Samson Goddy

In the rapidly evolving landscape of technology, two buzzwords have dominated conversations: decentralization and open source. While often mentioned in the same breath and perceived as interchangeable, they represent fundamentally different concepts with distinct implications for the future of digital infrastructure. This talk aims to clarify the misconceptions surrounding decentralization and open source, exploring how a project can be decentralized but not necessarily open source, and vice versa. This was a spinoff of my talk at all things open but focused on African builders and why open source is a center of innovation regardless of the technology.

This panel brings together experts working at the intersection of technology and social impact. It explores how the tech community, including open source developers, can drive positive social change, highlights ongoing initiatives in the country, and discusses GitHub's role in supporting these efforts.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of technology, two buzzwords have dominated conversations: decentralization and open source. While often mentioned in the same breath and perceived as interchangeable, they represent fundamentally different concepts with distinct implications for the future of digital infrastructure. This talk aims to clarify the misconceptions surrounding decentralization and open source, exploring how a project can be decentralized but not necessarily open source, and vice versa.

Hedera has donated its entire codebase to the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust, giving rise to The Hiero Project—an open-source, vendor-neutral, and decentralized codebase. This migration brings with it a fresh contribution model and new incentives for the community. In this call, we'll walk you through the changes in the contribution flow and explore the opportunities ahead for both new and seasoned developers. Plus, with Hacktoberfest in full swing and the launch of the Thrive Program, contributors can now earn rewards such as exclusive swag and HBAR for their valuable input. Don't miss this opportunity to get involved, contribute, and be part of the next chapter for Hedera and Hiero!

This presentation will capture my journey into the world of open source into where I am today. Starting from Sugar Labs and the Sugar Desktop Environment where the adventure began, this open-source project fueled my passion and set me on a path to co-founding the Open Source Community Africa (OSCA). OSCA is a platform that promotes open-source contributions in Africa, bridging the gap between developers and the open-source world. while focusing on why it is important to build tools, specially leveraging AI to aid and understand large code base

In the last three decades, we’ve seen an evolution of open source starting from the ’90s when foundations and ideas were birthed with the likes of the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, and projects that changed the world like the Linux Kernel and the Apache server. From there, open source has gotten into mainstream adoption and advocacy, where we have platforms like GitLab, GitHub, and SourceForge, enabling people to build software projects openly and increasing collaboration among people in tech. Within the last ten years, groundbreaking innovations like the cloud, AI, and big data have become open source by default - this is where we are now. However, the global south is still stuck in the advocacy and adoption phase, with people who haven’t moved beyond their first contribution or are only aware of open source. We need to address this and move the global south to the next phase of open source—ideation, designing, and building. In this talk, we will share what we’ve been doing in Open Source Community Africa for the last 8 years and how we are currently fixing this problem through our latest flagship program, IDB (Ideate, Design, Build).

As the Decentralized Trust landscape continues to evolve, the role of open source technologies in driving innovation and fostering collaboration has never been more critical. This panel introduces Hedera, a groundbreaking and fully open source DLT. Based on its unparalleled consensus algorithm, Hashgraph, it is the most energy-efficient blockchain today. And with its unique governance model comprising 31 recognized global leaders such as Google, IBM, Dell, Boeing, Standard Bank and more, Hedera is the platform of choice for dozens of decentralized application builders and a community of more than 1000 developers. The panelists in this session will discuss why they chose to build on Hedera and highlight the types of use cases that can be built on the platform using real-world examples. They will also share ways on how developers can get started building on Hedera and the resources and opportunities available. . Join us for an engaging discussion featuring a diverse group of participants from across Hedera’s ecosystem, including end users, developers, and community leaders. Each panelist will share unique insights into how Hedera is transforming their work.

The presentation covered the limitations in design, and how designers need to embrace openness, collaborative methods as well as diverse design open source tools Sharing that declarative design is a way to connect developers and designers as the language barrier is one of the main reasons for the perceived divide.