and how new contributors can benefit from OSS programs like Outreachy, Google Summer Of Code, etc.
Everyone in attendance introduced themselves, I met Mr. Kaweesi Joseph form OpenMRS, a former GSOC intern, I met many Outreachy applicants as well and talked to people about my experiences as an Outreachy intern with mUzima, and the mUzima community.
The second and third day of the conference was packed with educational and knowledgeable talks, interviews, panel discussions and keynote speeches that covered topics such as Open Source in Diversity, Documentation, Design, Mixed Reality, Cryptocurrency, Machine Learning, Serverless, DevOps, JAMstack, Linux, IoT, Cyber Security, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence etc..
I had a very beneficial information chat with Amanda Casari, an engineering manager on the Google Open Source team. I had opportunity to network with participants. I met with, and learnt from different people from all over the world, it was fun and fulfilling.
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