I spent the last several days in Lagos, Nigeria, attending OSCAFest 2025 and other related events.
(Warning: Long)
While I’ve spent lots of time in Africa, that was all 35+ years ago, and also I’ve never been to West Africa, so I didn’t know what to expect.
It was lovely. The people were friendly and welcoming. The roads were … exciting. The accents were a delight to the ears. And the food was *amazing*.
I arrived on Tuesday morning. It was a 10 hour flight from Atlanta, and it’s a 5 hour time difference.
On Wednesday, I attended CHAOSSCon Africa 2025, a one-day event put on by CHAOSS, the Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software project. This was an event talking about how to participate in open source projects in meaningful ways. There was a lot of focus on non-code contributions, as well as general tips around earning trust in these communities.
As the name CHAOSS implies, the organization is primarily about community health metrics. US and EU CHAOSS events have been primary academic – about the science of measuring community. I have asked, in the past, questions like “Now that you have measured us, what should we do to improve”, and felt that the answer was “That’s not our lane.” But in the past two years, I’ve seen a LOT of stories coming mostly out of Africa about how CHAOSS has engaged with young developers to build their skills, particuarly around engaging with, as well as creating, open source projects, in healthy ways. To me, this is an upgrade to the mission. I’m very curious if this is an intentional shift in strategy, or if this has just been organic change stemming from the passionate African communities. (I’m also inclined to attribute this to some of the amazing community-centered people that have joined CHAOSS over the past few years, including, but not limited to, Ruth Ikegah!)
On Thursday I attended Sustain Africa, which was an event that I received an invitation to pretty late, but thought sounded interesting. It was hugely valuable. There were perhaps 100 people there. They were, I think, mostly from Nigeria, but there were also people from all over Africa. We broke up into groups to discuss what sustainability looks like in various topic areas — OSPOs, Government, Design, Mental Health, and so on. It took a little while to get rolling, but once we got started, there were some fantastic discussions in these areas, with practical tips about how to be intentional about planning for sustainability.
I was able to share some anecdotal advice around dealing with burnout in one’s open source endeavors. (I was, I think, the oldest person there, and certainly had been in open source longer than anyone else.) And was also ablet o share some about how an OSPO can help shape a company’s (or government’s) culture around open source participation.
And, finally, on Friday and Saturday, I attended OSCAFest Africa, the main event. I’m not sure how many people were there, but I heard someone say 900.
There were presentations with deep technical content, community engagement advice, career advice, design, documentation, and so much more, across five tracks.
The highlight was, as usual, the conversations with individuals. They were from a wide variety of industries, from government agencies, to education, to electricity, to software. And there were a lot of early-career software developers and AI practitioners who were looking for ways to build their skills in the open source technologies that they were involved with.
On Saturday I had the great honor of giving one of the keynotes. I spoke about the two themes that has stood out to me in the previous three days — sustainability and sovereignty.
For centuries, Africa has been compelled to rely on Europe, the United States, and China for so many things. Open source is an important way in which African companies and nations can take control of their own destiny. And doing it in ways that are sustainable, by taking ownership of the projects they participate in, rather than being followers, is a critical part of that.
My talk — Plan To Fork (So You Won’t Have To Fork) — focused on thinking long term about investing in open source projects we depend on, and addressing participation pain points and community dysfunctions head-on by taking leadership in those communities. I *think* it was well-received. And I think it was the largest audience I’ve ever had for a talk, with both the main auditorium and the overflow hall completely full.
Two other talks really stand out for me.
Linda Ikechukwu gave a talk titled “Ditch Passion. Follow Curiosity”, about selecting your path in life based on learning new things. She talked about how the usual “follow your passion” advice can be misleading, given that so many of us are passionate about things that will simply not make a viable career. But if you focus on curiosity, and learning new things, you will find yourself in a position to be an expert on something that others struggle with.
And a group of kids from the Techstars Hub program talked about their projects in open source and the skills that they learned there. This was enormously inspring, and I look forward to seeing these kids take leadership in technology in Africa in the coming years.
Overall, this was a great event, and I was enormously proud that AWS sponsored this event, and helped make it possible. I hope I’ll be able to attend this event in the future, and continue to watch Africa take its place as a leader in technology and innovation.
The doors are all gorgeously carved.
I’ve started reading Clockwork Angels, by Kevin J. Anderson, based on the story by Neil Peart that became the album Clockwork Angels. The album already makes a *little* more sense, and I’m only in the second chapter. I wonder if they expected people to just get it, or if they really expected the True Fans to read the book. I guess I’ll know more in a few days.