Speaker
Description
At the start of the global pandemic, the GNOME African community was set up with the goal of introducing Africans to the GNOME projects, onboarding newcomers, and helping them make their first contributions to open-source software, with the hope that they will stay involved in our community. As a maintainer and contributor to the GNOME Africa community, the goal of this talk is to share news about what's going on in the GNOME Africa community. Minority communities in large open source projects all have the same goal: to reach out to groups that aren't well-represented and help them become contributors and maybe even ambassadors for the projects. Has this journey been easy for us? Are there Africans who work on the GNOME project? So far, what have we learned? How can we help groups that are underrepresented in our community?
Author(s) Bio
Regina is a software engineer at IKEA. She is the founder of OpenKids Africa, a non-profit organization using open educational resources to teach children in rural African communities digital skills. She is a governing member and vice president of the board of directors at the GNOME Foundation. She is a maintainer and contributor to the GNOME Africa project. She has 11 years of experience working with databases and Linux-based projects. Regina holds an MS in informatics. She has an interest in improving diversity in open-source communities; hence, her talks are centered around diversity and open-source sustainability. She has spoken at and participated in conferences like Women in Tech Sweden, GUADEC, FOSS Backstage, Linux Foundation events, Linux App Summit, OSCA, and more. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling and sightseeing.
