Peace Ojemeh

In this talk we discussed the current state of Africa, the challenges it faced, and how Open Source can be used as a tool for development, innovation, and collaboration. Through success stories and real-world examples, highlighting the impact of Open Source on Africa's development and the important opportunities it presents for the future. Notably, GitHub effort in creating impact in Africa through the All in Africa program among other statistics shown in the 2023 Octoverse report.

I was invited to lead a user group to discuss how the Ethereum community can improve its relationship with the broader open source communities. We discussed things like supporting open source projects we rely on GitHub, using GitHub as a hub to identify developers actively contributing to Ethereum projects and incentivising them, and creating more educational resources around Ethereum to dispel the misconception of it being "just crypto" and many more conversation around sustainability.

I spoke on an X (formerly Twitter) space about how to make contributions to open source as a designer and the benefits of doing so. During the session, I discussed where to find projects to contribute to and shared some mindsets from my experience that have helped me grow in the open source in the past.

I delivered a captivating keynote at Penpot Fest, with a focus on unlocking Africa's potential for Open Source. The talk emphasized Africa's crucial role in the success of Open Source communities and highlighted the importance of collaboration. Additionally, it covered the significant impact that the OSCA team and I has achieved in the past 5 years since we started building the Open Source Community Africa. It was good to learn after the conference that my talk was ranked top 3 of all the talks at the fest :)

Co-hosted an open-source design podcast with guests Jan C. Borchardt, Elizabet Oliveira, and Peter Hanekamp. Topics discussed include open-source design strategies at Nextcloud, design systems in startups, and open-source strategy for audience targeting and community growth.

Hosted a podcast about open source design, three guests - Dima Davidoff, Madeline Peck, and Michal Malewicz - shared their experiences and insights. They discussed topics such as freelancing, design tools, open source alternatives, community involvement, diversity, and ongoing learning in the design world.

I co-hosted the SOS Design Podcast alongside Pia Mancini, Eriol Fox, and Victory Brown. In the podcast, we interviewed three guests. First, we talked to Alonso Torres, a Front-end Developer at Penpot, about the origins of Penpot and its importance as an alternative to proprietary design tools. Then, we discussed designing upstream in open source with Máirín Duffy, a Senior Principal Interaction Designer at Red Hat, and learned about the benefits of open source tooling and her project, Podman Desktop. Finally, we heard from Martin Owens, an Independent Free Software Developer at Inkscape, who shared his experiences funding open source development and the impact of companies on open source projects.

My team and I hosted the Open Source Festival 2023 in Lagos, Nigeria. The largest gathering of developers, researchers, designers, writers, and more, all coming together to discuss everything open source. My role was to focus on the event experience, leading and working with the team to ensure a successful event that left attendees with an unforgettable experience.