Open Source Summit Europe 2024

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).